Cyborg, il guerriero d'acciaio / Cy Warrior / Cy Warrior: Special Combat Unit

An accident causes the activation of the top-secret Cyber Warrior or 'Cyw' before his programming has been completed.


Number five is alive – or something

Concerned that the Cyw may fall into the hands of enemies, prove unable to control or simply receive unwanted attention from the public or foreign powers, the military dispatches a crack squad led by Colonel Hammer to bring back the Cyw one way or another: “If any of you see this piece of garbage and it gives you any kind of resistance blow it up as quickly as possible.”

Meanwhile, their target is befriended by young Brandon Scott and his sister Susan (no relation to Nieves Navarro, evidently), who had conveniently been orphaned by the death of their parents in a car crash a few years previously...

If this 1989 entry from make up and effects man Gianetto De Rossi is an obvious Terminator rip-off, down to copycat scenes of the Cyw performing surgical repairs on himself and POV shots in which he assesses the threat posed by possible enemies, it also has certain affinities with the later Universal Soldier which, along with in its high-speed reading Star Trek: The Next Generation's Data, demonstrates that apparent influences could go both directions or merely be coincidental.


“Hey CW1, we're friends. You can trust us. We don't want to do you any harm.”

Otherwise, there's not much to say about the film itself, with action, characterisation, dialogue and narrative alike being decidedly perfunctory. Nor is De Rossi's direction particularly inspired or imaginative, though also characterised by a surprising restraint, with little use of 'dramatic' close-ups, zooms and other techniques that we might traditionally associate with the inexperienced filmmaker striving for effect.


Henry Silva, great fun as always

Henry Silva is good value as the foul-mouthed Hammer, the kind of the boo-hiss villain who thinks nothing of having his men fire into crowds of innocent bystanders at a funfair in an ill-fated attempt to bring in the Cyw in the confidence that his superiors will cover up the incident as a turf war between local gangs, while the woodenness of Frank Zangarino as the Cyw is suitably in-keeping with his robotic nature, every move of his head being accompanied by the whirr of his motors on the soundtrack at a volume that makes you wonder how he didn't also turn the heads of people in the street.

The music by Lanfranco Perini is a plus, with simple yet effective percussive ostenati overlaid with synthesisers in a way that successfully connotes the Cyw's high-tech, robotic nature and, as the story progresses, emergent humanity.






Note how the Cyw's insides extend out further than his outside.

What was most interesting for me is how the film, like a number of filone entries of similar vintage such as Luigi Montifiore's Metamorphosis / DNA formula letale and producer Fabrizio De Angelis's Killer Crocodile – one of De Rossi's other directorial ventures was a sequel, Killer Crocodile II, shot back-to-back with its precedessor – seems to have sank without a trace, as indicated by the murky looking pan and scan Greek subtitled VHS source through which I had the opportunity to watch the film.

Twenty or even ten years earlier Cy Warrior would likely have found enough of an audience and and sufficient box office returns for De Rossi to carve out a longer running directorial career and maybe even have the opportunity to find a filone he was more suited for.

[The AVI is available from Cinemageddon]

Probabilità zero / Probability Zero

A RAF plane equipped with experimental radar is shot down over occupied Norway. The whole course of the war could be affected if German scientists can figure out how to repair, replicate and use it.

Duke (Henry Silva) of SOE is charged with the job of intercepting the destroying the wreckage of the plane. The mission goes according to plan but it soon emerges that the Germans were one step ahead. Duke and the local Norwegian resistance attacked a well-disguised decoy.

The real radar equipment has been delivered to an impregnable laboratory deep inside a cavern only reachable by sea and a cliff-face climb.

Worse, the pilot and radar operator is still alive and can surely be persuaded to talk, “ve have vays” style…

Though reconnaissance and intelligence evaluates the probability of a successful raid on the laboratory at zero, Duke obtains permission from the top brass to undertake the suicide mission with a hand-picked team of individuals with little or nothing to lose.

Duke’s first recruit is the Brit John McCarding, an expert climber court-martialled for alleged cowardice that resulted in the deaths of three of his colleagues and who is desperate to prove his innocence. (McCarding’s accent sounds Scottish, though he’s described as “the best climber in England” by Duke.)

