Notturno con grida (1981)

Ten years ago, rich guy Christian (Franco Molè) disappeared from his home under very mysterious circumstances. Everyone else in the household suffering some sort of physical damage as well as memory loss, so nobody knows what happened to him or if he is indeed still alive. The household members got the opportunity for a lot of bitter lawsuits out of it, so there was a silver lining to the affair.

The day after the film takes place will be the day when Christian can finally be declared dead, and his family commemorates the day that’ll leave his widow Eileen (Martine Brochard) stinking rich by a séance to clear up what happened to Christian, mirroring the night just before whatever happened to him took place. Brigitte (Mara Maryl), the wife of Christian’s brother Paul (house favourite Luciano Pigozzi aka Alan Collins), repeats her role as a medium she also had ten years ago. The séance is dramatic but rather inconclusive, Christian breaking off speaking through Brigitte exactly at the moment when he’s going to name the killer. Oh well.

So, everyone make their way to an excursion into the woods where they plan to build some bungalows. In the party are Eileen, Brigitte (who is either the dumbest woman alive or very good at pretending, something the other characters seem to ponder a lot, often loudly and in her presence), Paul (a former priest with some proper former priest secrets), the surveyor Sheena (Gioia Scola) and Eileen’s bodyguard and fiancée Gerard (Gerardo Amato). Of course, there are a bunch of secrets and lies between these characters, which come out sooner or later: for example, Paul once “took advantage” (as the film has it) of Eileen in the confessional when she was just fifteen, also talking her into marrying his brother in the hopes she would murder Christian and split the money with him; Gerard plans to murder Eileen once they are married for a while and take up with Sheena; Brigitte may or may not have been raped or have had an affair with Christian, and so on, and so forth. Really, it’s your typical rich family in a giallo.

As if all of these secrets, lies, and dubious moral backbones weren’t enough to motivate a bloodbath, the group is also beset by curious phenomena: a seemingly invisible early bird owl attacks, visions are had, memories relived, and so on. Eventually, their car disappears and the group can’t find their way out of the woods anymore, running in circles even if they clearly aren’t. And then there’s the invisible force that attacks them…

Ernesto Gastaldi was one of the more important writers of Italian genre movies during the 60s and 70s, writing giallos, peplums, Gothic horror films, or whatever else the market wanted. He only had a handful of stints in the director’s chair, though, this being one of them, the directing duties here shared with Vittorio Salerno, who isn’t as omnipresent or interesting as Gastaldi was.

As it stands, Notturno con grida is nearly a lost film, with a pretty drenched looking VHS source and fan made subtitles – which I am very thankful for – the best version of the film available right now, which is a bit of a shame, really, though not exactly surprising. After all, the film was clearly shot on the very cheap, even for the Italian movie industry of the early 80s, with only a handful of actors, a cheap “living room of the rich” set for the séance as well as the handful of flashbacks, a patch of woods and basically no special effects you can’t produce by moving your camera suggestively standing in for production values.

All of which to me suggests the kind of project someone working in the movie business could make on the side beside paying projects, asking some acquaintances (or in the case of Mara Maryl, his wife) to help out. So a bit of a labour of love. To me, at least, it truly feels like a labour of love, too, like a very experienced filmmaker using some of the ideas he couldn’t quite sell anyone with money on. There are some stand-bys from typical Gastaldi scripts on screen, of course. Especially the group of nasty but very fun rich people that make up the cast are a dime a dozen in his scripts as well as many another giallos, though they would more typically bump each other off than encounter the supernatural that’ll punish them for their sins as happens here. However, the dialogue for these dicks and dickettes in other movies doesn’t usually show off Gastaldi’s classical education as well these here do. Particularly our former priest is full of quotations and philosophical musings quite befitting a film that is beholden to the conventions of traditional tales of the supernatural. Something that, needless to say, is bound to endear a film to me.

But I also simply enjoy how much Gastaldi and Salerno make out of the little they’ve got here, getting fun and interesting performances out of their actors, and creating an effective eerie mood out of basically nothing – and mostly in daylight to boot. There’s just such a fine sense of the strange running through the film as a whole that it’s an easy recommendation for anyone who likes Italian genre cinema of Gastaldi’s period, or simply appreciates a good tale of people getting lost in the woods, pursued by something worse than a bear.

