Only now does it occur to me... THE BIG RACKET (1976)

Only now does it occur to me... that it's been way too long since I've watched an Enzo G. Castellari film. It's a certain, unique strand of plagiaristic Italo-madness inflected with the pure joy of visual storytelling, á la Sam Raimi or Richard Rush. About fifteen years ago, I first watched a spate of his classicks: 1990: BRONX WARRIORS, THE LAST SHARK, THE HEROIN BUSTERS, KEOMA, TUAREG: THE DESERT WARRIOR, INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, et al., a series of films which rip off and then reinvent everything from JAWS to THE WARRIORS to LAWRENCE OF ARABIA to THE DIRTY DOZEN.

After all these years, I finally took a stab at THE BIG RACKET, which is a reinvention of the original DEATH WISH with enough Roman derangement so as to prophesy the swirly-eyed Cannon Films sequels.

The plot is thus: a gang full of models and character actors destroy bowling shirts and flowers with ball bats. This represents Italian crime in the 1970s.

 

What do they want? Protection money from local business owners.



They're part of a huge operation that goes all the way to the top––a smarmy mobster played by Joshua Sinclair's "Rudy." (He's a member of Castellari's acting troupe who almost always plays a gleefully pompous baddie, and––no joke––he's also a medical doctor and expert in tropical diseases who worked with Mother Teresa.)

But there's one man who will not allow this to happen. A likable man who wears a lot of denim and looks disapprovingly upon property destruction

and spilt sugar.

That's right, it's one tuff cop played by the one and only Fabio Testi. I've referred to him in the past as "Italo-Rock Hudson" and "Eurotrash Hugh Jackman." When he fires his weapon in top-to-bottom, skintight, cinched denim, you had best believe that he's doing a back-strengthening Superman extension as he does it. That's just standard Testi operating procedure.

Most of this movie is glass being broken in slow motion or Peckinpah-style bullet ballet featuring folks in close-fitting bell bottoms set to the wacka wacka beats of De Angelis, basically a nonstop bassline cribbed from In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and some random psychedelic guitar tinkering. Or else it's criminal organizations meeting up and sitting around and flashing their eyes at each other and posing while jazz drum solos riff unto infinity (just like in 1990: BRONX WARRIORS). There's a fair amount of ickiness, too, like the comically fascist pro-police agenda and "fridging" tropes and multiple gang rapes, which mainly seem to be in here because Castellari genuinely believes he is making a contribution to the same contemporary ultraviolent subgenre as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, DELIVERANCE, STRAW DOGS, DIRTY HARRY, and DEATH WISH. In fact, he's making a live action cartoon with some of the best-worst dialogue in his entire canon.

"Holy jumpin' jackrabbits, somebody took a strong dislike to the decor in here!"

 

 "Well look at that, we've got a plainclothes peeping pig in our window!"

"There we were having a couple of quiet beers and these guys arrive and just start beating the bean bags out of us!"

 

"I think I better warn you, if I find one bedbug, you will see me for dust."

"We can't offer them protection 24 hours out of 24."

There's excessive use of the word "diddly." Sometimes it's used to mean "diddly shit/squat," and sometimes the uses are, shall we say, even more imaginative.

"Yeah, you're right, but, uh, but if they cooperate with us, they'll be up diddly creek."

"Pull yourself together before you drop us both into the diddly."

–"If we're gonna get into the diddly, I'm gonna make sure it's because we really earned the right to be in it."

There are moments of the sublime, like when a gang member is pouring kerosene on a small restauranteur's dining room and says, flatly,

"Pity we ain't got some chestnuts to put on this."

"Ya mucker" is a common insult in the world of THE BIG RACKET, and sometimes gang members make spirited and hilariously weird commentary on the beatings they're administering:

"Ah sure, a sizzling face stinger... topped off with a rear-over-headlight turnover!"

All of this is too much for Good Cop Pushed Too Far™ Fabio Testi, who must break the law in order to enforce it.

"Criminal methods, in this case, were necessary. I know my methods are, let's say, somewhat illegal, but if the results are right, don't they justify the means?"

Because Castellari loves a "men on a mission" movie more than anything else, a now suspended-from-the-force Testi recruits a band of avengers to take out the mob, PUNISHER style. He enlists a thief-buddy (Vincent Gardenia––two-time Oscar nominee, DEATH WISH and MOONSTRUCK cast member, and "Mushnik" in LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS)

and other roughnecks to join his "let's say, somewhat illegal" crusade. Along the way, there are darkly comic and socially dangerous vigilante fantasies, like an Olympic skeet shooter being present (by happenstance!) when hero cops are pinned down by a literal army of mobsters. He proceeds to take out half the army while never being mistaken by the cops as a gang member. Holy jumpin' jackrabbits.

Anyway, the film's politics (described by Morando Morandini in Il Giorno as "a fascist film, a vile film, an idiot film"––and he's not wrong!) somehow can't fully drop this film "into the diddly," so to speak, and distract from its glorious, era-defining kitsch and denim-related achievements.

Only now does it occur to me... PHANTASM (1979)

Only now does it occur to me...  I've written a little about PHANTASM (1979) a few times before. It's a surrealistic indie melancholy horror which owes more to Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau (and a little Ray Bradbury) than, say, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD or the Universal horror classics.

Fred Myrow's spooky-rockin' soundtrack. The yellow blood. The Jawa-men. The box of pain (a DUNE homage?). That sleazy lean-to shack-bar that looks like a stiff wind could blow it over. The noiseless, alabaster-white corridors of the mausoleum. The angry red sky of the other dimension. The phantasm balls, and their hidden secrets. The Tall Man. "BOYYYYYYYYY!"

