Comin' at Ya!

Comin' at Ya!
US film poster
Directed by	Ferdinando Baldi
Produced by	Tony Anthony
Written by	Lloyd Battista Wolf Lowenthal Gene Quintano Uncredited: Esteban Cuenca Ramón Plana
Story by	Tony Pettito
Starring	Tony Anthony Gene Quintano Victoria Abril Ricardo Palacios
Music by	Carlo Savina
Cinematography	Fernando Arribas
Edited by	Franco Fraticelli
Production company	The Lupo-Anthony-Quintano Company
Distributed by	Filmways Pictures
Release date	July 24, 1981
Running time	91 minutes
Country	United States Italy Spain
Language	English

Comin' at Ya! is a Spanish-American 3D Western film, featuring Tony Anthony, Victoria Abril and Gene Quintano and directed by Ferdinando Baldi.

It was produced as a co-production between American company Filmways and The Lupo-Anthony-Quintano Company, an independent company. Released in 1981, the film effectively started the 3-D film boom of 1983. The same filmmakers returned in 1983 with Treasure of the Four Crowns.

H.H. Hart, a bank robber, loses his wife to kidnappers on their wedding day. Subsequently, she is traded as a prostitute by villain Gene Quintano. H.H. Hart races against time to find his wife, with the help of a Scottish preacher. The film features many 3D effects, many of which are intended to "fly off the screen" at the audience.

Comin' at Ya was filmed in the then-common over-and-under, single-strip 3-D format. Two Techniscope-format frames, one for the left-eye image and one for the right-eye image, are stacked one above the other in the same area as one ordinary 'Scope-format frame. The resulting frames, though diminished in size, yielded a nominal aspect ratio of 2.35:1.

The lens system used was Optimax III (Bill Bukowski of Optimax III served as 3D Technical Advisor), notorious for introducing vertical parallax error owing to its flawed design (i.e., the optical axes of its twin lenses are not at the same horizontal level). The film's posters by turns heralded the 3-D process as SuperVision and WonderVision.

Projection required prismatic or "mirror box" converters in front of an ordinary spherical projection lens. These converters were meant to converge the stacked left and right pictures on the screen, at the same time cross-polarizing them to match the filters in the 3-D glasses worn by the audience.

By some accounts, Tony Anthony himself designed a relatively low-cost projection lens which made the film marketable for general release. It is further claimed that during the film's initial run, its unexpected success caused it to be pulled from release when the distributor realized they were running out of 3-D glasses.