Plot of Fear (1976)

Original title: E tanta paura

Various, mostly rich and influential, people are killed in gruesome ways. The killer always leaves a page of German old-timey sledgehammer education picture book “Struwwelpeter” at the scene of the crime.

When he isn’t sleeping with his model girlfriend, Inspector Lomenzo (Michele Placido) does some actual, proper, investigative work – and acquires a new model girlfriend in form of Jeanne (Corinne Cléry) during it. From Jeanne, Lomenzo learns that all the victims were involved in the sex and violence parties hunter and dealer in wild animals Hoffmann (John Steiner) held at his estate when he was still alive, and all of them were there the day a prostitute died under highly dubious circumstances.

It’s nearly as if someone were trying to punish the people involved through brutal violence as also happens to be the tradition of old-timey German picture books for kids.

Paolo Cavara’s Plot of Fear is definitely one of the better attempts at mixing elements of the giallo with those of the Italian cop movie, and making pretty successful attempts at subverting both of them while also delivering the genre thrills an audience would expect.

On the giallo side, while this is certainly a stylish and well-shot film, Cavara shows little interest into stylizing the violence as someone like Argento or Martino would (though he does clearly have some heterosexual guy kind of fun with the nudity). Where the often sexually non-binary identities of the killers in your typical giallo can suggest a rather conservative world view (if these aspects are meant that way is a very different question), the killer here comes out of a thematic concern about vigilantism, the misuse of surveillance and the misuse of power that reads very directly left-wing to me.

Police film-wise, Lomenzo is a very different proposition to the two-fisted – depending on your view point fascistically coded (though I would often not read them this way) – action copper as exemplified in someone like the great Maurizio Merli. While he does get into a couple of scraps (the genre demands, and Cavara is clever enough to accede), Lomenzo approaches the case with his head instead of his fists, though he is no Sherlock Holmes, either. He’s a softer, more thoughtful proposition, easily flustered but just as determined and uncorrupted as his more brutal antipodes – he just clearly does believe in due process and proper procedure as the basis of actual justice.

All of which is nice and interesting on paper, but wouldn’t be worth much if Plot of Fear weren’t an engaging genre mix. Fortunately it is, providing the expected genre beats with verve and enough style to keep my sleazier nature happy while pushing two genres into directions they not often go. Hell, Cavara even manages to add humorous interludes that are actually drily funny, which is not a sentence you’ll find me writing about many giallos.

Dagger Eyes (1983)

Original title: Mystère

High class call girl Mystère (Carole Bouquet) keeps up the style and posture of a high fashion model at all times, projecting an aura of impossibly perfect beauty presented with total emotional detachment. Her mantra appears to be that nothing ever surprises her. Indeed, Mystère’s perfect surface hardly shows the tiniest cracks even when a mysterious figure starts stalking her with ambitions on murder.

The killer is not a random maniac, as you’d expect, however. Rather, a long-fingered colleague has more or less accidentally hidden a lighter in Mystère’s stylish handbag she has stolen from a client. In the lighter is a microfilm, and on that microfilm are photos that show the assassin (John Steiner) who shot a politician during a motorcade. The brutally disposed people behind the assassination are in the espionage business, and certainly not to be trifled with.

However, neither is in Mystère, even less so once she teams up with the deeply misogynistic, very subtly named, Inspector Colt (Phil Coccioletti).

The giallo genre hit a rather big snag during the 80s. In part, this was only natural in the somewhat fad and fashion based world of Italian genre movies where yesterday’s hit genre is today’s box-office death knell. Italian filmmaking as a whole started suffering from fewer opportunities and ever lower budgets, with rather a lot of talent making their way to the aesthetically less pleasing but more secure feeding troughs of TV production.

However, I believe the giallo had another problem in trying to update its style to that of the new decade. Visually, the genre had always been deeply informed by pop culture and fashion, but there aren’t that many directors involved in the genre who appeared interested in updating this element of their films as much as it was needed to keep giallos contemporary.

