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: Dial: Help (1988)

Original title: Minaccia d’amore

Among the most awkward possible ways to incur the interest of RCPNP (Random Crappy Paranormal Phenomena) must be how it happens to English model trying to make it in Rome Jenny Cooper (Charlotte Lewis): while she’s trying to reach the Guy Who Broke Her Heart ™, she misdials and lands on the line of a closed-down suicide hotline for the romantically disappointed. After murdering its cleaning woman for no good reason apart from the film needing a corpse in act one, the invisible force inhabiting said phone line travels from phone to phone flirting rather awkwardly with Jenny by killing her fishes, trying to hypnotize her new neighbour Riccardo (Marcello Modugno) into suicide, and murdering her friends, from time to time hypnotizing Jenny herself into acts of deeply awkward sexiness like that particular moment of phone sex where the telephone receiver also seems to work as a hair dryer. Better not to think about it.

On the plus side, the not quite evil force also shoots a would-be rapist to gory death with coins from a pay phone, so there’s a bright side to Jenny’s problems too.

Obviously, Dial: Help is a long way away from director Ruggero Deodato’s (unwatchable to me because I just can’t stomach the tone and the sheer amount of violence against animals there) magnum opus Cannibal Holocaust; its hilarious, frightening and quite puzzling attempts at the hot sexy times do pre-figure The Washing Machine somewhat, though, while the rest of the film is really a very typical example of crap Italian horror.

It’s the sort of film that just strings random scenes of generic supernatural business one after the other, attempts to break that up by what it deems to be sexy stuff but what isn’t anything like that to actual human eyes, gives its characters utterly bizarre dialogue, and tends to drift off into the pretty darn weird while mumbling stuff about emotional energy accruing in certain places and situations and taking on a mind of its own (which I think is supposed to explain what’s going on).

If you’re lucky, a film like this manages to create a dream-like mood out of its nonsense – if you’re really lucky even a thematically resonant one – if not, it becomes just boring and random. Dial: Help lands somewhere in the middle. It certainly feels too long, and more than one of its scenes of supernatural menace isn’t just silly and dumb but also a bit boring; on the other hand, there are incredible moments like the blow dryer telephone sex scene (the sort of thing you really need to see to believe anyone would put in a movie), or the sneaky telephone of Jenny’s photographer friend that only misses out on perfection by not putting a cardboard box on as a disguise (hey Konami, how about Telephone Gear Solid?), moments that really make a boy wonder what exactly the people responsible were thinking.

On a more technical level, Deodato does make decent use of your typical cold 80s aesthetics that sometimes rub in interesting ways against the rather dilapidated parts of Rome during the location shots, Claudio Simonetti provides a typical score, and the actors are doing their best (which isn’t necessarily very much) with what they are given.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,horror,ruggero deodato,charlotte lewis,marcello modugno

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