Few films build such a wonderful impression of the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. Ultimately, it's a grim coming-of-age, and minus the supernatural elements, I think that its honesty and sheer quality should have even made the establishment critics take notice. In fact, Coscarelli's first two films were slice-of-life coming-of-age pictures played straight (the excellent KENNY & CO. and JIM, THE WORLD'S GREATEST). But let the establishment have their films, and let genre fans have PHANTASM. 

And despite all of its wonderful bells (and balls) and whistles, it all really comes down to a feeling, an emptiness, a melancholy born of grieving. That secret urge to wander the graveyard on an overcast day, and see what you can see...

 

I also once wrote about THE OTHER (1972) as the missing link between SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES and PHANTASM, but I'd like to add a few new observations as well. 

First, that it's incredible how deeply PHANTASM aligns––more psychically than literally––with STAR WARS. Both take deep inspiration from DUNE (STAR WARS with Tatooine, the Tusken Raiders, spice-running, Jedi spirituality, and the Butlerian jihad reflected in "we don't serve their kind here," etc.; PHANTASM with the faux-Bene Gesserit "put your hand in the box/fear is the mind killer" scene, 

 

a hostile wasteland planet, and "Dune's Cantina"), 

 

and both feature little people in desert robes (in STAR WARS, the iconic Jawas; in PHANTASM, the compressed bodies of the dead... reanimated by the Tall Man and used as interdimensional minions). 

Director Don Coscarelli has described this as a coincidence. He was apparently midway through production on PHANTASM when a friend told him he had seen "a trailer for this new movie Star Wars and your characters, the little brown dwarf guys, are in it." Later, STAR WARS fan and THE FORCE AWAKENS director J.J. Abrams helped restore the original print of PHANTASM and named Gwendoline Christie's shiny chrome STAR WARS character "Phasma" as a tribute.

Anyway, PHANTASM is great. It's meandering and dreamlike and a true indie, with bold editorial choices and stunning visuals. It's a little rough around the edges, and the performances (aside from A. Michael Baldwin's lead (child) performance and Angus Scrimm's elementally terrifying Tall Man) are uneven, but it's spooky, charming, and in a class of its own. 

 

It makes the time for multiple Reggie the Ice Cream Man (Reggie Bannister) guitar jam sessions

 

and definitely is not a screenplay they're going to teach in SAVE THE CAT or Robert McKee-inspired film schools. This gives it time to develop its potently weird dream energy, like a more adult ALICE IN WONDERLAND (or like VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS or LEMORA: A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL).

 

 Like most melancholy horror films, it's about grief, abandonment, and fear of the unknown.

A strong recommend if you've never seen it, especially in its gorgeous new restoration.

Only now does it occur to me... BLUEBEARD (1972)

Only now does it occur to me... somehow, by putting a drunken Richard Burton into what is essentially a Vincent Price role––playing "Bluebeard," with an actual blue spray-painted beard, in a campy Technicolor French-Italian-German-Hungarian co-production––

 

that you could end up with something that's quite so... mediocre.

This is an odd duck. It's directed by former Golden Age Hollywood player Edward Dmytryk (CROSSFIRE, THE CAINE MUTINY, and MURDER, MY SWEET), has a haunting soundtrack by Ennio Morricone (which is very reminiscent of his work on DUCK, YOU SUCKER, completed one year prior), and brilliant cinematography (Gábor Pogány),

 

art direction (Tamás Vayer ), 

 

and set decoration (Boldizsár Simonka), 

 

by a trio of talented Hungarians who would rarely find work outside of their own country. It occasionally evokes shades of Mario Bava, Hammer horror flicks, and Nicolas Roeg's work for Roger Corman. All of this is good.

However, the screenplay (by Dmytryk and three Italian collaborators, based on the dark fairy tale but updated for a 1930s setting) is an absolute train-wreck: unfocused, pretentious, and meandering. Or perhaps it's more like a messy bird attack, ordered by a lethargic Richard Burton on his wife who just blew a raspberry at him?

 

I'm sorry, I'm afraid I'm making this look better than it is. There is artistic merit here, and, hell, there is camp merit, too, but it keeps getting dragged down into a morass of Italo skin-flickery and wannabe arthouse pomp. Like the Nazi subplot that it can't quite support.

(That's right, this Bluebeard is also an Austrian Nazi––and the cheapjack scaffolding this film provides can't come close to bearing that historical load.)

So while the director and writers believe it is something closer to CABARET or MEPHISTO, and its design team believes it is something closer to THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES or BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, and its star believes that it's his naptime (between his morning tipple and his happy hour), I think the producers––with their reliance on tawdry Eurosleaze thrills––think they're making a Tinto Brass or Joe D'Amato flick. Whew.

 Also, on a semi-related note, there are way more musical numbers in this than I would have imagined.

Oh, and Raquel Welch kinda sorta plays a nun. Maybe Ken Russell should have directed this. 

Speaking of Ken Russell, there's a ridiculous phallic moment where one of Bluebeard's wives cheats on him and then makes the mistake of falling asleep, naked, entwined with her lover beneath a rhino horn antler-chandelier. Which Burton gleefully unleashes upon the couple, impaling them.

And even though it's set in the 1930s, I guess Joey Heatherton is playing "Shirley Partridge" from THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY?

Damn, there I go again, making this look better than it is. Anyway, just go watch Catherine Breillat's BLUEBEARD instead.