Shobary's Spaghetti Westerns

I feel this guy and his site need a thread. What do you all think of his work? I share a lot of his opinions but do sometimes disagree. I wonder why he isn’t that active anymore.

I respect what he’s done and that he was one of the only sources of spaghetti related information & media when I first started looking… but I’ve never agreed with his reviews for the most part

The Spaghetti downs perhaps…

I think, he’S still active. HIs last review dates back to December. That’s not too old.

Sometimes I do NOT agree with him completely. Some of his ratings don’t match mine at all.

For example Sartana In The Valley Of Death is rated better than Today It’s Me… Tomorrow You! and Django The Bastard

or in the upper parts:

The Mercenary is on the same leves as No Room To Die

But nevertheless it IS one of the greatest SW-sites with many detailed and interesting information like the gun- or hte bloopers-section.

I love his site. Its the first site I ever went on to learn about SW’s.

However, I find his reviews to be overly simplistic and rather unsophisticated. For example he will praise a movie as a classic for having a “high kill count” LOL.

Yes he prefers just the action and bang-bang, doesn’t seem to care much about other aspects of these films, at least not in his reviews

But there are reviewers who ARE unsophisticated, like on:

[url]http://www.linteum.at/italo/[/url]

Yeah, I understand how his review system works and it seems good in theory but a lot of great movies have gotten pretty bad reviews by him because of this system. Of course it may or may not have as much to do with the system, but that’s what it comes across as to me

I do not think, you can rate a flick with a kind of system.
The only systems that work are karks or points for good or bad movies, like round here.

I think his system would work fairly well, if he made room for allowances… for example, a good movie with a high kill count is a lot better than a good movie with a low kill count- as opposed to a movie with a low kill count is bad no matter what

Hm… killing is OK, but “a good movie with a high kill count is a lot better than a good movie with a low kill count”, I can’T agree with that.

of course its not going to apply in all situations, and depending upon what makes a good spaghetti for you

but in a broad general sense, I can usually agree with this

of course it also depends on how the kill count came in- if there is one scene where a whole crowd of people were gunned down, then this applies less… but generally the higher the kill count, the less boring a spaghetti (again depending on what you’re looking for in a spaghetti)

OK, there’s a correlation between bodycozunt and entertainment. I can live with that :wink:

Shobary’s site was very important to me years ago as it’s one of the oldest spaghetti western site on the net. Nowadays there’s dozens if not hundreds of spaghetti western sites, blogs, forums etc. but 10 years ago there was just Shobary and few others.

btw, check out the Guns section from his site, great stuff!

I like Shobary’s site a lot and i agree with him most of the time. Huge plus is that he’s a big Garko fan, like i am.

His reviews are indeed rather simple and unsophisticated, but almost every time they say all that i need to know about a spaghetti :wink:

I like the site - it was a great starting place to find info on some great and not-so great movies.

[quote=“Dillinger, post:7, topic:1543”]But there are reviewers who ARE unsophisticated, like on:

[url]http://www.linteum.at/italo/[/url][/quote]

What’s wrong with the guy/site Dillinger?

I find it quite a pleasant read, and I learn some German
He uses one of my favourite German words in every review: Fazit
Never looked it up in the dictionary, so don’t know what it means (I guess something like ‘conclusion’) but it sounds really fine

Some other great German words: Leidenschaft - Ungeheuer - Krimi - Aufschwung

A while ago, reading a novel by Theodor Fontane, I found the expression Krethi und Plethi, which is also very nice, much nicer than the Dutch equivalent: Jan en Alleman. Is it still used today, or one of those expressions only used by the likes of Heine, Mann or Fontane ?

By the way: Fontane’s novel (recommended) had a great title: Irrungen, Wirrungen
It wasn’t too hard to read for me as a foreigner, but I had read it before in translation (a few times I consulted this translation because I didn’t understand the German text)

Who ever is responsible for this site:
http://www.italowestern.de

Great name for a webpage but only little info about our beloved SW.

[quote=“Dillinger, post:7, topic:1543”]But there are reviewers who ARE unsophisticated, like on:

[url]http://www.linteum.at/italo/[/url][/quote]
He’s writing his opinion which is quite ok but I don’t like that he is calling it the 200 most important SW. :slight_smile:

I really like Shobary’s site, but I don’t like his Four of the Apocalypse review.