Michael Callan

Forced by personal circumstances, Marshal Chris Adams recruits a writer and five prisoners to help him eliminate a gang of Mexican bandits. After his last adventure in the Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969), the former leader of the Seven and now a married U.S. Marshall, Chris Adams, declines his old friend Jim McKay's invitation to stop the outlaw De Toro and his marauding gang of bandits from attacking the Mexican border town of Magdalena. Filled with guilt, Chris decides to visit the town--now inhabited by widows--before the tough band's imminent return, having no other choice but to recruit a brand-new team of unlikely defenders. As always, the odds are against them. Can the new Magnificent Seven and the town's defenceless women put an end to De Toro's reign of terror? —Nick Riganas Marshal Chris Adams turns down a friend's request to help stop the depredations of a gang of Mexican bandits. When his wife is killed by bank robbers and his friend is killed capturing the last thief, Chris feels obligated to take up his friend's cause and recruits a writer and five prisoners to destroy the desperadoes. —David Bassler

A young schoolteacher turns into an outlaw to avenge her murdered father. Cat(herine) Ballou's family farm is being threatened by the railroad. She sends for Kid Shelleen, finding him to be the drunkest gunfighter in the west. When her father is killed by the railroad magnate's gunman, she vows to fight on. Shelleen manages to ride sideways in several scenes, while minstrels sing the ballad of Cat Ballou in between scenes. —John Vogel <jlvogel@comcast.net> When hired gun Tim Strawn kills her rancher father, Cat Ballou becomes an outlaw set on vengeance. Enlisting the help of washed-up gunslinger Kid Shelleen as well as the handsome bandit Clay Boone, Cat strikes back at the land development company that employed Strawn and eventually targets the assassin himself. —Jwelch5742 1894. Prim and proper innocent Catherine Ballou has just returned to her hometown of Wolf City, Wyoming, to begin her working life as a schoolteacher. She learns that an unknown someone is conspiring to force her father, Frankie Ballou, off his ranch in the name of development, that person or people having hired "muscle" in the form of vicious, tin-nosed Tim Strawn. Frankie and his sole ranch hand, a mild-mannered Cherokee named Jackson Two-Bears, are ill-equipped to defend the ranch. As such, Cat takes it upon herself to fortify themselves in the form of convicted cattle rustler Clay Boone - who, in his assistance, has the ulterior motive of wanting to get into Cat's bed - and Clay's associate, "Uncle" Jed, who both may be of little help in admitting that they have never fired a gun in their crimes. So into whose basket Cat places most of her eggs is another hired gun she sees advertised on a poster, Kid Shelleen, who, after her $50 payment to him with her merchandise sight unseen, she learns is not all he is advertised to be. Cat's mission changing from protection to retaliation leads her into her own life of crime. What happens in this situation is affected by the Kid's own unspoken history, most specifically with Strawn. —Huggo