Past Misdeeds: And God Said To Cain (1970)

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 without any re-writes or 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.

After ten years of forced labour, Gary Hamilton (Klaus Kinski) is pardoned by the state governor. As it goes with protagonists of movies, Gary has been framed for the crime he has supposedly committed, and has not exactly mellowed towards the people responsible for his plight.

So Gary gets into the next stagecoach to return to the little Western town where his troubles began. With him in the coach is Dick Acombar (Antonio Cantafori), a soldier who is just returning home after two years of absence. As destiny (and it is destiny responsible in this particular film, and not luck) will have it, Dick is the son of the main target of Gary's vengeance. Gary gets out of the coach a bit before town, because he still needs to buy a weapon and a horse from the mandatory old blabbermouth, but he asks Dick to tell Acombar that he'll be around for a visit in the evening.

Dick's father (Peter Carsten) has become the head honcho of the town, ruling it with an iron fist and a veritable army of gunmen, yet has somehow been able to hide his rather dubious character from his son. Acombar and those of his henchmen in the know seem rather disturbed when they hear the news of Gary's impending arrival.

Because the patriarch still wants to hide the nature of his affairs from his son (for whom he has great plans including buying him the presidency), he sends his men out into town to kill Gary before Gary can learn the truth of the business between them. That's easier said than done, though. Gary arrives at nightfall, together with a tornado that might just have metaphorical dimensions, and he shows a nearly supernatural ability at hiding and striking at his enemies from the shadows, slowly working his way closer to Acombar throughout the night. Of course, all that racket in town can't help but send a clever young man like Dick searching for explanations.

After my last Spaghetti Western experience with Ferdinando Baldi's clichéd and unfocused Django, Prepare A Coffin!, it is especially nice to stumble onto a film as focused and tight (though not lacking in clichés) as Antonio Margheriti's And God Said To Cain, the product of a director not only in control of his visuals but also one having quite specific ideas about dramatic unity Aristotle-style. Tightness and focus aren't usually words I tend to connect with Margheriti's name, but And God Said To Cain makes it quite obvious that the director could do tight and focussed if he wanted to.

Now, Margheriti is of course one of my special favourites among Italian genre filmmakers, yet I usually tend to praise him for those of his films that live on sheer gleeful silliness and a sense of good fun like his post-Indiana Jones adventure movies or - strangely enough - his jungle action films. One tends to forget that Margheriti was also quite at home in the Gothic horror genre - a part of the cinematic landscape where one won't find much glee - and did in fact produce some very fine films there.

And God Said To Cain is Margheriti's successful attempt at stitching the stylish and elegant head of the Gothic onto the stinking, unwashed and possibly flea-bitten body of the Spaghetti Western, creating a monster made out of ringing church bells, howling wind, shoot-outs and vengeance taken right out of the Old Testament. In a sense, mixing the typically elegant Gothic horror with the typically rude Spaghetti Western shouldn't work, what with the Gothic being a film genre of night and fog and the Spaghetti being one of daylight and too stark sunshine.

Fortunately, Margheriti makes some deft directorial choices, taking the mood (and therefore the night) from the Gothic and the nature of his hero and the way violence works in provoking ever more violence from the Spaghetti. The director also emphasises the common ground of the two genres he is trying to fuse: both can be high on the melodrama (although the Spaghetti Western not always is) and both love to tell stories of vengeance and the way the sins of the father tend to fall back on the sons, as will inevitably happen to Dick Acombar in the end here.

It comes with the vengeance territory that both genres tend to believe in destiny (or the grim god of the Old Testament working through the gun of a film's protagonist) and so like to end on a scene of a cursed building burning down. And God Said To Cain is certainly no exception to this rule, ending a final confrontation in a room full of mirrors (of course also a visual tell of both the Gothic genre and the Spaghetti Western) with a burning villa.

