Blood and Bullets (1976)

aka Knell, The Bloody Avenger

Original title: Sangue di sbirro

Dan Caputo (George Eastman), a giant with a short fuse and a violent disposition who goes by the nickname of Knell (as in death knell) returns to New York shortly after the death of his father. Because this is that kind of movie, Dan single-handedly thwarts an air jacking attempt by half a dozen or so armed guys on his way in. Sure, quite a few of the hostages die during the shoot-out, but apparently, he’s still a big damn hero.

Somewhat more plot-relevant attempts at our protagonist’s life begin when he hasn’t even entered the apartment he grew up in and where his father was killed. Of course, random mooks are easily dispatched. To make Dan’s life a little easier, he’s also greeted by an old associate of his, the avuncular (if one’s uncle is a bit of a killer, at least) gang leader Duke (Jack Palance) who comes with some helpful gunplay and his own free corpse disposal service.

From here on out, barely a scene goes by in which Dan isn’t involved in a brutal beatdown – mostly with him as the delivering party – or a shoot-out with people who really don’t want him to find out who killed his father, or why. The film does manage to squeeze in a couple of flashbacks about the fraught relationship between Dan and his dad, a sub-plot about him reconnecting with an old girlfriend (Jenny Tamburi), and even some detective work. Repeat until all of the bad guys are dead and Duke – spoiler – crowns himself the new king of the underworld, because all of this was apparently part of his evil plan, or something.

Around these parts, Blood and Bullets’ director Alfonso Brescia is mostly beloved for his wild and woolly cardboard and blinking lights space operas, films whose cheapness is only exceeded by their inspired weirdness. Being a working Italian genre director, Brescia was involved in other genres as well, which brings us to this Eurocrime movie. Or truthfully, this endless series of cheaply – though not as cheaply as Brescia’s science fiction – realized yet energetic action sequences. Brescia isn’t one of the great Italian crime action directors, but what he lacks in finesse when it comes to editing, blocking and rhythm, he does make up for in energy. The action is absolutely relentless, even in the context of the film’s time and place. I don’t think I’ve seen many action movies where the sheer number of violent encounters was quite as exhausting as here, apart from some Indonesian films made forty years or so later.

What Blood and Bullets lacks, at least in comparison with much of the rest of Brescia’s body of work is a sense of weirdness. Brescia’s stranger sensibilities are completely replaced by a willingness to hit genre tropes and plot beats like clockwork. To me, that’s a bit of a disappointment, because I prefer my Brescia weird and woolly. Yet it also is what makes this work as well as it does as a straightforward Eurocrime film, made with a total commitment to entertaining its audience with the low-brow but always effective charms of copious violence, tough guy posturing, a bit of sex and a nasty disposition.

OSS 117 Murder for Sale (1968)

Original title: Niente rose per OSS 117

aka OSS 117: Double Agent

aka No Roses for OSS 117

An organization cleverly known as The Organization is successfully committing a good number of high profile political assassinations. US secret agent OSS 117 (John Gavin), Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath to his friends, decides to do something against it. He does the logical thing and gets some plastic surgery to look like the most wanted international killer of them all, sleeps with a random beautiful woman so she can rat him out to the police, and then awaits rescue by The Organization. Which somehow really does work, so our hero – such as he is – ends up in the palazzo and headquarters of The Organization’s boss, The Major (Curd Jürgens hamming it up lovingly). Situated there, 117 has a fine opportunity to get bored by classical music (philistine!), bed the place’s doctor (Luciana Paluzzi), make enemies with the Major’s right hand man Karas (George Eastman in all his hairy glory), and spy a bit. Eventually, he is sent on a mission, during which he will be poisoned by Robert Hossein, have more sex (this time around with Margaret Lee), come up with plans that make no sense at all, and get involved in fisticuffs and mild car chases.

