Giugno '44 - Sbarcheremo in Normandi / Commando Attack / Seven into Hell

What we have here is a classic example of the late 1960s Italian-Spanish co-production war film, in which a hand-picked group of misfit soldiers is assigned a near-impossible mission that only some of them will come back from.

Though inspired by The Dirty Dozen such films lacked their model’s budget and scope. This manifested in a number of ways. They tended to feature only about half the number of men – witness Commando Attack’s alternate title of Seven into Hell – and truncated the training sequences and build up to quickly get into the mission and keep the running time down to a concise hour and a half.

The nominal star of Commando Attack, or the one that the typical US moviegoer might remember from many years back, is Calum Rennie. He’s an odd choice for the Lee Marvin type role, not least because he looks too sensitive and old to be playing the action man. The filmmakers are astute enough to turn this apparent disadvantage into a virtue by commenting upon it via his recruits, who include Aldo Sambrell.



Just days before D-Day the seven men are dropped into Nazi-occupied Normandy, where they are to meet up with the resistance and destroy an enemy radio station that bombers have failed to take out. They reach their rendezvous point only to find their contacts dead, with the signs pointing to a traitor within the resistance...

Though the film delivers in terms of derring do and has some nicely drawn characters, it is a bit too mechanical and stretches credibility, with the Nazi stormtroopers showing all the tactical awareness and competence of their Star Wars counterparts.

Needless to say it also plays fast and loose with the historical details, with IMDB reviewers noting that the GI’s carry German and Italian guns amidst a host of other inaccuracies.

But all this is to be expected: You don’t go exactly into one of these films expecting realism.

As such, where the film failed for me was in replacing the anti-authoritarian cynicism of its model with something bordering on romanticism.

With the exception of an Archer Maggot inspired rapist, the recruits are volunteers rather than conscripts and, in the cases of the bored rich guy looking for excitement (“Why should a playboy like you volunteer for a mission like this?” “I find that my playing gets more and more monotonous”) and the young guy with a death wish (“For me to be killed is the goal of my life”) are basically there as audience-identification figures; predictably the latter is cured of his condition by the love of a good partisan woman.

We’re also asked to believe that D-Day is really up to these guys and that they aren’t just there as a diversion, misdirection or outright sacrifice.

Bruno Nicolai’s music is bold and striking, thought not necessarily the most appropriate.

Último deseo / The People who Own the Dark

You could be forgiven for mistaking this 1976 Spanish horror entry as being the work of Amando De Ossorio, featuring as it does a horde of unseeing, zombie-like monsters much like his Blind Dead along with a small group of people holed up by said monsters a la Return of the Evil Dead.

In fact, however, the film was directed by Argentinean ex-pat Leon Klimovsky from a scenario co-authored by Blood Spattered Bride director Vicente Aranda.

We begin with the introduction of a dozen characters as they assemble at a mansion house for a masked, de Sade-inspired orgy. The six men including Alberto De Mendoza as scientist Professor Fulton and Paul Naschy as military man Bourne. One of the six women functions as mistress of ceremonies. The others, including Teresa Gimpera and Maria Perschy, are there to service the men's requirements.





But before the orgy moves into Jesus Franco territory the dungeon is shaken, as if by an earthquake.


Being a pre-destape film, this is about as far as it goes nudity wise

Venturing into the upper levels of the mansion to see what is going on, the participants find the servants blinded, their eyes burned white. Fulton realises that these symptoms are indicative of a nuclear explosion nearby. (Yes, this makes no sense, except in a Protect and Survive or Duck and Cover don't tell the public too much of the truth about nuclear armageddon way.)


The Beyond meets Horror Express?

Come morning the six men drive into the nearest town to find out what has happened and stock up on supplies. Victor cracks under pressure and kills some of the blind people before himself being killed by Edward; back at the mansion, Edward in turn suffers a breakdown, stripping naked and crawling around on all fours as if he were a pig.


Naschy blasts some of the local wildlife

The situation becomes more desperate as night falls and the blind march on the mansion intent on killing all those within...


A Birds meets Night of the Living Dead shot

One of the greatest strengths of the horror film is often its capacity for allegorical use, the way it allows the filmmaker to obliquely comment on social and political issues to cutting effect.

This can be seen in Night of the Living Dead, as an obvious inspiration for both The People Who Own the Dark and De Ossorio's Blind Dead films, and the Blind Dead themselves: Romero's film allowed him to comment upon the likes of the Vietnam War and the continuing necessity of the Civil Rights movement, while the Blind Dead enabled Ossorio to sneak criticism of the Franco regime past the Spanish censors.




Random Naschy images

The problem in this regard for The People Who Own the Dark is a relative lack of clarity about what the film's message is. With the Blind Dead it was easy to see, in that here were these ancient undead figures who killed those amongst the younger generations who failed to keep silent, or had the temerity to raise an oppositional voice.