During the Civil War a group of Union soldiers, a Confederate and a civilian escape the stockade using a hot-air balloon and end up on a strange Pacific island. During the US Civil War, Union POWs escape in a balloon and end up stranded on a South Pacific island, inhabited by giant plants and animals. They must use their ingenuity to survive the dangers, and to devise a way to return home. Sequel to '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea'. —Stewart M. Clamen <clamen@cs.cmu.edu> In 1865, during the siege of Richmond, Virginia, Union soldier POWs Captain Harding, Neb and Herbert escape in a balloon during a hurricane with a confederate prisoner, Sergeant Pencroft and civilian journalist, Spilett. The storm takes the balloon to a mysterious island near New Zealand in the South Pacific. Captain Harding proclaims himself leader of the group and they look for food. They discover that they are stranded on an island and soon are attacked by a giant crab that becomes their first meal. In the following days they build themselves shelter and find the island inhabited by other giant animals. One day they find two castaways on the beach: the aristocratic Lady Mary Fairchild and her sexy niece Elena. Later they find a trunk with weapons and a sextant and then they find the hut and journal of a man once marooned on the island by pirates. When pirates later return to the island, the castaways are surprised to be helped by Captain Nemo of the legendary submarine Nautilus. (Nemo -- notorious for his war against slavery -- was supposedly sunk and gone missing eight years earlier.) Finally, when a volcano threatens to obliterate their island, all must plan an escape. —Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil As the war between the States is coming to an end, an imprisoned Union captain, two other prisoners, a confederate soldier and a civilian newspaperman escape in a hot air balloon. Strong winds carry the across the country and out over the Pacific where they eventually land on what at first appears to be an uninhabited island. They are soon joined by two women, survivors of a pirate attack. While they manage to make a home for themselves, they have to deal with extraordinarily large animals including a giant crab and giant bees. The giant fauna is the result of experiments by Captain Nemo who has lived on the island aboard his crippled submarine, the Nautilus, for eight years. They also have to deal with an active volcano and time is short if they are to leave the island before it explodes. —garykmcd 1865. With the aid of Gideon Spilitt, a war correspondent for the New York Herald, three Union soldiers - Cyrus Harding, Herbert Brown, and Neb Nugent - are able to break out of a Libby, a military Confederate prison in Richmond, Virginia, the four men who are able to escape using one of the Confederate's surveillance hot air balloons, they in the process necessarily taking along a Confederate soldier, Pencroft, as he knows how to operate the balloon. Despite Pencroft's knowledge, the balloon nonetheless crash lands in where they believe is somewhere in the South Pacific on a seemingly deserted volcanic island. Still considering themselves at war, Captain Harding, as the senior officer, feels he should take charge. While Brown, a self-admitted coward, and Nugent, a black man, willingly go along with his orders as their superior, Spilitt and Pencroft are more reluctant in their agreement, working cooperatively for their own survival outweighing whatever hesitation they have working under Harding. The five are soon joined on the island by two Brits, Lady Mary Fairchild and her pretty young adult niece Elena, the only two survivors of a shipwreck. While there is a bounty of food and water on the island to survive, they still work toward the goal of trying to get off the island back to civilization. While they learn quickly in their stay that they share the island with a number of supersized menacing animals which provide much wanted animal protein, that is if the animals don't kill them first, they face a looming more dangerous menace preventing them from staying on the island much longer, something well known to the hidden eighth on the island. —Huggo

An army major, himself guilty of cowardice, is asked to recommend soldiers for the Congressional Medal of Honor during the Mexican Border Incursion of 1916. After a cavalry charge during the 1916 U.S. "war against Pancho Villa," unheroic awards officer Tom Thorn (who is obsessed with the nature of courage) recommends 4 men for the Medal of Honor. He is ordered back to Cordura with them...and prisoner Adelaide Geary, gringo who sheltered the enemy. On the arduous journey, Thorn's heroes show a different face, and Thorn may have one last chance to prove he's no coward. —Rod Crawford <puffinus@u.washington.edu> In 1916, the American Army is hunting Pancho Villa down in Mexico. The awards officer Major Thomas Thorn is assigned as observer in the battlefield to seek out heroes in the regiment of veteran Colonel Rogers during the attack to Ojos Azules villa to be nominated to the Medal of Honor with Pvt. Andrew Hetherington that is riding with him. The villa is owned by the American Adelaide Geary, who welcomes Pancho Villa's men after their raids. However, Colonel Rogers commands the attack and defeats them in Ojos Azules. Thorn identifies acts of heroism by Lt. Fowler, Sgt. Chawk, Cpl. Trubee and Pvt. Renziehausen during the charge. When Colonel Rogers learns that was not nominated by Thorn for the Medal of Honor, he is furious with Thorn. Rogers unsuccessfully tries to change his position reminding Thorn that he was protected by him from an investigation of cowardice in respect to his father. Thorn rides with the five soldiers and Geary, who is accused of giving hospitality to Pancho Villa's men to Candura. Along the difficulties of their journey, Thorn researches the feelings of the men during their heroic acts and learns that one heroic act does not turn men into heroes. —Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil