La polizia è sconfitta / Stunt Squad / Execution Squad

Anyone interested in the poliziotto could do worse than track down this 1977 entry from veteran director Domenico Paolella and prolific screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti.

For Stunt Squad, as it was known in the Phillipines, proves a textbook example of the filone, delivering not only in violent action and exploitation but also thought-provoking sociological commentary on the state of Italy in the 'years of lead'.

We're first introduced to the protection racket headed by Valli (Vittorio Mezzogiorno), who has a particularly indiscriminate way of dealing with those Bolognese businesses who refuse to pay or even have the temerity to organise against him: Dressed as telephone engineers his men plant a bomb in a payphone as he observes from nearby. Once his men have left, he then dials the corresponding number.


A 'phone story', to use Michel Chion's term






Nothing personal, only business

After witnessing the devastation caused by Valli's terrorist-like tactics, we're well positioned for the introduction of our chief protagonist Commissioner Grifi (Marcel Bozzuffi), as he gets his superiors' permission to recruit for a special squad trained in combat driving, sharp-shooting, martial arts and the like.






Stunt squad training montage

The rest of the film follows the various skirmishes between Valli and Grifi and their men / proxies, with plenty of brutal violence along the way until finally the two go mano a mano in a powerful and deeply ironic showdown after the desperate Valli hijacks a crowded bus.


Dubious or telling incorporation of actuality footage

Yet if the hijacking suggests an indebtedness to Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, other aspects of the film, like the explosive beginnings and the escalating dynamics of violence are more reminiscent of Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, leading one to wonder – as so often with this cinema and its better-known, better-financed, better-distributed US genre counterpart – who was actually influencing who.


A giallo-esque murder

Paolella's direction and Sacchetti's writing are perfectly in tune with one another: If the director's handling is at times somewhat prosaic, you get the sense that this is precisely what worked best with Sacchetti's script. Correspondingly when Paolella pulls out the stops on the set pieces, with slow-motion, dramatic angles and so on, Sacchetti hasn't put anything in his way.

Through this, one perhaps gets an insight into why Sacchetti didn't get along with Dario Argento on Cat o' Nine Tails, that maybe Argento's more self-consciously auteurist approach meant he was unwilling to give Sacchetti the expected freedoms.

The leads and supporting players are solid, as are the technical contributions of the editor, production designer – with yet more of those abandoned factory found location sets so common in the filone and its giallo cousin – cinematographer and other crew.

Stelvio Cipriani provides the score in his usual idiom: Not outstanding on account of its predictability but also, for this selfsame reason, of sufficient quality and, indeed, in perfect accord with the film as a whole.

Recommended to both fans of the filone and casual viewers seeking a representative example of it.

Manhattan Baby

Released in 1982 Manhattan Baby is a film which may, in retrospect, be seen as the beginning of the end for its director, Lucio Fulci.

In the preceding three years, beginning with Zombie, Fulci had formed a successful partnership with producer Fabrizio De Angelis. Though that film was more of a work for hire for the director, he subsequently developed his own vision, particularly with the trilogy begun by City of the Living Dead, continued by The Beyond and completed with The House by the Cemetery.

If all Fulci’s films during this prolific period (the others being The Smuggler, The Black Cat, and The New York Ripper) have their moments, it is fair to say that the trilogy remains at the core of his critical reputation.

With this in mind, what really emerged for me on watching Manhattan Baby again was how far it seemed to represent an alternative grouping of Fulci’s films, much in the way that John Martin suggested Phenomena could be considered the (Heavenly) conclusion to a Dante-eqsue triptych in Argento’s work.

What also makes this comparison worth considering is the way in which Manhattan Baby now seems to be Fulci’s Phenomena, a greatest hits package of moments culled from his previous films, most notably City and The Beyond.

Indeed, the film can also be called a greatest hits package in a more literal sense insofar as much of its score is drawn from Fabio Frizzi’s work on these films, with countless cues creating a sense of déjà vu.

The big question here is how far this intertextuality was present in Fulci’s and screenwriting couple Dardano Sacchetti and Elisa Livia Briganti’s original version or imposed by De Angelis’s refusal or inability to commit the resources he had originally promised.

The early scenes of the film take place in Egypt, where archaeologist Professor George Hacker and a native assistant enter a lost tomb bearing a curse. The curse predictably leads to the death of the admirably, if foolishly, non-superstitious assistant via an Indiana Jones-esque spiked pit trap, with the use of Beyond cues as the two men enter the formerly sealed, subterranean space foreshadowing their doom; the fall onto spikes also being found in The Black Cat.

Hacker is then blinded with two Conquest-like blue laser beams to his eyes at the exact moment as his daughter Susie is given a mysterious amulet by an blind woman who had clearly been waiting for her…

If all this is already pretty weird, and marked by Fulci’s ocular obsession, it only gets weirder as the Hackers return to New York. There, alongside their neighbours and friends, they fall prey to random manifestations of killer snakes; unexpected portals emerging into an otherworldly desert; a lift which inexorably conspires to deposit its charges into the abyss, all culminating in a battle for Susie’s very soul.

At this point we also get two of the film’s wider intertextual allusions as the occult expert Exorcist type happens to be called Adrian Mocata in reference to Rosemary’s Baby.

What also makes Manhattan Baby such a Fulci compendium is its casting, with roles for Giovanni Frezza (House), Cinzia De Ponti and Cosimo Cineri/Lawrence Welles (Ripper), Carlo De Mejo and Martin Sorrentino (City) and, yes, Fulci himself, as yet another doctor.

Overall, not a film for the Fulci newbie, nor those who would prefer more extreme gore – although there is still probably more than enough by most film-makers standards – but one which the fan should get something more out of.