I find it rather interesting how the film utilizes Kinski. Usually, directors employing the man had him do his - loveable and most excellent - Wild Man of Germany shtick, glowering, screaming and jumping up and down like the original, frightening Rumpelstilzchen, but Margheriti somehow convinces Kinski to restrain himself until he becomes a stone-faced, coolly-burning killer who shows his true emotions only through his eyes. Not surprisingly, Kinski is quite brilliant at this, too.

I was also impressed by Margheriti's restraint when it comes to showing the violence happening, often only letting us (and the increasingly panicked bad guys) see the aftermath of Kinski's killings instead of the the executions, letting the audience share something of his victims' fear of their enemy being more than just a normal human being who can be killed like anyone. Only the film's final third shows Kinski's work in more detail, and very consciously begins to show us the sheer physical strain this man must be under, making him possibly even more frightening than he was when he seemed to possess the dubious physical reality of the killer from a slasher movie. After Kinski has become something akin to a force of nature, he slowly becomes human again until he can throw away his gun in the end.

There's a mythical quality about much what happens in the film. It lies in the way in which what would be coincidences in a different world become destiny, in the dark rhythm of the film's editing, in the methodical way Kinski goes about the killing business, the silent fear he awakens in his victims and in the sparseness of information about what betrayal it is Kinski has come to take vengeance for.

This is not all the sort of Spaghetti Western one would expect Margheriti to make - and in fact, his other Spaghettis are much lighter in tone - but it should be an excellent surprise for everyone stumbling onto it.

In short: Libido (1965)

As a child, Christian (Giancarlo Giannini) witnessed his father killing a woman in his special mirrored sex room. Some time later, his father supposedly killed himself jumping off a cliff into the sea, as if there wasn't already enough psychological damage done to the boy. Since then, Christian has been fragile, taken from one psychiatrist to the next by his foster father and executor of his father's will Paul (Luciano "Allan Collins" Pigozzi).

Now Christian is nearly 25, married to a woman named Helene/Eilene (Dominique Boschero), and in a few months time, he will inherit his father's sizable fortune; at least, if he is of sound mind at that point. Christian, Helene, Paul and Paul's vacuous sexpot wife Brigitte (Mara Maryl) are driving out to the house of Christian's father - the place where he killed the woman, and killed himself - to take inventory of some of the estate.

Christian is soon plagued by curious phenomena that suggest that either his father to be still alive, Christian to be losing his mind in a rather spectacular manner, or someone to be trying to drive him insane to get at his money.

Ziggy Freud has a lot to answer for. Despite his psychoanalytical theories often having less to do with actual human psychology and more with Freud's own psychological fixations, the man was highly influential on all kinds of artists and all types of art even at a point when it was pretty clear how much of his theoretical apparatus was untenable. The Italian giallo did particularly like to take a bit of old Sigmund's tales in, seeing as they make a perfect pretext for an at least pseudo-intellectual mix of sex and violence, and also - perhaps just as importantly - lend themselves wonderfully to stylish visualizations, so I'm not necessarily blaming filmmakers for it.

Ernesto Gastaldi's and Vittorio Salerno's early black and white giallo Libido is as freudsploitation-y as a film can be (just look at the title!), beginning with a quote of the big man and then throwing as many elements of Freudian theory into its plot as possible. The film's first half hour or so is also a cornucopia of Freudian imagery, with more phallic and vaginal symbolism than you can shake a stick at (wait a minute…). It's the kind of film where just thinking a cigar (and why isn't there one?) might actually be a cigar would be absurd.

Once the film has acquainted the audience with the large mansion it will predominantly take place in, it calms down a bit with the loaded imagery, or maybe I was just so used to it at that point I just didn't see quite as much of it anymore. At that point, the film's other influences come to the fore: the post-Psycho psychological thriller, and Les Diaboliques, and if one is familiar with these films, the film's general gist and particular plot twists won't be much of a surprise. The film plays quite fair with the audience too, which is a fine way to avoid being annoying, but does not help against a certain obviousness.

