Robowar - Robot da guerra

Luigi Cozzi once remarked that one of the distinguishing features of the Italian cinema in the 1970s and 1980s was the kind of producer who didn't want to know what your film was like but rather what film it was like.

1988's Robowar - Robot da guerra is a perfect illustration of this point and thus the filone principle in action. For the film, the work of the prolific Bruno Mattei / Claudio Fragasso team, can be summarised neatly as Predator meets Robocop.

After a helicopter is shot down in a remote jungle, a group of ex-Vietnam specialists known as the Bad Ass Motherfuckers are assigned to help a military scientist on a mystery mission.

While the local guerillas / bad guys don't prove much of an obstacle to the BAM's, it soon turns out that there is something far more dangerous out there, the cyborg warrior Omega 1...

Mattei's and Fragasso's work is better than might be expected. But this is perhaps less perhaps because they don't so much take Predator as an inspiration but actually lift plot points, set-ups and dialogue directly from it, all the way through to to the you-have-been watching style end credits.

Taken on its own terms as a no-nonsense action-adventure exploitation film, the area where the film is weakest is not when it comes to realising Omega 1.

For while the film-makers have no problems with blowing up extensive sections of Philippines jungle – or of borrowing footage of such from their back-catalogue, one exploding hut being much the same as another – they didn't have much of the budget for stop motion, computer generated or other effects necessary here.

In particular the heavily pixelated shots that represent the cyborg's POV leave you wondering how he was able to distinguish between friend, foe and landscape to begin with.

Future Fatal Frames director Al Festa contributes a surprisingly decent, if derivative, synthesiser based score.

Oltre la morte / After Death

Having been surprised by Claudio Fragasso’s mafia thriller Naples-Milan One Way earlier in the week, the chance of watching After Death AKA Zombie 3 or 4 (depending upon who's counting and from where) was too good to pass up.

Was he a hack who had struck lucky on one occasion, or someone whose work I had unfairly dismissed in the past?

On this evidence here, he’s more the former than the latter. There are however occasional hints of something better trying to escape the confines of the low budget and short shooting schedule.

Fragasso’s camera is fluid, with some nice Evil Dead style tracking shots through the jungle – albeit with the difference between the two film-makers thereby further confirmed through the way Raimi invented his own camera on a plank of wood technique which Fragasso’s more conventional eye-level shots don’t imitate.

The areas where the film is lacking are those around character and plot development, although when you consider that he was apparently shooting without a script and with a cast who couldn’t speak one another’s languages, this is less surprising.

Then there’s the fact that rather than having Giancarlo Giannini as his leading man Fragasso’s here got gay porn woodsman Jeff Stryker, whilst in lieu of Pino Donoggio to score the film he has Al Festa of Fatal Frames infamy. Leading lady Candice Daly, meanwhile, apparently took the part on the prompting of her then boyfriend.

An extended 20 minute prologue sets the scene, via a patchwork of allusions to The Beyond, Zombie, The Evil Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Demons, amongst others:

A group of scientists establish a medical research station on a remote tropical island to study various life-threatening diseases. In failing to save his daughter from cancer, they incur the wrath of the local voodoo priest. He opens the third door to hell, causing the dead to return to life.

The only survivor of the resultant zombie massacre is a young girl, Jenny. Exactly how she escaped is not clear, but this at least is in accord with much of what follows – including her subsequent return to the island with a quartet of mercenaries after the boat they are sharing mysteriously veers towards the island. They decide to head inland, in the hope of finding assistance. One of the mercenaries, Tommy, spies a zombie, chases [sic] after him, and gets bitten…

Meanwhile – again, this is a film with a lot of meanwhile, where things just tend to happen without rhyme or reason – a trio of investigators trying to discover what happened to the research team find the voodoo temple and, within it, The Book of the Dead which, true to idiot plot form – there is also lot of this, including the re-opening of the door of hell and – then gets read out aloud:

“If you want to open the door to hell today these four words you must say”
“Well, why are you stopping at that point?”
[Takes book] “Anatanou! Zombies! Maraco! Zombies!”

