America così nuda, così violenta / Naked and Violent

You can be forgiven for confusing this 1970 film with its 1969 predecessor A Thousand sins... no Virtues.

For both are the products of the same team, headed by director Sergio Martino and his producer brother Luciano, and present mondo exposes of the western world at the time.

Indeed, one faux occult ritual sequence was sufficiently similar to make me check whether I had in fact seen the film before, before a check of the archives – revealed that the earlier film had been set in Sweden whereas this one is located, as its Italian title indicates, in the USA.

Besides the occult, other common themes include the sexual and social revolutions of the 1970s, with plenty in the way of sex, drugs, the counter-culture and so on.

There's also a similar mixture of found footage – here of Woodstock and anti-Vietnam demos – reconstructions / inventions – the occult ritual is tastefully suggested to be linked to the Manson Family's alleged practices – and highly dubious vox pop interviews with Easy Rider-styled bikers, redneck racists, black panthers and other representative / stereotypical American figures of the time.

The most interesting topic is the Native American occupation of Alcatraz. Citing a clause in 19th century legislation, activists took control of the island as a territory abandoned by the US. Unfortunately it's also worthy of a documentary in its own right, rather than being a two minute segment here.

One aspect in which the film differs from its predecessor – albeit perhaps down to different edits being extant for different markets – is that other familiar mondo staple of animal cruelty and death. What A Thousand... lacked Naked and Violent provides, via the sacrificing of a chicken in the occult ritual, whose blood is at least seemingly used, and a group of men shooting live rabbit targets strung up on a washing line, apparently not for food but solely as cheap target practice.

The whole is tied together by the usual voice-off commentary along juxtaposition of extremes and opposites – wealth and poverty, black and white, modernity and tradition etc. - alongside the use of scene-setting music, on this occasion courtesy of Bruno Nicolai.

In the end the biggest difference for me between the two films was in how I acquired them: A Thousand Sins... an AVI download from a VHS source, Naked and Violent the recent DVD from Mya Commmunications.

Unfortunately the free download and the paid for DVD are almost identical as far as image quality is concerned; if anything the DVD is worse, with some noticeable jump cuts between one scene or segment and another.




Examples of the print damage

Maybe no better source print was available. But if so there's nothing to indicate this, unlike those releases which at least tell you at the start that this is the case or that some material has been interpolated in from an inferior source or has proven impossible to locate. Nor are there any extras.

All in all, it's the kind of treatment that can only discourage the fan from shelling out their cash. Indeed, we might even venture that in making the film available with English subtitles, the release has a self-defeating aspect: If the increased sales from providing subtitles are greater than the cost of their production, then aren't there just going to be more dissatisfied customers than otherwise? What makes it even odder is that these subtitles have clearly been produced, not being burned in to source print and being removable for those comfortable with the Italian audio. So it is not as if the release was just about taking something that already existed and transferring it across to DVD.

2019 - Dopo la caduta di New York / 2019: After the Fall of New York

In the early 80s films about dystopian near futures like Mad Max 2 and Escape from New York were big box-office. It was no surprise, then, when Italian film-makers quickly moved to rip them off to the best of their abilities and budgets. 2019: After the Fall of New York is Sergio Martino’s contribution to this cycle, in conjunction with his producer brother Luciano and frequent screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi. (Sergio Martino uses his Martin Dolman alias, Gastaldi his Julian Berry one.)


Planet of the Apes? Escape from New York?

The film’s influences are evident from the first two scenes. Scene one gives the back-story, that a nuclear war between the Eurac Alliance (of Europe and Asia) and Pan American Confederation has left the earth devastated and women infertile, with no children having been born for 15 years. The ruins of New York are under Eurac control, with soldiers and mercenaries hunting down survivors who refuse to submit for “voluntary” medical experiments. Scene two introduces our hero, Parsifal – a name with appropriately mythic connotations – as he engages in some Mad Max style car wars in order to win some prize or other.


The Eurac leader's Picasso pastiche; only thing is he identifies with the bombers rather than the bombees

Following this, the story proper gets started as Parsifal is taken to the Alaskan base of the Confederation. A fertile woman, upon whom the fate of the human race depends, is somewhere in New York. It is up to Parsifal to find her and bring her out of the city. He is to be assisted by Bronx and Ratchet. Bronx knows New York like the back of his hand – presumably not the one that has been replaced with metal pincers – whilst Ratchet, who sports the eye-patch that is about the only aspect of Snake Plissken’s look not in evidence on Parsifal himself, is immensely strong and deadly with his bolas.


Snake, er Parsifal, and one of those early 80s blue laser beams

Good comic-book / pulp fun, 2019’s main strengths are a fast pace once the story is underway and a superabundance of action, combined with the fact that everyone involved seems on the same wavelength as far as the ridiculous and cliché are concerned: At one point a Eurac commander actually remarks to a prisoner that “We have ways of making you talk,” while George Eastman is memorably typecast as a simian mutant called “Big Ape”.

Its main weaknesses are some obvious model work and the state of many of the locations used, not so much post-apocalyptic, as with the models and mattes, as post-industrial. Arguably, however, this could also be read as in accord with the general design of the film, as with the Eurac soldiers being equipped with Wookie-type bow-laser combinations and riding white horses that contrast with their own black vaguely kendo or samurai type armour. That blue laser beam effect gets a look in, as do some blinkenlights devices and general purpose oscilloscopes; here one wonders how you test a woman’s fertility with an oscilloscope?