That doesn't mean Libido isn't worth watching. While it tends to symbolic overload and suffers from a too melodramatic ending, the film is visually attractive, well paced and well acted. For me, it's a particular delight to see Luciano Pigozzi in a larger role than usual.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,giallo,ernesto gastaldi,vittorio salerno,giancarlo giannini,luciano pigozzi,dominique boschero,mara maryl

On WTF: And God Said To Cain (1970)

Antonio Margheriti makes a Gothic Spaghetti Western with Klaus Kinski in a surprisingly stone-faced leading role.

I react by singing songs of praise and love for the film on WTF-Film, as I should.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,antonio margheriti,spaghetti western,gothic,klaus kinski,reviews,other places,luciano pigozzi

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

Exterminators of the Year 3000 (1983)

We are in Post-Apocalyptica again. Judicious use of atom bombs has destroyed the ozone layer completely and turned the Earth into a dried-up wasteland where roaming bands of would-be punks called exterminators duke it out against each other. How fortunate for them that there's no lack of petrol.

One remnant of civilization still remains, though, in the form of a bunch of people living in caves and using their own private waterhole to help their greenhouse plants grow. But these people have troubles of their own. Their well will dry up any day now, leaving them ill prepared for survival.

At least they know where to find more water. Trouble is, the water source is hidden in the territory controlled by a gangleader called Crazy Bull (Fernando Bilbao), who isn't really someone you could start up diplomatic relations with or even meet without getting killed and probably eaten. Thus, the first man trying to reach the water hasn't returned yet. The cave dwellers decide to send out a second badly armed group to get the precious liquid, but a run in with Crazy Bull's men leaves only the child Tommy (Luca Venantini) and his pet hamster (presumably called Boo) alive.

So Tommy, in his annoying kenny-like way, decides to get to the water on his own. On his way, he falls in with the local more assholish semi-Mad Max, Alien (Robert Iannucci). Alien's not trustworthy at all, but at least he is an enemy of Crazy Bull, since he stole Bull's favorite super car, The Exterminator.

Not that Alien was able to keep the thing. He has learned the hard way that you shouldn't leave your car unlocked - not even in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

On their way to the water source, Tommy and Alien have various silly adventures and meet interesting people like the ex-astronaut/now mechanic Papillon (Luigi Pigozzi/Alan Collins hamming it up beautifully) and Alien's ex-girlfriend, the honest thief Trash (Alicia Moro).

Giuliano Carnimeo's Exterminators starts out with half an hour of nearly non-stop post-apocalyptic carnival car stunt driving and assorted fighting, and at that point contains already more of it than 90 percent of Italian Mad Max imitations. One would expect that the well of fun would then start to dry up (see what I did there?) and the rest of the film would consist of copious amounts of people stumbling through the desert while a synthesizer gently bleeps.

One would expect wrongly. Exterminators is one of the handful of films of its genre which know what to do when no cars are exploding, which is to say, it starts to throw silly pieces of whimsy at the viewer, not with the gesture of someone doing world building, but with the gentle, laconic enthusiasm of someone really getting into that pulp SF thing. The film isn't getting especially insane, instead, Carnimeo opts for charm and consciously used humor to present the ideas that are wildly stuffed into the script. Surprisingly enough, it works, and my inner twelve year old was having the time of his life with bionic arms, ex-astronauts and mutant guys in robes.

Technically, the film is mostly alright. Nobody would call Carnimeo a stylish director (I hope), but his no frills way of filming does fit the film's dry tone (oh my god, I did it again) rather nicely. The acting is mostly neutral, with dear old Pigozzi and Fernando Bilbao doing some fine overacting and everyone else mostly making shifty eyes and/or screaming nonsense (the script was co-written by Dardano Sacchetti, after all).

One last thing besides being a whole lot of fun that  Exterminators does right is the production design. Everything is either dusty and scavenged looking or delightfully retro-futuristic, most probably because most of the props and costumes were in fact scavenged from the sets of other films.

All in all, that's more than enough to make me happy.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,post-apocalypse,action,sf,luciano pigozzi,giuliano carnimeo,reviews

Alien From The Deep (1989)

An evil Texan corporation (of Evil) known as E-Chem has built a shiny new recycling facility for radioactive waste right next to a mildly active volcano on a tropical island. What do you know! It is not really a recycling facility! In truth the corps' minions dump the radioactive materials into the volcano, blessedly ingorant of any problems this might cause.

