Treasure of the Four Crowns (1983)

After soldier of fortune J.T. Striker (four time winner of the title “best name in the business”, Tony Anthony) acquires a mysterious key from a haunted castle/wildlife park, a professor sends him out to steal two of the crowns of Visigoths (yup, the title’s ever so slightly exaggerating), items full of mystical power, to which the key is the, well, the key, from the mountain lair of evil cult leader Brother Jonas (Emiliano Redondo). Of course, one needs to assemble a crack team for this kind of operation, so Striker packs in his wimpy tech guy buddy, an alcoholic mountain climber, a circus strong man with a secret deadly heart disease (Francisco Rabal), and the strong man’s wife Liz (Ana Obregón), trapeze artist. I’m somewhat disappointed he’s not taking clown Popo too, but we just can’t have everything.

The team assembled, it’s off to the heist; though the finale might turn out rather different from Rififi.

Sometimes, it truly can be the first and the last fifteen minutes that make a film special. At least, that is the case in Ferdinando Baldi’s Treasure of the Four Crowns, a Spanish/Italian film (for some reason distributed by Cannon Films, of all companies) made to cash in on the second 3D fad, which means there are way too many moments of pointless pointy things – and plastic snakes, a lot of them – popping into the camera as if there’s not tomorrow.

But oh, that beginning! It shows our hero conquering a castle that acts like the lamest haunted castle ride you can imagine, with first various animals (fake and real) trying to get at that tasty Tony Anthony flesh, a full plate mail and a skeleton playing peek-a-boo with him, and various things catching on fire for no good reason. Everything that happens here is accompanied by the most outrageous cartoon noises the sound department could come up with, with animals that make more improbable noises than Lucio Fulci’s maggots (particularly the non-rubber snake), and only the least frightening giggles and howls. And of course, dear Tony Anthony does contribute his own bit of craziness by making all the rubber faces he can come up with, stoicism not being the strong point of his character, until you can’t help but laugh at the seriously presented insanity happening in front of your eyes. And just because, all this stuff happens to the accompaniment of an absurdly dramatic score by Ennio Morricone, because of course it does.

Unfortunately, once that is over and done with, the film calms down into a bit of an hour-long rut, with way too much exposition (though the mandatory slideshow exposition scene is at least accompanied by some excellent insane rambling from Brother Jonas), and too little happening. Even the craziness can’t help much there, because apart from the bizarre and hilarious scene where the “flying” (on strings visible even in a film as badly treated on home video as this one), whistling key turns the alcoholic mountain climber’s hut to mush in an attempt to “escape” (don’t ask me), and the fact the audience learns of the strong man’s heart problems in a scene between him and Popo in full clown make-up, there’s little of interest happening.

Of course, finally, after too much time spent on our characters avoiding lasers by hanging from a ceiling, and an intercut (stalling for time) sequence of Brother Jonas healing a fake possessed woman, the film finds its feet again when people start dying in hilarious ways, Tony Anthony’s face melts, and he turns into a human flame thrower, melting someone into the kind of skeleton that makes crashing noises like a breaking clay jar.

That’s the sort of thing that really makes up for a pretty dismal middle in a film, at least in my house, and particularly when the film treats the whole mess with a blank faced earnestness that’s only disturbed by Tony Anthony making rubber faces even when he’s not wearing a rubber face, but that’s Tony Anthony for you.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,italian movies,reviews,adventure,fantasy,wtf,ferdinando baldi,tony anthony,ana obregón,francisco rabal

Nine Guests For A Crime (1977)

Original title: Nove ospiti per un delitto

Twenty years ago, a quartet of men with guns first shot a young man for the sin of sleeping with a woman of their family on the beach of their private island, then buried him alive. Might this become the reason for a few killings later on in the movie?

Now, rich patriarch Ubaldo (Arthur Kennedy), his three sons, their respective spouses and their mad aunt Elizabeth (Dana Ghia) go to the very same island for a nice summer holiday.

As this is a group of rich people in a giallo, everybody spends his or her time either bitching at one another, uttering melodramatic monologues, sleeping around with other people's spouses in the same room where one's own spouse sleeps, or just masturbating in an open air shower.

While these fun and games are going on, a mysterious person wearing black leather gloves - as mandated by giallo law - murders the sailors manning the family's yacht and drives it off somewhere. All that arguing and sleeping around is pretty distracting, so the family only realizes the absence of their transportation when family member Carla (Flavia Fabiani) drowns, her body never to be found, and they need to call the police.

And oh, somebody seems to have stolen the spark plugs of the cute red motorboat too.