Carlo Vanzina, mostly specialized in directing comedies, demonstrates no problems in that regard here (nor in his later giallo Nothing Underneath) – if there is any film that breathes the idea of the giallo as a version of the thriller and horror genres informed by violence and sex but also by fashion, it is Mystère. Its titular heroine – really embodied by Bouquet more than strictly acted – is presented as the impossible ideal of its time: an always perfectly made-up, cool kind of femininity. Bouquet always looks as if she’s just stepped out of a magazine cover, even when surrounded by people who look perfectly normal, always in control, Hitchock’s everyman protagonist inverted into something new and deeply contemporary - as it will turn out morally as well as stylishly, as befits the decade.

She strides through a plot that enlivens giallo standards by combining them with the conspiracy thriller – also reimagined into something more fashionable and more amoral – through often rather wonderful suspense sequences, shots of great, artificial beauty, and those sudden outbreaks of illogic and goofiness which were always part of this arm of the genre. Indeed, if you ask me, its the inherent strangeness and the disinterest in presenting the world of the film as working like the real world does that always bring the giallo into the folds of horror, or at the very least the cinema of the fantastic, as a sibling of the film noir that’s even more stylized and even less interested in real-world logic.

From this perspective, even the pretty damn silly epilogue of Mystère makes sense as part of the aesthetic package of the film; that it also doesn’t even seem to understand, and certainly not share, the moral outrage of the conspiracy thrillers it also borrows from makes sense: this is a complete product of the 80s.

Cut and Run (1984)

Original title: Inferno in diretta

After stumbling upon the aftermath of a very violent massacre committed on members of a drug smuggling gang, TV reporter Fran Hudson (Lisa Blount) and her buddy and cameraman Mark Ludman (Leonard Mann) are put on the track of a curious drug war that seems to go on all around the United States as well as (somewhere in) South America.

Clues soon lead to one Colonel Horne (Richard Lynch) who supposedly died at Jonestown, and the missing son of an executive in Fran’s TV network,  and to an unnamed part of South America, so off to (some part of) South America our heroes fly. There, they’ll have to evade the soft attentions of crazy people and the cult of native warriors who are somehow (the film never explains) under Horne’s sway. Awkward attempts at Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now quotes happen. Michael Berryman does his wild Berryman thing, so there’s quite a bit of gore, too.

Fortunately for the softer stomachs and hearts in the audience, Ruggero Deodato’s Cut and Run – at least in the rather gory cut I’ve watched – does not follow the trail blazed by the director’s masterpiece of making any viewer feel like shit Cannibal Apocalypse and contains very little footage of animals getting tortured to squick the viewer out. Since the film fuses Italian jungle action and elements of the cannibal movie, Deodato obviously and cleverly having deduced that cannibals alone don’t cut it anymore at this point, there is some sexual violence and quite a load of implied racism to get through, though not double the amount than in each genre alone, at least.

It also has to to be said that Deodato’s use of sexual violence here very clearly isn’t meant to turn a viewer on, but rather part of the director’s typical project (at least in this part of his career) of putting us off of humanity altogether while still doing what is expected by an exploitation movie. To my eyes, one of the things that makes Deodato’s movies from this period – which pretty much ends around this point in his filmography - rather more interesting than a lot of its genre siblings is how clearly the guy means his general hatred of Western complacity and how earnestly he tries to shock his audience out of it. Which can lead to a film like Cannibal Holocaust only few people will want to watch a second time even when they are – as I am – sympathetic to the director and his project, or one like the film at hand that’s not fun enough to really work as an exploitation movie, but not unpleasant enough to make you (well, me, at least) feel really bad.