The projects' chief scientist (Luciano "Alan Collins" Pigozzi) doesn't think this is a very bright idea (now, don't ask me why he helped build it, then), but his Texan bosses ignore him and have put the homicidal hard-ass Colonel Kovacks (Charles Napier) in charge, a man who does what he's told, unless that interferes with shooting people or screaming at subordinates.

But don't fret, people who think dumping things in volcanos is a bad idea, Greenpeace has sent its top operative Jane (Marina Giulia Cavalli) and her cameraman Lee (Robert Marius) to infiltrate the facility. The inital break-in part works out nicely, and the two heroic eco warriors get some nice shots of waste being deposited contrary to regulations. Too bad that then the alarms start to sound and a bunch of angry, armed people is out to shoot them. Lee just manages to hide the video tape before he gets caught, while Jane escapes into the jungle, hunted by the rather rude security personnel who are just itching to kill her with their nice automatic weapons.

Jane survives her pursuers' attention only thanks to the help of the American snake farmer Bob (Daniel Bosch) and his tobacco into snake face spitting brand of masculinity, upon whom she literally stumbles while running through the jungle. Bob takes Jane home, and finds himself a wet T-shirt moment later roped into helping Jane rescue Lee from his (very American, that is, torture-loving) captors.

At the same time, a hungry alien has landed in the ocean next to the E-Chem base to do who knows what with the radioactive waste. In any case, it starts to lay waste to the place just when Bob and Jane arrive to rescue Jane's friend. What fun!

Alien From The Deep is one of the last films directed by Italian low budget crap hero Antonio Margheriti and is for some reason often called his worst film. I don't really see that. Sure, the film's stupid as they come, it has plot holes you could maneuver a death star through and everyone in front of the camera except for Pigozzi and Napier tries to win a price for "Worst Acting Performance In A Movie", but that is par for the course when it comes to the Italian action film of the late 80s. The true measure for this type of film isn't how intelligent it is, but how entertaining, and when it comes to entertainment, Alien From The Deep is a winner.

It really has quite a bit to recommend it. For a start, there's some of Margheriti's patented incredibly fake but beautiful looking model work, made with obvious love for detail, and an even greater love for miniature explosions). Then there's the immortal dialogue including lots of discussions of people's "balls" and some of the most deadly sexual inuendo you will ever hear.

And of course there is the alien, for the most part represented by a, well, a giant black lobster claw which is unfortunately not related to the Giant Claw, but looks pretty nifty in its giant clawlike way. The rest of it is rather less exciting. It seems to be a very very very large behelmeted, black, spiky biker without a motorcycle (but with the wonderful claw) or a beard, and it just don't look right, Ma, no, not right at all. Fortunately, Margheriti was far too experienced a director to show us this abomination for too long, so we can only enjoy it for a few short moments in the grand, Aliens-inspired finale.

What I find absolutely brilliant about the film is its (technically of course absolutely dubious) decision to make about an hour of an Italian jungle action film that then culminates in thirty minutes of Alien(s)-impressions. This does not only help reserve the effects budget for some mighty fine explosions, but also keeps the film away from needing to include too much filler by the sensational new method of making two Italian genre movies at once. It's brilliant in its simplicity, Dub-Dub.

This brilliant plan of resource conservation could of course have backfired badly if not for Margheriti's knack for making something watchable even when only in control of the tiniest of budgets. Late period Margheriti possessed a certain liteness of touch quite contrary to the nastiness and misanthropy of Italian exploitation colleagues like Lenzi (or the total incompetence of Bruno Mattei, for that matter), a liteness that made for surprisingly charming movies in genres where charme was usually absent. Even when people are mutilated by aliens or bitten by cobras, it all very obviously happens in good fun.