At least by around this time the survivors have managed to find a cache of M-16s to even the odds somewhat…

Like many films within the genre After Death plays upon the distinction between black magic and white science. The bulk of the monsters are non-white, native-types, the majority of the victims, with whose plights and in some cases zombie transformations we are supposed to sympathise.

This latter aspect, that the more fundamental distinction is between the living and the undead mitigates against the notion that the film might have been intended as a paranoid, racist fantasy, as does the presence of an African-American mercenary amongst the otherwise all-white group.

Admittedly, much like the none-too sensitively named “Chocolate” in the Fragasso scripted Rats, this is probably unlikely to appease the more politically correct viewer.

But, then again, the more politically correct viewer is unlikely to be the target audience for After Death anyways.

The real question is thus how far the film will appeal to the gore-hounds. The answer here depends somewhat on how you like your red stuff: While there are plenty of throat and face rippings and shots to the head, there is less that is particularly imaginative, convincing or extreme along the lines of, say, Zombie’s splinter in the eye or Hell of the Living Dead’s hand in the mouth and fingers up through the eyeballs gag.

One of the stars of the film, Nick Nicholson, has a blog where he discusses some of the amusing behind the scenes goings on in the film and in his career in Philippenes film-making. Check it out at http://nicknicholson.blogspot.com/

Palermo Milano solo andata / Palermo-Milan One Way

As the old adage goes “every cloud has a silver lining”

In the case of the Italian filone cinema the lining was perhaps that its general decline sometimes afforded those who were still able to make films the opportunity to work with the kind of talent that likely would otherwise have been unavailable to them.

Claudio Fragasso's Naples-Milan One Way is a case in point, with the writer-director getting the opportunity to work with actors Giancarlo Giannini and Stefania Sandrelli – actors who, twenty years before, were more likely to be found working with Wertmuller and Bertolucci respectively – alongside internationally recognised composer Pino Donaggio.

But while the film certainly benefits from their respective contributions, the real surprise is Fragasso's own direction. Not only does he handle the various action set pieces extremely well while sustaining a high level of tension throughout, but he also allows for the characters and the story to develop.

Admittedly the last is derivative, with Ricky Tognazzi's La Scorta and Umberto Lenzi's From Corleone to Brooklyn coming to mind in the modern and classical eras of the poliziotto respectively.

But it's also a story that was still relevant at the time and, if Gomorrah is anything to go by, today: the extent to which the tentacles of organized crime have reached through the establishment and the often thankless task of those who challenge this power.

More importantly, Fragasso also navigates his own path between such models, providing more genre thrills than Tognazzi’s film whilst avoiding the more unrealistic aspects of Lenzi and Merli’s work. (Another notable difference between the two periods is that Fragasso’s film features policewomen as part of the team, with their gender going unremarked and their abilities unquestioned by their peers, in sharp contrast to the masculine, woman-as-victim world of the 1970s poliziotto film.)

The altogether more vulnerable Giannini plays a mob accountant, Turi Leofonte, known as “the computer” for his ability with numbers and capacity for memorising everything. He's been named by an informer as someone who knows all the secrets and will divulge them if given the right prompting.

Before word gets out, a hand-picked police squad is hastily assembled, with leave cancelled. Their job is to take Leofonte into custody and transport him to safety. It should be a more or less routine task, but the mission is compromised from the start.

Narrowly escaping an ambush – albeit at the cost of the lives of some of the police escort and Turi’s family alike – the survivors are forced to continue to Milan alone, not knowing whom they can trust.

Drama is added by the well-defined internal conflicts within the group. Understandably paranoid, Turi worries his escort has been selected precisely because of their youth and relative lack of experience, while they in turn are frustrated by his general attitude. In the middle is Turi’s rebellious and naïve teenage daughter, Chiara, who starts to develop a mutual friendship with the youngest of the policemen.

Fragasso recently made a sequel, charting the return voyage from Milan to Naples, which features Merli's son, Maurizio Mattei Merli…