André Hunebelle’s Murder for Sale is the only time John Gavin was playing the title role in a film about agent OSS 117 (based on a long running series of French pulpy spy novels), and I’m not terribly surprised by it. Now, unlike your serious John Le Carré-style espionage material, Eurospy movies of the sillier Bond-affine variety – to which the film at hand absolutely belongs – don’t live or die on the merits of their lead actors. These guys are mostly there to punch uglier guys and look good in a suit, so basically any more or less handsome visage will do. However, Gavin’s not a terribly convincing puncher, while his acting approach here seems like an attempt to channel Alain Delon’s patented icy coolness, perhaps with an added wink from time to time, which might have sounded like a good idea at the time but mostly results in this OSS 117 feeling very bland rather than cool.

Fortunately, that’s not terribly important, and the rest of the film is a perfectly entertaining example of its style, and one that doesn’t have the slapdash feel of many a Eurospy movie either. Hunebelle had quite a bit of experience with genre movies of all types, and he manages to take the very silly script, pump up the right bits of silly business yet also provide all the minor thrills of face-punching, car chasing and perfectly awkward sexiness one comes for in these films.

The director keeps the pacing up admirably even when there’s no action happening, too. He seems to have particular fun with all the side business that makes a Eurospy movie, like The Major’s version of the dancing troupe you find in so many villain lairs: a string quartet playing Schubert. One can’t help but think that’s quite good for the lair’s security too, for while you can man-dance your way through a Bollywood dance number (just look at Sonny Deol), no vengeful hero’s going to take the time and study the cello to infiltrate your base. And hey, The Major even has a neat self-destruct device for the place, though he doesn’t quite manage to use it, alas.

Not terribly typical for the genre is the film’s aesthetic emphasis not on the pop art culture much more common in Eurospy films but what I can’t help but call posh art – there’s the Schubert, the somewhat tacky old school rich people beauty of the Major’s lair, and a general tendency of everyone furnishing a home here to go for mock Greek statuary to behold. It makes for a nice change from other films of the genre, and must certainly have jibed well with director Hunebelle’s experience with swashbucklers.

It’s all rather lovely to look at, particularly since the director is also rather good with pretty postcard shots for cars to mid-tempo chase one another in and dubious heroes to strut around in front of, nicely leaning into the travelogue aspects so many Eurospy films feature.


Obviously, there’s no depth at all to anything here – unless you make like George Eastman and drop from a roof, of course – and the film’s sexual and social politics are a bit dubious to modern eyes, but for light action and very pretty pictures, Murder for Sale is an excellent choice.

Endgame - Bronx lotta finale (1983)

aka Endgame

The world as we know it has ended again, and what may or may not be the Bronx (actual connections to other Bronx-based Italian post-apocalyptic movies are strenuous at best) is ruled by a military dictatorship that counts among their members good old Gordon Mitchell and black clad goons wearing what looks a lot like SS signets on their helmets. To keep the populace distracted, the rulers hold a Running Man variation called "Endgame" that is even organized in some sort of league system, which seems rather useless given the lethality rate of the whole affair.

One of the best Endgame fighters is Ron Shannon (Al Cliver). While he's running through the dangerous parts of town attempting not to be killed, a woman named Lilith (a clothed Laura Gemser, for no discernible reason listed in the credits under the nom de plume of "Moira Chen") hires him to guide and protect her and a group of associates out of the city to a place in the wastelands. Lilith and her associates are telepathically gifted mutants on the run from the government but they are willing to pay in gold.

After winning the Endgame round by cheating his old friend/enemy/rival Kurt Karnak (George Eastman) with Lilith's help, Shannon assembles a team for the trek through the wastelands. It seems the city is full of people like the imaginatively named martial artist Ninja (Hal Yamanouchi), and mutant-hating strongman Kovack (Mario Pedone), so Shannon acquires his team easily enough.

More trouble starts in the wastelands, where our heroes have to defend themselves against an army of evil blind monks and a half-animal biker gang. I don't know why the animalistically mutated gang has as many fish people as they do, what with the near total absence of water in their surroundings, but hey: fish people!

And can it be a good thing for our heroes that Karnak is following them?