It's the magic of cinema, I suppose, and absolutely keeping in spirit with the classic American movie serials Margheriti must have loved.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,reviews,action,horror,luciano pigozzi,antonio margheriti

In short: The Devil Has Seven Faces (1971)

For some reason she isn't aware of, Julie Harrison (Carroll Baker), an American living in Holland, is suddenly shadowed by, later even threatened by a bunch of gangsters and mysterious strangers from the home country. It seems her twin sister Mary was involved in a diamond robbery and made off with the booty. Her former partners now think Julie to be her sister and won't stop from anything to get it.

Fortunately, Julie can rely on the help of her lawyer Dave Barton (Stephen Boyd) who is infatuated with her and his friend Tony Shane (George Hilton), whom she promptly falls in love with. But is it possible that one or both of the men have other motives for their actions than their macho libidos? And what about the insurance investigator Steve Hunter (Luciano Pigozzi)?

 

The Devil Has Seven Faces is an entertaining if neither original nor aesthetically thrilling giallo of the apolitical criminal conspiracy sub-type. If you have seen a few of these films, you'll probably know how it will all end and which character has what secret just by my short plot synopsis and the actors playing them (come on, it's George Hilton!). But Osvaldo Civirani's direction moves at a nice pace and the main actors are all quite impressive in the same roles they are playing so often, so the film provides a nice enough time without delving into any of the depths other giallos explore or reaching the visual heights of films by Bava, Argento or Martino.

Additionally, the friend of Seventies fashion can find some fine examples of the work of colorblind designers in Baker's costumes, as well as some of the most atrocious wigs I ever had the dubious pleasure to see.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,giallo,carroll baker,george hilton,stephen boyd,luciano pigozzi,osvaldo civirani,in short

Jungle Raiders (1985)

Malaysia, 1938. Duke Howard (Christopher Connelly) also known under the delightful moniker of Captain Yankee pays is bills by conning Western millionaires into financing not all that dangerous adventurous expeditions full of events Disney World would be proud of. As the Captain sees it, nobody gets hurt: the rich have the adventures of their lives and himself, his friend Gin Fizz (Luciano Pigozzi; a better alcoholic Scot than that Connery guy could ever dream of) and a local tribe that plays the evil howling natives for them make a nice living. Alas wonderful arrangements like that don't last forever. Just back, he helps a woman called Maria Janez (Marina Costa) escape a handful of crooks that tries to kidnap her (queue fruit cart and cardboard box destroying car chase here), only to be brushed off when she hears his name. He doesn't know yet that she is a) the woman of his dreams and b) working for a museum in search of the mythical Ruby of Gloom. He also doesn't know that she is the person his friend Warren (Lee van Cleef) has just blackmailed him into playing the guide for in a real adventure.

How adventurous, you ask? Well, there are a few other groups interested in the Ruby - the usual types, like the hidden guardians every artifact must have and the Borneo Pirates under their leader Tiger, who plans on using the Ruby to help him get crowned as king of Malaysia (nope, I don't know why he needs the ruby for that) and who has bought the help of the local weapon smuggler Da Silva and a group of quite unimpressive mercenaries. I see lots of explosions in Captain Yankee's future.

Antonio Margheriti has a big place in my personal pantheon of Italian B-movie directors. A film like this doesn't make this place smaller. In part an Indiana Jones rip-off, a comedy that has a lot of fun with some genre clichés and a series of explosions (yeah, the Ruby is buried under a volcano), Jungle Raiders certainly is a lot of fun. The actors seem to be having a lot of fun, the tone stays mostly on the light side and the humor is (to my great surprise) actually funny. Margheriti's usage of genre standards is actually a lot more interesting than what the gentlemen Spielberg and Lucas did; especially when some of the racist underpinnings the Indiana Jones films just repeat are nicely deconstructed.

This being an Italian action movie, there are of course moments of pure idiotic genius, most of them backloaded into the last third of the movie. Personal favorites here are the caterpillar/tank with flamethrower approved embrasures and Lassie the cobra who gives Wonder Dog Moti a run for his money (and gets to slither into the sunset with a lady cobra, oh yes!).

And the best thing? This isn't even Margheriti's best adventure movie.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,adventure,action,comedy,antonio margheriti,christopher connelly,marina costa,lee van cleef,luciano pigozzi,reviews