On the exploitation and horror front, there are – if you find a version of the film not cut to hell – some rather creative gore bits to watch, as well as small parts for Karen Black, John Steiner (who really goes to pieces for his part) and other genre favourites. There’s generally enough of a good bad time that it’s a reasonably enjoyable film to watch if you’re into this sort of thing like I am (and anyone who isn’t will already have closed this tab a couple of paragraphs earlier), particularly since Deodato isn’t bad at all at pacing the film’s more extreme moments with the inevitable slow parts. I also approve of Richard Lynch doing a Marlon Brando impression for a bit, as well as the completely pointless attempts at exploiting Jonestown for additional shock value.

In short: I Don't Want To Be Born (1975)

aka The Devil Within Her

aka Sharon's Baby

aka The Monster

aka The Baby

Winning the fight for the heavyweight championship for the worst movie about killer babies is clearly this British production directed by Peter Sasdy. The plot, such as it is, concerns Joan Collins as the most horrible burlesque dancer/stripper imaginable getting cursed by a spurned dwarf, and soon enough popping out The Devil Baby after getting together with Ralph Bates.

Hubby Ralph is so disturbed about his offspring that he's talking in an Italian accent so ridiculous it's difficult to imagine he's meaning it seriously (he does). Note to casting directors of the past: Ralph Bates is neither Italian nor able to pretend he is.

The dialogue may regularly inform the viewers that the baby, or rather The Baby, is abnormally large and strong for its age, but the hoped for effect is a bit ruined whenever Sasdy cuts to the actual baby - looking fat, satisfied, totally normal and so completely good-natured it's impossible not to laugh when the next character comments on its size or goes through a bad "oh my god! The devil baby scratched me!" rigmarole. Given how ridiculous baby's physical feats get during the course of the movie, I find it difficult to understand why the script doesn't just give it explicit telekinetic powers or something of that sort. That would have been silly enough, but slightly less ridiculous than a baby that's able hang Ralph Bates on a tree. Of course, it is hardly possible to watch I Don't Want To Be Born without developing doubts about the intellectual capacities, or at least the willingness to give a damn, of everyone involved behind the camera.

Because all this is not dumb enough, the film also sees fit to try to get at some of that sweet, sweet Exorcist money by adding a Catholic nun who works in the animal experimentation field (Eileen Atkins) and is related to Ralphie Bates, so that she can discuss the nature of evil babies with the family's doctor played by the great Donald Pleasence. The latter seems to have a lot of fun in his few scenes and brings some conscious irony and even class to a cast - there are John Steiner as sleazy script club owner and Caroline Munro as Collins's ditzy best friend, too - that should be able to do better, even when having to work with a script like this. Again, it all seems to be a case of nobody willing to give a damn.

I Don't Want To Be Born is a film you either stare at in disbelief and giggle continuously at, or give up on after fifteen minutes, depending on your tolerance for unbelievable nonsense.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,british movies,horror,peter sasdy,joan collins,eileen atkins,donald pleasence,ralph bates,john steiner,caroline munro

In short: Cobra Mission (1986)

Four Vietnam veterans (Christopher Connelly, John Steiner, Manfred Lehmann and Oliver Tobias) have enough of being disrespected by random drunks and/or their families. What would lead to a drunken bender, a bar fight or a divorce for most people soon finds the quartet being convinced by their former commanding officer (played by the cameoing Enzo G. Castellari, who'd probably have made a more exciting film had he directed this one) to return to Vietnam and rescue some of those legendary US prisoners of war the Italian film industry cares deeply about.

After further cameos by Luciano Pigozzi/Alan Collins, and Donald Pleasence as a mad, commie-eating Catholic priest, our guys are armed to the teeth and on their way through the jungle.

Surprisingly enough, they even manage to find and free a handful of prisoners, but finding and freeing and actually rescuing them turn out to be quite different things, because The Man turns out to be totally evil, you know.