I am not exactly an admirer of Endgame's director Joe D'Amato. Sure, he always was a pretty great director of photography, but a large part of his directorial output tends to the needlessly and tediously boring. Endgame is among the exceptions, though, for while it's not up there with the best (read: most insane) Italian post-apocalypse epics it is rather good fun.

It is clear that D'Amato was not exactly swimming in money for the production, so most of the film takes place in a handful of brick-walled tunnels and in the outside area around a rundown agricultural building but to make up for it, there are also quite a few motorcycles on screen, and rather more stuntmen costumed as various goons and henchpeople around than you'd expect. D'Amato makes good use of what he has available, too, and while there isn't that much advanced silly stuff going on, Endgame is stuffed full of enough silly, cheap, and fast action sequences to fulfil the basic entertainment needs of any friend of Italian pieces of post-apocalyptic nonsense.

Plus, there are various favourites among European cult cinema actors showing off their facial hair. This particular post-apocalyptic future may still possess TV where - in one of the film's funnier ideas - the biggest sporting event known is sponsored by a brand of vitamin pills that's good for basically everything, but shaving utensils are quite a different thing, it seems. On the other hand, the film does treat the generally non-bearded, peaceful mutants as the future and hope of the world while the poor hairy men of the rest of the cast are standing in for the past, so I'm just going to pretend Joe D'Amato cared enough about the movie to put in this kind of (ridiculous) metaphorical stuff. Then I'm going to laugh till I cry.

Be the symbolic status of facial hair as it may, for a man wise in the ways of Italian post-apocalypses like me, what Endgame has to offer (basically: people in leather killing each other) is more than enough to keep me entertained (though I could have survived quite well without the fish man/Gemser rape scene), so I am quite satisfied with what I got here.

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Three Films Make A Post: Born A Man...Turned Into A Living Laser Beam By Science's Most Gruesome Experiment!

The Last Killer (1967): Slow, ponderous, but not as weighty as it would like to be Spaghetti Western about George Eastman making a crash-course as a gunfighter and professional killer to be able to avenge his murdered father. Boredom ensues, though I can't say the film is actively bad.

Sector 7 (2011): Generally, contemporary South Korean filmmakers seem to be much better at making big budget genre movies that aren't dumb as rocks than their US counterparts, so I did go into this monster on an oil rig movie with certain expectations to be entertained. Alas, Sector 7 is a proper catastrophe of a movie. It's a plodding mess, dumber than you may think possible, full of clichéd non-characters who do things too idiotic to even accept in a monster movie (it really is that bad), hideous "comic" "relief", actors working on valium and a monster that looks a lot like that from The Host but (of course) worse.

The whole affair has a SyFy monster movie vibe, with all the crappiness that entails, just with a higher budget.

The Gibbering Horror of Howard Ghormley (2005): Fortunately, this brilliantly creepy piece of Weird filmmaking (shot on Super 8, no less) that is available to watch on YouTube in two parts here and here, gives me the opportunity to end this on a positive note. Director Steve Daniels uses the rawness of Super 8, editing and staging that at times remind me of Eraserhead and Weimar expressionist films, and a pretty fantastic soundtrack and sound design to create a nightmarish mindscape I found utterly irresistible and properly conducive to feelings of actual dread.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,south korean movies,american movies,spaghetti western,horror,in short,george eastman,steve daniels

Three Films Make A Post: Enter a prime-evil world of future shock and alien terror.

The Unholy Four aka Ciakmull - L'uomo della vendetta (1970): Enzo Barboni's Spaghetti Western about four escaped mental patients (Leonard Mann, George Eastman, Woody Strode, Pietro Martellazana) finding out the truth about the amnesiac (Mann) among them, which obviously leads to some vengeance-ing in the end, starts out strong if loosely plotted, but peters out somewhat after half of the film is over and the actual main plot is truly starting. A film that up to that point was dominated by some beautifully photographed scenes taking place in autumnal Europe/America becomes predominantly bound to not very interesting looking sets and wants a type of highly melodramatic acting from the cast that only Evelyn Stewart actually knows how to provide.

