Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969) – A breezy, light-hearted Western comedy, with James Garner in full James Garner mode as a man drifting through a tough gold-mining boomtown on his way to Australia and being offered the job of sheriff because he’s a crack shot and nothing seems to faze him. A large part of the enjoyment comes from watching a trio of classic character actors in supporting roles: Harry Morgan, Jack Elam, and Henry Jones.
(While looking up info on this movie, I discovered the fact that James Garner’s birth name was James Scott Bumgarner. As someone whose surname is “Shumate,” it gives me comfort to point to someone else and say, “NOW THAT’S AN UNFORTUNATE NAME.”)
Viral (2016) – Despite the title, the pseudo-zombifying pandemic here is distinctly NOT viral, it being a multi-cellular parasite explicitly compared to botfly larvae that propagates from host to host via bloody sputum/vomit. The story is about two teenage sisters new to a secluded development in the California hills who get cut off from their parents behind a military-enforced quarantine when their suburb becomes the epicenter of an outbreak.
There’s absolutely nothing here that’s new, but it’s nonetheless a competent little paranoid horror-thriller that tries to maintain a baseline plausibility.
Sabata (1969) – It’s a little puzzling to me that the character of gambler-gunfighter Sabata (one of the most stolen and ripped-off characters in spaghetti Westerns, right up there with Django and Sartana) got his start in this movie… because it really doesn’t strike me as top-tier. Sure, watching Lee Van Cleef as a self-confident anti-hero is always fun, but the double-crosses outnumber the reasons to care who’s double-crossing who by an order of magnitude. And William Berger as an Irish hippy who plays the banjo (and so is known only as “Banjo,” obviously) would be a pretty annoying supporting character even without the jinglebells tied into the fringes on his ankles.
And even I, not the most firearm-savvy person, get plenty annoyed with gunfighters making all of these bullseye shots with stubby little Derringers or four-barrel pepperboxes — sorry, but it doesn’t matter how good a marksman you are if your firearms of choice just isn’t accurate.