Riding Shotgun: Before He Was James Bond and Lord Sinclair, He Was a Maverick Don McGregor June 10, 2014 Riding Shotgun, TV Enter Roger Moore, as a cousin raised in Britain, whom audiences had never heard of before.
Riding Shotgun: Searching Search for Leslie Stevens Don McGregor June 2, 2014 Riding Shotgun, TV The only thing missing in Search is Leslie Stevens's inherent vision and voice.
Riding Shotgun: Gently at the Crossroads of Life and Violent Death Don McGregor May 21, 2014 Riding Shotgun, TV This is a series that deserves to be well known.
Riding Shotgun: How the Shadow and Popeye Are the Same Don McGregor April 20, 2014 Riding Shotgun The Shadow is what he is.
No Robin Hood Is Going To Save This ‘Lady in a Cage’ Don McGregor April 7, 2014 Riding Shotgun Don't expect any deep psychobabble about what makes Caan tick; the only thing you need to know is his boundaries for violence are nonexistent.
The Beast of Hollow Mountain Devours More Than Sugar Pops Don McGregor March 13, 2014 Riding Shotgun If you were one of the people who shared Harryhausen's and O'Brien's fondness for both prehistoric behemoths and hard-riding heroes, you really only had two films that solidly fit into that category: The Valley of the Gwangi and The Beast of Hollow Mountain.
Jack Benny Meets Raoul Walsh: The Horn Blows White Heat at Midnight Don McGregor February 9, 2014 Riding Shotgun Jack Benny meets Raoul Walsh at the top of the world: Heaven. This pairing of two such disparate talents, the collaboration of the inimitable stand-up comic master of the verbal pause and perfectly timed...
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman: A Haunting Echo, A Fading Validation of a Disintegrating Woman Don McGregor January 27, 2014 Riding Shotgun Can you hear someone calling your name? Twice? Like a haunting echo? The double-calling of Mary Hartman's name at the beginning of every episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is used in...
Zatoichi – The Scintillating Sword-blade Stained with Blood is the Blu-ray Set Of 2013 Don McGregor January 11, 2014 Riding Shotgun You know how many damned years and how much of a quest it was for me to finally manage to get a full set of the Zatoichi: the Blind Swordsman film series on DVD? I'm sure it was over a decade. Just this year I...
Cheyenne – Season 7: The Quintessential ‘Quiet Until Riled’ Loner Cowboy Rides into the Last Sunset Don McGregor December 16, 2013 Riding Shotgun It has been noted that when Cheyenne premiered on September 20, 1955, as part of an anthology series, Warner Brothers Presents which contained three separate, alternating series, one show was based on...
Shout at the Bipolar Devil & Bad Scorchy Gets Her Fire Put Out (A Midnight Riding Shotgun Double Feature) Don McGregor December 1, 2013 Riding Shotgun Just like they sometimes do in movie theaters, I decided that for this column I would write a double feature. Cult films often had midnight runs and ran as double features. Both Scorchy and Shout at the Devil...
Night, Dawn, Day of the Walking Dead: The Demarcation Points of Gut-spilling and Women’s Nipples in Pop Culture Don McGregor November 15, 2013 Riding Shotgun Richard Matheson was a legend to many readers and writers because of his novel I Am Legend. Whenever Hollywood has tried to film that seminal book about survival and how myths come to be created, they...
Dobie Gillis: “I Gotta Kill that Boy!” A Cult Series Makes its Way to DVD Don McGregor October 26, 2013 Riding Shotgun On the television screens in America in 1959, a harried grocery store owner shouts out at his son's cavalier leave from their home with the SHOUT!, "I've gotta kill that boy!" And we're a long ways from the...
A Boy, A Dog, A Woman — and L.Q. Jones and Harlan Ellison: A Writer’s Wounds 40 Years Later Don McGregor August 10, 2013 Riding Shotgun I liked Blood. I liked Blood right up to the end. I liked Blood until Blood, the telepathic dog, the sardonic sage, laughed callously at the death of a woman, until Blood dismissively made a cruel joke...
Loneliness. Do You Know That Loneliness Will Kill You Deader Than a .357 Magnum? Don McGregor June 14, 2013 Riding Shotgun Electra Glide in Blue should be a severely schizophrenic movie. The two compelling storytellers, the first time director James William Guercio and cinematographer Conrad Hall have almost bipolar extremes in...
Before They Slaughtered Mavericks Wholesale Don McGregor May 22, 2013 Riding Shotgun Warners has two divisions releasing DVDs and Blu-Rays, and sometimes it’s like a Maverick gamble trying to figure out which release is coming from which section. Maverick, Season 2 on DVD has apparently a...
Who The Hell Is Stoney Burke and Why Should You Care Don McGregor April 24, 2013 Riding Shotgun The question many of you will have coming to this piece is: Who the hell is Stoney Burke, and is there any reason I should care who the hell he is. Stoney Burke is a TV series created by Leslie Stevens and...
Jackie Chan Channels Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks and Harold Lloyd Don McGregor April 18, 2013 Riding Shotgun Over the years I have met various film directors who claim they'd studied the film-making of Buster Keaton and had been influenced by Keaton's 1920s cinema-language defining work and mind-warping, eye-boggling...
Andrew D. Cooke’s Documentary Slices into the Heart of a Creative Life Don McGregor March 21, 2013 Riding Shotgun Andrew D. Cooke’s documentary Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist is a rarity, a film on the life of a comic artist against the backdrop of decades. For people who treasure comics and the history of...
Yancy Derringer and the Wolf Who Stands in Water Don McGregor November 12, 2012 Riding Shotgun I never thought I'd see the TV series Yancy Derringer, with Jock Mahoney, on DVD looking as spiffy as Yancy in his ruffled shirts and brocades.I never thought every episode with Pahoo Ka Ta Wah...