I have often read that Fabrizio De Angelis' Cobra Mission is supposed to be one of the better Italian rambosploitation (or is it explodinghutsploitation?) movies, but I can't say I agree with that assessment. Sure, the lead actors have have held their creased visages into cameras pretending to be real macho men in a few hundred of these films and are kind of good at their job. Yes, the cameos and small parts for people like Pleasence, Pigozzi, Gordon Mitchell, or Ethan Wayne are nearly as nice a thing to have on screen as having good old friends as dinner guests. And of course there are exploding huts and Filipinos pretending to be Vietnamese dying in various ridiculous poses aplenty.

But unfortunately, Cobra Mission falls into one of the saddest traps a vietnamsploitation film can fall into: it's neither mad and viscerally exciting enough to delight as a cheap piece of crap, nor good enough at being earnest and po-faced to work even vaguely as the message movie it likes to pretend it is between the shouting and the shooting. The film's message movie parts are also of the unpleasantly jingoistic "bring our boys back home (even if we Italians don't have any boys there)" variant, with a mild helping of racism, which does not help to endear them or Cobra Mission to me.

From time to time, the jingoism and the racism is unexpectedly interrupted by sudden moments of relativism that show (some of) our heroes' enemies as actual human beings with actual human motivations, moments in which the film also seems on the cusp of developing a consciousness of said heroes being utter jerks. If the film had developed these elements further, Cobra Mission could have become something quite special, but the film's admittance of complexity never goes all the way, and so the next piece of right wing whining is never far away, while the action is never good (or silly) enough to make up for it.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,action,war,christopher connelly,manfred lehmann,john steiner,oliver tobias,fabrizio de angelis,in short

Ark of the Sungod (1983)

aka Temple of Hell

The gentleman burglar Rick Spear (David Warbeck) has come to Turkey to combine a pleasurable holiday with his girlfriend Carol (Susie Sudlow) with a little light burglarizing. Keeping Carol out of the loop of what he's doing for a living is surprisingly easy. The woman's a real airhead, but at least she will turn out to be a very practical airhead without much of a propensity to scream during the course of the movie, so the film already has one better on the middle part of the Indiana Jones trilogy (there is no fourth film).

Rick's burglary business is easy work for a professional, even with a random cultist trying to kill him while he is acquiring the tools of his trade from the shady Mohammed (Ricardo Palacios), but it also turns out to be a benign sort of trap laid by Rick's old buddy Lord Dean (John Steiner). Dean wants Rick to find and steal the scepter of king Gilgamesh for him. The artifact is securely tucked away in a lost temple somewhere in the mountains of what should be Iraq. An expedition in the 30s found it, but didn't manage to open the large, golden door leading into it. Obviously, an expert burglar will succeed where archeologists have failed.

Finding the last survivor of the old expedition (our dear old friend Luigi Pigozzi aka Alan Collins) to learn where exactly the temple is located will be the least of Rick's problems. He'll also have to cope with more cultists and the bumbling henchmen of a certain Prince Abdullah (Aytekin Akkaya, if you believe the IMDB the man who played Captain America in 3 Dev Adam) who is planning on using the scepter to...rule the world. Mwahahaha. I see kidnappings in Carol's future.

Ark of the Sungod (and might I mention the complete lack of an ark in the film?) shows director Antonio Margheriti in full cheap-skate Spielberg mode, although I would argue that while Indiana Jones might be the commercial reason for the film's existence, the serials the Lucas/Spielberg films were based on are the company in which the Italian film really belongs in spirit of quick and dirty fun and by virtue of its cheap but effective production values.

The archeological adventure part isn't as important for the film as one might think. Mostly it is a very (yes, pulpy and serial-like) succession of fistfights, stunts, model-driven car chases (in fact one of the best model-driven car chases in movie history), and gleefully absurd humor.

Some would call the plot and the plotting here dumb and juvenile, but I find the lightness of touch this film shares with Margheriti's other adventure movies much too knowing and endearing to be this humorless about it. There's also a friendly little bunch of stereotypes to offend the easily offended, but taking offense here would mean putting a weight on a film it never was meant to take.