It's thanks to Barboni's impressive tight editing rhythms and his always inventive direction that the film stays watchable and recommendable.

Island Claws (1980): This film about a giant crab and his little crab buddies fighting "eccentrics" in Florida is the only movie by director/producer/writer Hernan Cardenas, and watching it, I wasn't much surprised by that. It's not a catastrophically bad monster movie, but if the internet wouldn't tell me differently, I'd have taken it for a rather mediocre TV movie without anything in the writing or direction marking it as something other than just another movie made for no other reason than a pay check, and without much enthusiasm. The film does have one or two moments of pleasant silliness but the rest of it is just so dumb and inoffensive that I think I've already spent enough words on it.

Heavy Metal (1981): As a rule, I don't watch much Western animation, what with the form's peculiar fixation on kids and a family audience, and it's corresponding lack of exploitational values. The portmanteau film Heavy Metal (based on the US version of the French magazine) is an exception to this rule, seeing as it was made with the twelve year old boy in all of us in mind and therefore exists only to provide exploitational values. I find the quality of the animation rather rough when compared to Japanese films of the same era, but it is rough in a way that fits the film's fixation on breasts, blood and freaky humour.

Personally, I could have lived without the segment based on Richard Corben's Den, but then I do think that the Den stories are the absolute nadir of Corben's rather wonderful body of work. However, as we all know, every film like this is bound by law to contain at least one bad segment, and the rest of the segments is entertaining enough to make up for that beautifully.

 

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Django, Prepare A Coffin! (1968)

A gold transport protected by a guy named Django (Terence Hill, doing a rather stiff impression of Franco Nero as Django) is attacked by a gang of bandits. Everyone except for Django is slaughtered, the man himself left for dead. Among the victims of the massacre was Django's wife, so he gets even more grim-faced than before and does the obvious. Namely, he starts to dress up like that other Django from a certain Corbucci film.

Five years later, Django has somehow found out that two old friends of his, David Barry (Horst Frank) and Lucas (George Eastman) were the ring-leaders of the attack. In a sense, they're still living off the interest of the old incident by blaming the old attack on the gold transport (and possibly also newer crimes - the storytelling is rather obtuse) on people whose land they want to steal. It doesn't make much sense, yet still seems to work for them.

Fortunately, Django is now working as an official executioner and only seemingly hangs the victims of Barry's and Lucas's plans. In truth he is building a small gang of their victims to take revenge.

Alas for Django, not every one of the people he has saved is truly trustworthy. A guy named Garcia (Jose Torres) would prefer getting gold to getting his revenge on the people who framed him and soon Django's plan is in tatters. Of course, the usual torture, escape with the help of an old coot and a woman (Garcia's wife Mercedes as played by Barbara Simon) and final revenge follow.

The more of Ferdinando Baldi's Spaghetti Westerns I see, the more I come to the conviction that the wild and weird The Stranger Gets Mean is a positive aberration in his body of work in the genre. Django PAC! is just as easily distracted from its main plot or any form of sensible storytelling, but it's neither as batshit insane nor as imaginative as the later film to make up for its ADD sensibilities.

Again, as was the case with the other films of his I've seen, Baldi only seems to go through the motions of the Spaghetti Western, copying some of the surface elements of other films of the genre, but never getting to either the thematic reasons for using these elements or just developing some themes, or even just ideas, of his own.

At times the film is just another solid Spaghetti Western, but whenever I got my hopes up of it staying at least a solidly entertaining genre piece, Baldi does something to undermine this - usually by introducing yet another element that could potentially be used to provide some depth to the film (like Barry's political ambitions or a monologue by Garcia that informs Django and the audience that being poor is rather shite), but that he'll drop immediately after without ever truly making use of it. After a time, this and the film's permanent detours into boring talky sequences without any substance where silent, moody sequences with substance belong, become somewhat infuriating.