Of course, Carla isn't the last family member to die. Soon enough, Ubaldo himself is dead of poisoning, and it's time for everybody to give up on the sleeping around and concentrate on calling each other a murderer. And, going by the continuing body count, one of the family members might very well be one.

Nine Guests is another entry in one of my very favourite giallo sub-genres, the Rich-Bastards-Get-Theirs film that's an unholy, sexed-up update of the Dark Old House genre (though the house in this particular case is - ironically - pretty modern and bright) and/or Agatha Christie, just with class politics that would have driven the conservative old writer into conniptions.

This particular sub-genre of the giallo seems to be made to strengthen my own classist prejudices as someone coming from sub-working class circumstances, demonstrating that yes, indeed, all rich people are murderous bastards and deserve to die, and then proceeds to show their deaths in great and lavish detail. This sort of film is to rich people what the slasher is to very old teenagers.

Although playing only to its audience's basest instincts is not something I really approve of in a movie, it's difficult to disagree with the lurid charms of Nine Guests. Directed by Ferdinando Baldi - who is a very hit-or-miss director for me - the film is so obviously having fun with its own trashiness that it's impossible for me to not have fun watching it, too.

There's dubious 70s interior architecture to gawk at, softcore sex of the rubbing kind to laugh at, and decadent evil rich people being hatefully decadent, evil and rich until they are killed off in various bloody and photogenic ways - what more could I ask of a movie?

On the negative side, the first half hour or so is actually a bit too loaded with the softcore sex, going from breast rubbing on a terrace to breast rubbing under the shower to breast rubbing in bed until the sceptical viewer might begin to think this movie experience is a bit lacking in diversity. However, that's only because Baldi needs to load all the mandatory nudity into his movie's first thirty minutes so that he doesn't need to take a break in the melodramatic arguments and the killings for more breast rubbing later on. Thanks to this genius idea as well as some suddenly pretty stylish direction, Nine Guests' final act even develops a solid feeling of suspense.

Sure, the identity of the killer is quite obvious, and the explanation for everything that's going on is more than just a bit silly, but Nine Guests For A Crime is consequent, a bit cynical and so well-clad in its chosen pop trash guise that I'd need to be a much grouchier person than I am to not overlook these minor problems and enjoy it.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,giallo,ferdinando baldi

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: Blindman (1971)

A blind gunman (or rather rifleman, going by his favorite weapon) only known as Blindman (Tony Anthony) is hired to escort fifty mailorder brides to their future husbands in a Texas mining town. Before he can even gets his hands on them, they are kidnapped by the bandit Domingo (Lloyd Battista) and his men and brought to Mexico. There, Domingo wants to use the women to help him deal with the local military in a never explained kidnapping and murder plot to get money out of an unnamed General (Raf Baldassarre).

Blindman lets his Manmohan Desai-clever horse take him to Mexico and nicely asks for his women back, of course to no avail. Abducting Domingo's stupider brother Candy (Ringo Starr, oh yes; well, actually, oh no) to exchange him against the women doesn't work out as our hero planned, and just leads him into captivity, but don't fret, he'll escape to do the usual Spaghetti Western revenge dance.

Someone in the Italian film industry thought it a good idea to finance this fever dream the drug-addled brains of director Ferdinando Baldi and his star/producer/story idea provider Tony Anthony cooked up, and who am I to blame him?

A Spaghetti Western variation of Zatoichi with the goofiest looking Western actor of them all in the lead role must have sounded irresistible. Unfortunately, the finished film isn't as fun or as accomplished as I'd like it to be.

It all starts out fine enough in the insane, weirdly good-natured - even when people are killed and mutilated - tone that would make Baldi's and Anthony's later The Stranger Gets Mean so much stupid fun, but after forty minutes or so of Anthony mugging through absurd set-ups (personal favorite: the bad guys hiding a snake in his salad), the film suddenly turns mean on us. There's a scene where Domingo's men are hunting down, raping and killing the escaped fifty women that would be effective, poignant, deeply uncomfortable and touching in a Corbucci film, but just comes over as vile and misogynistic here. In theory, Baldi pushes all the right buttons, he just isn't able to let the viewer connect emotionally to the victims of the violence, leaving the impression of someone just not knowing what he's doing and (worse) why he is doing it.

The film has more than one moment of this type, and I never felt that Baldi was able to connect this half of his movie with the manga-esque exaggeration of its other half. In fact, I was never sure that Baldi knew what kind of film he was actually making, nor what its themes or mood were supposed to be.