What Ark of the Sungod has going for it is an infectious feeling of fun and enthusiasm that comes through in Warbeck's sarcastic swagger, Akkaya's insane ranting, the relish with which Margheriti presents the location shots made in Turkey and the shrugging disinterest for common sense that runs through much of the film.

Like many of the director's best films from this phase of his career, Ark of the Sungod possesses a slightly post-modern feel. It is a movie very conscious of being a movie and of being stitched together out of parts of other movies. Margheriti is of course very adept at being irresponsible and playful about it without the need of great gestures to demonstrate how clever he is.

Ark of the Sungod is a boy's own adventure with all the problems that entails, but it seems to know that these problems are mostly dangerous for and in those boy's own adventures that decide to take themselves much too seriously. The only thing Margheriti takes seriously is having some fun while making his film, which in his case more often than not produced a fun film.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,adventure,action,antonio margheriti,luciano pigozzi,john steiner,reviews,david warbeck

In short: The Lone Runner (1986)

Somewhere, at some inexplicable point in time, a bunch of rather dull people live in a desert.

Various tribes - let's call them the Poor People, the Bedouins and the Sand People - roam the desert around something that could be meant to be a town (or not). A man called the Summer King (Donal Hudson) rules over the place (or not) peacefully enough, while Garrett the Lone Runner (Miles O'Keeffe and his magical hair, mostly riding and not running) rides through the desert looking heroic, righting wrongs (or not) etc.

One day the Summer King's daughter Analisa (Savina Gersak) is kidnapped by the Bedouins.

The whole kidnapping business is just a ploy thought up by the Summer King's confidante Emerick (Michael Aronin) to get at the thousand diamonds (and the film is pretty adamant about that number) his boss has stashed away. I'm pretty sure those diamonds will be of use in the desert.

Of course, rescuing kidnapped women falls under Garrett's job description, and he'll have quite a bit of rescuing and re-rescuing to do, because he might be great at pulling a damsel out of distress, but he's just crap at keeping said damsel un-kidnapped.

The desert dwellers don't make his job any easier. The Sand People, lead by a certain Skorm (John Steiner), also want a piece of the diamonds and are willing to do the most fiendish evil cackling to get what they want.

Well, that was slightly underwhelming, yet puzzling. The Lone Runner is usually called a post-apocalypse film with horses standing in for cars, but I'm not completely convinced that it is supposed to take place after a global catastrophe. Knowing how Italian genre films use history, this might as well be meant to take place in 19th century Tunisia, or the time and place when Maciste met Zorro.

Unfortunately, thinking about this is the most fun I had with the film. It's just not all that interesting to watch people ride through a indifferently shot desert while one of the more boring synthesizer soundtracks in Italian film history noodles away in the background.

Points of interest between all the riding are few and far between. O'Keeffe moves his facial muscles at least once, John Steiner plays his baddie as Adam Ant on crack and some of the fight scenes are somewhat competently done. You could also add O'Keeffe's use of a crossbow with exploding bolts and the homemade laser the Sand People use to the mildly awesome.Alas, director Ruggero Deodato never heard of the word "awesome" and does everything in his power to make even these flourishes rather slow and boring.

I'm not asking for much in Italian post-apocalypse (or not) action films from the 80s, but a film needs to show a little effort, either by being insane or enthusiastic or both.

What Deodato delivers instead is a desert of wasted opportunities.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,post-apocalypse,action,ruggero deodato,miles o'keeffe,john steiner,in short

In short: Mark Strikes Back (1976)

aka The .44 Specialist (not to be mixed up with The 44 Specialist, also featuring John Saxon and also made in 1976, but in the Philippines by good old Cirio H. Santiago)

Mark Patti (Franco Gasparri) is a small-time undercover cop working for the Italian police. Mark is quite unsatisfied with his position and the fact that he is only able to go after the small fry. It suits him just fine when chance lets him fall in with Olga (Marcella Michelangeli) and Paul (John Steiner), two international terrorists. The anti-terror squad is all too pleased to finally be able to get someone close to two people relatively high in the undefined terrorist organization and Patti is just too happy to finally be of real use.