His second is Carlo “Charlie” Sardi (Luigi Castellato), an Italian POW who was the only one of six men who undertook a daring midget submarine raid to survive. Though happy to languish in the safety of the POW camp where he fleeces the other prisoners at three card monte, the camp commander correctly surmises that Carlo’s services in operating the submarine bomb can be bought if the price is right.

His third is Sam Schultz (Enzo Sancriotti), a sailor and smuggler who speaks Norwegian and knows the region’s coastline like the back of his hand. Sam is a reluctant ‘volunteer’ for the mission having been caught smuggling contraband by his new commanding officer. Indeed, he soon pledges to kill Duke when the chance presents itself.

The final member of Duke’s team is Sam (Pietro Martellanza / Peter Martell) a good all-rounder and expert frogman with a distinct attitude problem.

En route to Norway the group are intercepted by a German patrol boat, whose crew they easily overcome.

On reaching the Norwegian coast, Schultz decides that his mission is over and attempts to sneak away and swim for shore, taking some scuba gear with him. Worried that their mission could be betrayed and taking the opportunity to demonstrate to the others that he means business – not a difficult task when you’re Henry Silva, it has to be said – Duke calmly shoots the deserter in the back.

Though the four men reach their contacts in the resistance without further incident, Schultz’s body is found by the Nazis who note the American calibre of the bullet within it…

This 1968 war movie was directed by Maurizio Lucidi, one of those talented directors who seems to have flitted between filone without ever really excelling in any or producing the quantity of output to establish much of a name for himself. As such, it’s likely that most audiences will approach Probability Zero more for its star, Henry Silva or as a chance to see an example of what scenarist and co-screenwriter Dario Argento was doing in between Once Upon a Time in the West and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

Given that Argento has indicated that he felt no particular enthusiasm for the war genre and found many of his writing assignments during this time to be disappointingly routine, his writing here proves better than might have been anticipated. Character and situation are well-defined, with some worthwhile attempts to go beyond cliché such as the juxtaposition of the over-familiar ruthless SS type utterly dedicated to the glory of the Third Reich with his more humane and pragmatic Wermacht colleague who reluctantly plays deadly games with the lives of his men:

“To die for the Fuhrer is an honour”

“No one who dies finds death honourable – that’s a quote from Goethe.”

“Captain, your remarks sound dangerously anti-German.”

One reason for the film’s success here is perhaps that the difference between being a western and a war movie often came down to a matter of historical location and trappings at this time: If The Good, The Bad and the Ugly situates its “two magnificent rogues’” treasure hunt against a Civil War backdrop, they also experience WWI trenches and WWII concentration camps by proxy. If A Bullet for the General sees an American agent go on a mission in revolutionary-era Mexico, it is also a thinly-veiled commentary on 1960s US imperial adventures.

According to Will Wright in Sixguns and Society the narrative structure of westerns as a whole changed between the 1930s and the 1970s in relation to shifts in the nature of American capitalism. In the earlier period, the bond between hero and society was stronger, with the hero acting to save the weak society from the villain. By the 1960s, however, this connection had largely broken down. While the hero might still save the society through his actions – as here, if we read the film as a displaced western – it was less relevant to his relationship with the rest of his group and / or with the villain, with whom he shared a common professional bond. (Richard Brooks’s The Professionals, in which four specialists go to rescue a Texan millionaire’s wife from the Mexican bandito who has kidnapped her is exemplary here.)

Though Wright’s model has been criticised by Christopher Frayling as far as the Italian western is concerned – criticisms that seem especially valid given its accelerated developmental pace and looser generic boundaries compared to the American western, it provide some useful ideas to play with: referring to Probability Zero’s obvious model and predecessor in Argento’s work, are we dealing with a reinterpretation of The Dirty Dozen or of Five Man Army?

In truth, however, for the average viewer none of this matters. Even with a panned and scanned, washed out video that is less than ideal for showcasing the rugged scenery and the action set piece, Probability Zero works, and works whether we read it as a war or western movie. Everyone – writer, director, cast, crew – does the their thing to the best of their professional abilities, with the result a solid, gritty action-adventure that engages the audience.

One curiosity is Carlo Rustichelli’s incidental music, with many cues sounding very similar – perhaps even identical – to those in his gialli and gothic scores for Bava and, as such, a little out of place at times. Then again, this only adds to the difficulty in placing the film versus acknowledging its accomplishments…

Killer Contro Killer / Death Commando

Four professional criminals are hired by an unidentified employer to infiltrate a chemical plant, steal a briefcase from the safe, and then blow the place up.