It doesn't help that our titular blindman isn't much of a hero, not even an anti-hero. When he's not actively shooting someone, he is about as effective as a traffic cop without any knowledge of traffic laws.

It's quite a shame really, because the film does look very nice, and some of the action scenes are very ably done. I just don't think it is worth wading through the muck for them.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,ferdinando baldi,tony anthony,spaghetti western,in short

The Stranger Gets Mean (1976)

aka Get Mean

The always weirdly grinning and mugging gunman we only know as the Stranger (Tony Anthony) returns. And what a return it is! He is being dragged behind a riderless horse into the dustiest Western ghost town in all of Spain, um, I mean America. There he meets a bunch of people I can only describe as gypsy pirates. They have been waiting for him as the promised hero who shall return their princess Elizabeth (Diana Lorys) back to Spain and help her regain her throne from the invading barbarians. While our dubiously heroic hero is still haggling about the price of his services, a group of black clad cowboys led by a Viking attack. The Stranger disperses these guys pretty fast and it does only take a little line on a map until the he and the princess arrive in Spain. Once there, they witness a bizarre battle between the barbarians (a bunch of people with melee weapons, dressed as Persian, Vikings, traditional Spanish courtiers, or just in the pelts of movie barbarism) and Elizabeth's people (who are white Moors? Spaniards?), wearing either the gypsy pirate style things or movie Moorish clothing circa from the Crusades era, as well as anything else the director thought he could get away with (that is, everything). By all rights, Elizabeth's guys should win, what with them having firearms (and bows) and such, but the barbarians have a secret weapon. It's an early version of a tank in form of a cart carrying four cannons on a turning disk and it makes short work of Elizabeth's army.

Well, so much for the good guys. Afterwards, the leaders of the barbarians go for a little chat with the Stranger and Elizabeth. It turns out that Elizabeth's tendency to tell everyone, even the leaders of her enemies, who she is and the Stranger's helpful explanation of her monetary worth can only lead to trouble. So Elizabeth ends up kidnapped while our hero sees the world hanging from his feet while the barbarians are shooting their cannons at him.

This is where the plot (such as it is) starts to get complicated with a nonsensical series of double crosses between the leaders of the barbarians (Diego-who-dresses-like-Genghis-Khan-and-is-dubbed-with-a-near-impenetrable-accent, The Gay Courtier, and Richard III's number one fan) and the Stranger himself, kidnappings, escapes, and a little questing for a hidden treasure.

Among the further indignities that are visited on our hero are:

• invisible ghosts hitting him and possessing him into imitating wolf howls (very badly, at that)
  
• a black face bomb
  
• people stuffing an apple into his mouth and trying to roast him on a spit
  
• the local semi-lesbian warrior women trying to do him sexual harm until they are distracted by each other's awesomeness

and more insane shit than one could possibly list.

For those among us who thought The Stranger's outing in Japan was weird, Get Mean is a true eye opener. Its glaring and completely conscious ignorance of things like logic, characterization, history (if not time itself) and plain human sanity is bound to show everyone what the word "bonkers" really means. It is surprisingly unmysterious how the film came to pass, though (and yes, I am passing wild speculation based on my intimate knowledge of Italian filmmaking by way of watching way too many Italian films as fact here). You see, director Ferdinando Baldi and his star Tony "Mugging Mug" Anthony promised their producers to make a Western only to find that they didn't have any Western costumes except for the single one that was part of Tony's private wardrobe. Buying or making some was completely out of the question after most of the budget had already been invested in drugs during the script writing phase (a wild party in Baldi's house during which no script was written), but what luck! Baldi still had some moth-eaten rags "borrowed" during his stint as director of peplums and historical adventure films stashed away in his cellar! Nothing was more obvious than to just put them all on random actors and improvise something along the lines of Maciste's adventures in China, just with a gunman instead of Maciste and even less of an idea when exactly the damn thing was meant to take place.

Which brought this film into existence, a real prime piece of what the hell filmmaking that for once is as fun as its elements promise. There was most definitely neither a real script nor a plan nor any sane idea involved, but damn, this thing is moving along with nary a minute that is not filled to the brim with stupid, inappropriate and goofy scenes of inexplicable meaning, be it the indignities inflicted upon our hero or just a mass of dubious details (like the silver spheres which seem to observe the beginning and the end of the film, or our hero's love for the taunting of dead enemies or or or).

This just might be the film the Italian movie industry was made to create. Thanks, God!

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,western,adventure,comedy,tony anthony,ferdinando baldi,reviews