That is, until he has reason to doubt the motives and methods of his new boss, a certain Altman (John Saxon). At that point, it might just be too late for Mark to change his mind about his job or to just get out alive.

Mark Strikes Back has every possibility to be an excellent film. Stelvio Massi's direction is unobtrusive, yet obviously skilled, the actors (especially Steiner) are doing great work, there's even a fine soundtrack by Stelvio Cipriani to round it all out.

Alas, Dardano Sacchetti's script really lets the whole film down. It all starts out well enough and for about forty-five minutes, the film seems to slowly but surely move into a direction where Eurocrime film and 70s conspiracy thriller meet, until the actual plot is suddenly cut short at the movie's halfway point and replaced by a very Sacchetti-typical episodic drifting from one loosely connected set-piece to the next. Why one would just stop one's plot in the middle of a film, robbing it of every sense of urgency in the process, is beyond me. Sacchetti might well be going for something like "terrorism has no head and more than one reason, so there can be no real throughline" (at least that's what the film more or less states outright), but this sadly ignores the fact that a thriller needs a plot and an audience needs a reason to care about the things that are happening on screen beyond the mere fact that they are in the script.

Thanks to everyone else's contributions, the film stays watchable as a technically excellent accumulation of scenes that probably would make an excellent movie, if someone would just bother to actually connect them.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,eurocrime,john saxon,john steiner,franco gasparri,stelvio massi,in short

In short: The Last Hunter (1980)

Look here, future American presidents: Even Italian war exploitation movies are telling you that war is bad.

Antonio Margheriti and Dardano Sacchetti probably saw Apocalypse Now a few times before making The Last Hunter. The basic rhythm of both films has quite a few similarities and both films are not telling us that war (in this case the Vietnam war) is hell, but that war is madness.

Of course, the Italian film does this in a much cheaper way (I am sure I must have heard parts of the music one or two times before) as well as with much more dubious motives.

Captain Henry Morris (David Warbeck, displaying just the right amount of cynicism) is ordered to destroy a highly effective Northern Vietnamese propaganda radio station. On his way there he meets a lot of mad or half-mad people, hooks up with the war journalist Jane Foster (Tisa Farrow, looking terribly under the weather), enters an American outpost commanded by John Steiner, who amuses himself with playing recorded gunshots and explosions as his beloved music, shoots a lot of people, is tortured etc etc. Also, there are lots of explosions (many of which you can meet again in later Margheriti films. I can't blame the man - they are nice explosions.).

What makes the film surprisingly effective as a variation on its rather surrealist predecessor is Margheriti's assured direction. As I might have said about him before, the man knew how to use a meager budget to produce a rather expensive looking film.

I'm always fascinated by the way Margheriti can get away with the depiction of as much nastiness and depravity in his films as other Italian directors without looking like a cynical madman. The trick lies in the humanity of his gaze, I think. The camera may linger on many things a lot longer than one should be comfortable with, yet Margheriti often uses this to give the victims of violence at least a basic human dignity. In this sense, his films feel like a humanist counterpart to the nihilism of Ruggero Deodato or Umberto Lenzi.

His merry gang of constant collaborators helps a lot with humanizing the film, too. The script doesn't care for the kind of psychological depth that pleases the jury at Cannes, but still gives the actors enough to work with to create a certain amount of human depth. People like Warbeck, Farrow, Steiner and Pigozzi (aka Alan Collins) are able enough actors to make the best of what they get when in the hands of a director who cares at least somewhat about their performances.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,antonio margheriti,david warbeck,tisa farrow,john steiner,action,war