Ferrari (Albert Janni) is the vehicle specialist, an ace driver who can hotwire anything.

Jaffe (Fernando Cerulli) is the safecracker, with a penchant for paying women to do bump and grind shows for him.

Cherry (Dalila Di Lazarro) is a conwoman, expert at finding a way into any location and characterised by both a ruthless streak and her commitment to her boyfriend, Sean.




Cherry justifies her actions

Sterling (Henry Silva) is the hitman, an impassive professional whose emotionless mask conceals a fondness for animals, the proceeds from past jobs clearly having gone towards the creation of what amounts to a zoo in the grounds of his mansion.








Classic exploitation of exploitation; note the absence of the J&B bottle that would have been compulsory ten years earlier.

The job goes according to plan and without a hitch – almost too easily, in fact.


Giallo-esque man-nequin and 80s big hair

At this point the man bankrolling the job, identified only as His Excellency (Edmund Purdom) decides that the four and their contact Hagen (Franco Diogene) are too much of a risk to his plans to be allowed to live and accordingly sends his minions to kill them.

Two of the four survive – the credit to Di Lazarro for her “extraordinary participation” gives a clue that Cherry won't be one of them – and go in search of revenge...

Though formulaic and lacking most of the sense of aspiration that characterised the Milieu Trilogy of the early 1970s, allusions to The Asphalt Jungle in the characters' names and traits taking the place of more profound political and social commentary, Fernando Di Leo's Killer Contro Killers is nonetheless competently put together and always entertaining – even if the caper comedy presentation of the build up to and execution of the job (including a nude trampolining Di Lazzaro who distracts the guards so Silva can shoot them with a tranquilizer gun) and a musical interlude which seeing Di Lazzaro deliver a number may seem ill-placed against the no-nonsense hard hitting action foregrounded elsewhere for some.

Certainly it hardly deserved the release it didn't get in Italy itself, a failure that sadly signalled the end of Di Leo's career.

This inglorious fate also shows how far the pendulum had swung against the Italian B movie by 1985 compared to its heydey. With Silva's presence explicable through his fondness for working with Di Leo, few of his countrymen now saw the point in going to Italy if there was work to be found at home on some direct-to-video product. And without a moderately recognisable and bankable star name, it was more difficult to sell the films internationally, resulting in ever lower budgets and a general vicious cycle from which the Italian industry has never really recovered.










The many / few faces of Henry Silva

Those new to Di Leo would be advised to seek out the Milieu Trilogy first – that the film is double billed with the Silva starring The Boss on Nocturno's DVD, with the company having also brought out Milan Calibre 9 and Manhunt, makes this a whole lot easier – insofar as certain moments, such as the introduction of Sterling wielding a bazooka, refer to his earlier work.

In this regard one also notes how Cherry demonstrates her ruthlessness by cutting off a bodyguard's hand to take the briefcase chained to it as a possible allusion to Yojimbo, Di Leo having worked uncredited on the screenplay for Leone's Fistful of Dollars early in his career, the connection enhanced by the way the piano and percussion driven musical cue at this point and others sounding very like Morricone's work there.

Unfortunately much of the rest of the music has that horrible 80s blandness and artificiality to it, with this criticism extending into the styles and designs and technologies on display, too close for comfort and not far enough in the past to be retro. Their time, like Di Leo's, will surely come, however...

Giallo fans will note that Jaffe is shot in the eye through the peephole of his door, an ironic fate for a peeping tom which also mirrors that of Daria Nicolodi's character in Opera – albeit decidedly less spectacularly – while The New York Ripper's Staten Island ferry victim Cinzia de Ponti turns up alive and well as Purdom's secretary.






The peeping tom is perfunctorily punished

Indeed, looking at this eye trauma scene in the context of Di Leo's career as a whole and in comparison with Argento and Fulci, one wonders if Di Leo's failure thus far to gain the recognition afforded them might not have been down to a certain lack of vision.

He could be relied upon to deliver the goods – there are plenty of shoot outs, chases and things exploding here – but rarely transcended the limitations of formulas to imagine those iconic did-I-just-see-that moments that make you sit up and take notice.

The question then becomes whether he considered himself first and foremost a professional – a theme which runs through this film and his oeuvre as a whole – or an artist.

Definitely a candidate for future research...