Past Misdeeds: With Death On Your Back (1967)

Original title: Con la muerte a la espalda

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


A gang of international evil-doers has invented a drug that can be used to provoke completely innocent members of the military into pushing the Big Red Button that would loose the Big One. Does it show I'm so old I even remember the Cold War?

Anyway, that drug may not sound all that useful to you or me (for what good is destroying the world, really, unless you're an insane cultist of some eldritch god?), but "the third power" we will certainly not call China (oops) is very interested in acquiring it.

Fortunately, our international evil-doers make a very public test run of their drug, giving one of those professors of every discipline you often find in these films enough data to develop an antidote against it. For once, the Americans and the Russians (as represented by agents called - I kid you not - Bill and Ivan) are of one mind, and are even willing to share the antidote with each other, if with gnashing teeth.

For some reason, the good guys ship the Professor and his assistant Monica (Vivi Bach) off to Hamburg, where he is supposed to give a suitcase containing the antidote and/or the formula for the antidote to the proper authorities during some rich woman's party. Of course, the international evil-doers get wind of this particularly useless plan – unless this takes place in a world without any telecommunications - and gun down the Professor. If not for the intervention of suave/smarmy thief Gary (George Martin) who just happens to be a sucker for beautiful women and suitcases containing valuables, they'd be able to kill Monica and steal the suitcase too.

Having acquired Monica and the suitcase, Gary isn't quite sure what to do with them - sell them on to the Chinese? The Russians? The Americans? Be a gentleman thief and protect Monica? Treat her like an actual human being? It would be nice if our hero (or not) had some time for further deliberation, but each and every faction who knows about Monica and the suitcase wants to capture, kill or buy him, leaving the poor jerk hardly a second to breathe or put the (horrible) moves on women. What's a thief to do?

It has always been one of the pleasures of the Eurospy genre for me to encounter unexpectedly fun films like With Death On Your Back. Its director Alfredo Balcázar is one of those workhorses who spent much of their career during the 60s and 70s churning out films in the popular genres of the day, trying their best to craft fun movies out of clichés, pieces taken from other movies, and actual talent. In Balcázar's case, a lot of his work took place in the Spaghetti (or is it Paella in this case?) Western, but I have to admit I don't remember having seen a single one of them, which may either speak against their quality, my memory, or my knowledge of European genre films of the 60s and 70s.

Be that as it may, With Death On Your Back seems to be the director's only Eurospy film, which is a bit of a disappointment given how entertaining the film is. Sure, much of what happens on screen is the usual mixture of a suave/jerk-y (why do these words seem to be synonymous to me by now?) hero charming the ladies in improbable ways, punching goons in the face (or whatever other body parts look most punchable), and going through various chase sequences to acquire and keep a McGuffin, but Balcázar just as surely knows how to make the generic just pretty darn fun.

For me, the light variant of the Eurospy movie to which With Death certainly belongs has a lot in common with the comedy genre. Both don't thrive as much on originality as on an ability to make the well-known and expected feel new and exciting, and both genres often survive problematic plotting through the timing of their delivery. Balcázar's movie is nothing if not good at timing and pacing, letting hardly a second go by that doesn't have something exciting happen in it, never stopping for longer than a joke or a kiss until its hero stumbles into the next punch-up or the next chase, keeping the audience hooked through breathlessness and - always an important factor in a genre movie - a willingness to entertain that makes it easy to just overlook minor flaws like the fact that the scriptwriters don't always seem to realize Hamburg is situated in Northern Germany and not in Bavaria or the silliness of most everything going on.

Balcázar is helped in his endeavour of keeping the audience away from thinking about plots, plot holes and other dumb stuff like that by an ultra-generic - or archetypal - soundtrack by Claude Bolling that's just bound to swing things along, a cast - also featuring Rosalba Neri and a very unexpected Klausjürgen Wussow as mid-level baddies - that has no problems at all to go with the silliness instead of against it (there is, as you probably know, not much worse than an actor trying to be all thespian-like in what is basically an adventurous romp), and some very decent stunt work.


Plus, there's a scene documenting the eternal struggle between earthbound human and small plane (hello, Mister Hitchcock), guest starring machine pistols, so what's not to like?

In short: Escalofrío diabólico (1971)

Sometimes, it makes little sense to summarize the plot of a movie here, because the narrative (such as it is) not only makes little sense but is presented in a way custom-built to let it make even less sense. This is of course something my beloved European genre cinema of the 60s and 70s was particularly good at, leading to a lot of films that have the quality of hallucinations and dreams.

Actor and only three-time director George Martin's Escalofrío diabólico belongs to a slightly different sub-type of these films, the sort where a hallucinatory script wildly throws Gothic tropes, needless distractions and pulp Satanism at the audience but loses a lot of its potential power of confusion and delight through a horribly bland direction style. There are moments when the script's sheer loopiness wins out over Martin's lack of visual imagination and money but at other times, it's a bit like watching a fever dream through the eyes of the most sober man alive.

When the film works, it delights with scenes like that of our main baddy Alex's (Mariano Vidal Molina) mute, crazy (everyone in the film is the latter) servant dancing with a manikin he has hidden away in a ruined castle, the wild rantings of Alex's mother (who keeps her dead husband in a rocking chair in the cellar; while Alex keeps his step brother drugged up in a different cellar), frequent Euro horror actress Patty Shepard making excellent panicked horror heroine bug-eye faces while wearing a collection of mildly disturbing 70s fashion, and weird shit happening with all the dramatic sense of a film made by people who have never seen a movie before. The awkwardness of the direction is rather inexplicable given that Martin had been in the acting business for ten years at this point, and certainly must have learned something about filmmaking.

When the film doesn't work, it becomes very boring, very fast though, with scenes that drag inordinately, never ending on a shout when they can end on people doing nothing of interest five minutes later. Because of this, Escalofrío diabólico is more of a film for the advanced fan of European horror of the era, the sort of thing that has enough scenes of delirious idiocy to recommend it to viewers of a certain experience but won't ever turn anyone into a fan of this sort of thing.

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On WTF: With Death On Your Back (1967)

Original title: Con la muerte a la espalda

Sometimes, I'm still positively surprised by the movies I stumble upon. Case in point is this fine, highly entertaining Eurospy movie by Alfonso Balcázar starring George Martin and Vivi Bach.

Read more about my encounter with it in my column on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,reviews,alfonso balcazar,george martin,vivi bach,klausjürgen wussow,rosalba neri,eurospy,spies,other places