Django PAC! has its moments, though. Django's confrontation with Lucas in a burning house is surprisingly tight - if held back by Hill's stiffness -, and there are short sequences that put an emphasis on the casualness with which Django kills that seem to belong in a much less bland film, but for each of these scenes, there are three others mindlessly plundered from better films. Baldi even shoehorns a machine gun in a coffin in (just because he didn't have a better idea for the finale and there was a machine gun inside a coffin in that other Django film?), without even bothering to introduce the gun beforehand. And might I just mention that there's a dramatic reason why Django doesn't use the machine gun in the final battle in Corbucci's original film?

The photography is pretty, though.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,ferdinando baldi,terence hill,horst frank,george eastman,reviews

In short: Hate Thy Neighbour (1968)

Bandit leader Gary Stevens (George Eastman) and his gang kill a guy named Bill Dakota and his wife, accidentally leaving the couple's little son Pat (Claudio Castellani) alive.

When Bill's brother Ken (Spiros Focas) hears of the affair, he is rather displeased. After a bit of fisticuffs to punish the local sheriff for not helping his brother against Stevens (the film's forgetting this plot element after the brawl, so there's no need for me to get into it any further), Ken grabs the comic relief funeral home owner and hobby musician Duke (Roberto Risso) and rides off to Mexico, where Stevens is supposed to hide out.

It turns out that Stevens killed Bill to acquire a map leading to a hidden goldmine, and that the bandit has a partner - Malone (Horst Frank in his usual sadistic rich guy in a white suit role), a big shot in Mexico. Not that Ken does anything with that information once he has it…

Stevens and Malone soon don't see eye to eye anymore, and so Malone puts his old buddy into a death trap (elements: rope, snake pit, rope-gnawing rats). In an intensely un-Spaghetti Western scene, Ken frees Stevens and drags him in front of a judge who does in fact sentence the bad guy to death by hanging.

Of course, that's not the end of it all. Malone frees Stevens, Stevens kidnaps Pat and Ken finally has to get off his arse to do something more lethal.

Abstractly, Ferdinando Baldi's Hate Thy Neighbour is a well-made film. It's beautifully photographed (nice locations, some clever framing) by Enzo Serafin (in the business since 1941), well edited, in short just plain nice to look at and technically excellent.

Unfortunately, its visual slickness can't hide the film's lack of substance or excitement. The script just seems to go through the motions, working through Spaghetti Western tropes without truly making use of them. The film drops each and every interesting idea it has after about five minutes, never to mention it again, reminding me of the main character in Memento, but without the tattoos.

The characters are neither developed nor used as archetypes. It's a little as if they all were just standing around in front of the cameras because they had nothing better to do. Even dependable character actors like Horst Frank and George Eastman aren't projecting much of their usual charisma here.

Worse, Spiros Focas might be the most boring Spaghetti Western hero I have ever seen. I'm now terribly sorry for ever having made fun of Dean Reed. I couldn't mention even a single character trait, or a gimmick, or anything memorable about Hate Thy Neighbour's supposed central character. Even his clothes are boring.

You'd think that Ken's insistence on bringing Stevens to court instead of killing the man himself would give him at least a little bit of depth, but the film and Focas present this moment in so flat a way that there is just not the slightest bit of resonance to the scene. Like everything else in the film, it seems only to be there to fill out the running time with something, anything, as long as it just wastes another five minutes of the viewer's life.

Somehow, I don't think that's what a genre movie should do.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,ferdinando baldi,george eastman,horst frank,in short

In short: Blastfighter (1984)

Ex-cop Tiger (Michael Sopkiw) has just been released from jail. He was kept under lock and key for a slight case of vigilantism: Killing the man who killed a colleague in front of his eyes and then - when Tiger didn't back down - murdered his wife.

His last friend on the force greets Tiger with giving him a new experimental super shotgun (the kind that also shoots grenades) and admonishing him not to use it against the corrupt D.A. who was responsible for his sentence. Puzzled by this type of mixed signals, Tiger decides to retreat to his old backwoods home somewhere in Deliverance County, where great mock country plays on the soundtrack and the locals spend their time with the mass slaughter of animals - they export their victims to the Chinese medicinal market.