Here by contrast we have a mixed bag of reference points also including Pasolini's Salo, Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel, Saura's La Caza, Petri's Todo Modo – coincidentally released in the same year – and, amongst less exalted / more generic texts, Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids and Romero's The Crazies.

The thing that these works have in common with the Blind Dead films and Night of the Living Dead is an internal consistency. Once you have accepted that the bourgeois in The Exterminating Angel cannot leave the house; that the dead are returning to life to eat the living; that there are ambulatory killer plants on the loose amongst an almost entirely blind population; or that a group of bourgeois sadists are intent on exploring every facet of power and perversity that they can, everything else follows logically. You know how to engage with the film, where your sympathies are supposed to lie or, indeed, if you are to take a more detached, observational position.

Here by contrast we don't get any particular cues. This is most apparent when it comes to the most attractive of the female characters, Perschy's tart with a heart. Before the catastrophe, she has an encounter with a blind beggar and gives him alms. Later, post-apocalypse, she attempts to leave the mansion with one of the men to go in search of help.

It's the kind of selfless, heroic gesture that would conventionally be rewarded.

But the couple are then captured and killed by the blind, much like young lovers Judy and Tom in Night of the Living Dead were by the ghouls. The thing is that whereas the ghouls operated on a pure instinctual need to feed, the blind mob is being led by the aforementioned beggar, and dumps the mutilated bodies before the sighted for added impact.

Assembling this, my dominant impression was perhaps of a universe informed by Machiavelli – in the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king or, as we might formulate it here, the lifelong blind man is king amongst the recently blind – De Sade and Nietzsche in which the greatest error is not to take advantage of others' weakness when you have the chance for, resenting you, they will seek your destruction as soon as they get the chance.

These ideas aren't a problem, if you are a Pasolini or a Bunuel and attracted their kinds of audience, or if you're single-mindedly intent on making as unrelenting a film as possible, but Klimovsky doesn't appear to be.


Survival?

At least the cynical and nihilistic ending, with with some decidedly ironic use of Beethoven's Ode to Joy via A Clockwork Orange and / or Murder in a Blue World, is well realised and consistent with what has gone immediately before it, to indicate who really owns the dark, the light and the (brave new) world and to take you out of the film satisfactorily.

Alas, it's a slog getting there, with too little in the way of sex, violence and spectacle for the kind of hardened Euro-trash fan who is likely to be the primary audience for the film today.

In sum, very much an oddity as a rip-off of a rip-off that nevertheless subverts imitation with its own curious innovations.

Muerte de un quinqui

Retrospectively one thing about Paul Naschy's films, regardless of where we situate them generically, whether as horror, giallo- or crime-thriller, is that his presence seems to guarantee the inclusion of particular scenes and ideas that we would not get were someone else cast in the role.


As in Italy circa 1975, crime appears out of control in Spain as well; a guarded attack on the regime?

Scripted by Naschy himself under his real name Jacinto Molina, Muerte de un Quinqui – Death of a Hoodlum – is a case in point.




The heist

Naschy plays a psychopathic robber, Marcos, who guns down two men during a jewellery heist, stamps and kicks his girlfriend into a coma (Seul contre tous, anyone?), and flees from the rest of the gang with the loot which he had been safekeeping until their fence arrived.

As with the limping Peter Dockerman in the Jose Luis Madrid directed Spanish giallo Jack the Ripper of London, Marcos is physical handicapped, wearing a hearing aid as a result of being beaten by his father as a child.

As with Gilles in the Carlos Aured directed Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, he's also psychologically traumatised, being fixated on his mother, who was killed by his father in the same incident, and defending her name against any criticism.


Mummy




Her traumatic murder




And its consequences

More generally Marcos is one of Naschy's tragic villains / monsters, as much a victim of circumstances and history as anything else. This links him back to the most famous of his characters, the reluctant werewolf Waldemar Daninsky.

Having arrived in the sticks, Marcos gets a job as a handyman on a farm. At this point the similarities with Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll are again foregrounded in that the farm is inhabited by three people, one in a wheelchair. This time, however, it's a husband and wife – he is the one in the chair – and their attractive daughter. The mother and daughter look like sisters and, like the sisters in Aured's film, are soon both romantically involved with Marcos.

In addition to bedding his co-stars, Naschy also strips down to his waist to chop some wood and generally show off his weightlifter's physique, again all as per usual.


Cody Jarrett redux?

Eventually the rest of the gang, headed by Frank Brana, show up, just as the games between Marcos and the family turn deadly serious...

Leon Klimovksy, who also produced, directs with his usual efficiency.

[See also http://www.naschy.com/muertequinqui.html]