Leader of the pack is a certain Wally (Stefano Mignardo), a natural born psychopath and brother of Tiger's old friend/rival Tom (George Eastman). Tiger's taste for slaughter and violence has died down quite a lot over the years and soon Wally (whose taste for slaughter and violence is a big as is accent is fake) and Tiger lock horns. You really can't blame the ex-cop. He mostly just wants to be left alone; he just has a hard time tolerating people fucking with him.

When his daughter Connie (Valentina Forte) arrives to finally get to know a father she hasn't seen in eight years, things seem to take a turn for the better. Another attack by Wally even leads to Tiger backing down and promising Connie to go away to the big city with her.

Alas, Wally and friends don't really care, and after they kill Tiger's cop-friend, Connie's boyfriend and then Connie herself, Tiger gets kind of angry. And they shouldn't have made him angry.

 

Blastfighter is one of Lamberto Bava's better films and a small classic of Italian action cinema. What stands out in a very solid effort for me is not so much the action as the nice character work. Some of the writing surely is a bit cheesy, but the characters' psychology seems rather sound for a backwoods vengeance flick and the acting is surprisingly effective (if you can ignore the silly accents of the local yokels). Michael Sopkiw is especially good as the sullen loner whom he gives a big enough amount of warmth and humor to actually make you care about him. The scenes between him and Eastman and him and his daughter are giving the action a grounding more action films could use, making the inevitable carnage that much more interesting.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,action,in short,lamberto bava,george eastman,michael sopkiw

The Horror!? 89: Metamorphosis (1990)

Genius scientist and douche Dr. Peter Houseman (Gene LeBrock or a piece of papier-maché shaped like a man)has a problem (actually, he has two problems, but since nobody seems to mind his lack of manners I'll let it slide) - after his university has allowed him to use up $200 000 in his research on something he didn't want to tell them about, they actually dare to demand answers to some questions about his work before they grant him another $100 000. Although his incredible charm (or so the script says) helps him to sway Sally (Catherine Baranov), a member of the budgetary committee whose approval he now needs, the other members of said committee are less impressed by him or his theories (something about some kind of genetic thingy that could possibly end aging and death) or his methods (including illicit use of human fetuses in his experiments). They are so unimpressed that they're planning to assign Dr. Lloyd (Stephen Brown) as his supervisor, a man who hates Houseman's guts for no good reason at all (if you ignore Houseman's tendency to insult Lloyd whenever possible).

The only thing that can save Houseman's easy life work is that well-known staple of responsible science - the clandestine self-experiment. To no-one's surprise the good doctor, soon after injecting himself with his serum (genes are the new glands!), starts to act like even more of an ass than before. Of course he has these strange little blackouts, too. Is it possible that he slowly regresses into "a living fossil", the well known predecessor of mankind science calls the Humanoid Camembert? Will he kill a few people in a very lackluster manner? The answers will surprise nobody.

The most interesting thing about Metamorphosis is its place in bad movie history as the only official directorial work of beloved Italian (bad-)movie actor George Eastman of Anthropophagus and a million other films fame.

I am a little sad to suggest that Eastman didn't learn anything about directing films while acting in them, but this snoozefest doesn't leave me with much of a choice. I am even a little generous when I call Eastman's direction pedestrian and uninspired. The film is more or less at a point where I'm not sure if there really was a director on set. Everything is excruciatingly boring.

But special attention has to be paid to the actors as well. After all, how often does the discerning viewer have the chance to watch so many people in the only roles of their careers? Now some might say that even one time was one time too many for these people (or the viewer), a notion of which I highly disapprove. In the end even a piece of wood deserves a short time in the spotlight.

And let's be honest. I don't think even the most brilliant actors would have been able to do something with a script as thoughtless, stupid and just plain boring as Metamorphosis'.

 

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