The Eurac troops are about as effective as Stormtroopers

Oliver Onions provide a moody Goblin-esque score, with their title theme also giving Martino the opportunity for a nice sight gag, as a mournful trumpet plays over the image of a ruined Manhattan skyline, before the trumpeter is revealed to be just off to our side. Elsewhere we also get some gratuitous gore, with a Eurac leader being enucleated and the odd gut-spilling in the fight scenes and, more awkwardly, some rats apparently being impaled for real.

While perhaps one of Martino’s less substantial efforts, 2019: After the Fall of New York is fast, funny and passably stylish.

[The film is screening this Friday as part of the Edinburgh Film Guild's Apocalypse and Beyond screening - more information here: http://edinburghfilmguild.org.uk/film.php?id=44]

Mille peccati... nessuna virtù / Mondo Sex / Synnin palkka

This was the debut film from Sergio Martino. Released in 1969, it was produced by his brother Luciano, with the pair going on to collaborate on numerous films over the subsequent decade, sometimes with Luciano also involved in a screenwriting capacity - although not here, with Sergio credited as writer and director.

It is a fairly standard example of the less violent and unpleasant side of the mondo film at the time, more reminiscent of Luigi Scattini’s Sweden: Heaven and Hell and The Satanists than the work of Prosperi and Jacopetti.

This is not just because a fair proportion of Mondo Sex’s scenes are located in Sweden; nor that it features the obligatory dubious occultists; but also because of Peppino De Luca’s rocking soundtrack, with its prominent use of Cream’s 'Sunshine of Your Love' riff as the basis for some psychedelic grooving and that Edmund Purdom supplied the English voice-over for all three films (the Italian voice over here is courtesy of respected actor Riccardo Cucciolla, who later impressed in the likes of Sacco and Vanzetti and Rabid Dogs).

Though the end credits declare that every scene is true and authentic, there’s the inevitable sense of dramatic reconstruction or imagining about many of the smaller scale, indoors ones, such as the occultist’s orgiastic ceremony and (also present and correct in that checking the mondo film boxes way) the lesbian club scene.

Others, generally of a larger scale and location nature, are clearly genuine. These include a cross-country skiing event in Sweden and various demonstrations linked to the events of 1968 and their emerging longer-term fallout.

The generation gap and culture wars also form the basis of other predictable scenes around the permissive society, including such topics as communal living, unmarried couples, drugs, pornography and prostitution. In relation to the last two we get an interview in which one Swedish adult film actress is asked whether what she does is different from prostitution. Initially she says yes but when then pressed to explain why by the interviewer hesitates and ends up agreeing with his implicit position that they are one and the same; end of interview, without further questioning, probing, or asking for what this might then mean.

It’s one of those scenes that demonstrates the filmmakers’ lack of a real agenda, beyond exploiting the various possibilities that the counter-culture was throwing up, not least in terms of allowing them to proclaim virtue in principle whilst enjoying vice in practice.

From the perspective of the Martino fan, the most significant aspect is probably the stylised way in which he handles the material. The sequence with the occultists begins with a frightened woman in some woods and is shot with distorting fish-eye lenses, whilst the orgy itself sees him bring out the hand-held camera. Coupled with De Luca’s music, the effect is very much like seeing a prototype for the black magic moments in All the Colours of the Dark.

Cornetti alla crema / Cream Horn / Custard Croissants

What? Another Sergio Martino / Edwige Fenech sex comedy.

Well, when they’re as entertaining as Cornetti alla crema / Cream Horn, it would be churlish to complain.

Fenech plays Marianna, an aspiring singer with an estranged, over-possessive pro-football playing boyfriend; oddly the football in question is of the American variety.

She’s rescued from his unwanted attentions by Domenico Petruzzelli (Lino Banfi), a buffoonish businessman who makes vestments for the Vatican and has a shrewish wife (Milena Vukotic) and lazy, fat, idiot son back home in Rome.

Unable to tell Marianna the truth about his own domestic situation, Domenico gives her his best friend and upstairs neighbour Gabrieli Archangeli’s (Gianni Cavani’s) name and number.

In contrast to Domenico and his pure sounding name, Gabrieli’s very much the ladies man, with a raging libido that sees him make love to a different “physical therapist” every night for the good of his purported allergies.

Things quickly start spiralling out of control as Marianna then turns up unexpectedly and Domenico tries to keep her secret from his wife, while Gabrieli tries to explain to his own girlfriends – none of whom knows about the others – that he doesn’t know the new arrival.

Benefitting from a solid ensemble cast and a set-up that allows for all manner of amusing – if predictable – scenarios, most revolving around the family, church, hypocrisies and double standards around public virtue and private vice, and other staples of Italian life and comedy, Cornetti alla crema / Cream Horn is an perfectly constructed example of its form.

While Fenech again showcases her comic talents more than her physical assets, only exposing her breasts on a few occasions, real fans shouldn’t mind, especially when the compensation also includes her doing a drunken rendition of when the saints alongside some prostitutes dressed as nuns.

The supporting cast is also first rate, with Banfi also being a reliable sex comedy trouper – he also appeared in one episode of Don’t Play with Tigers, for instance – and Milena Vukotic having ample experience in the long suffering / long a cause of suffering wife via her similar role in the Fantozzi series. The most surprising performer in this right is Cavina, whom most giallo fans will probably better know for his on and off screen contributions to Pupi Avati’s The House with the Windows that Laughed.

Ricchi, ricchissimi... praticamente in mutande / Don't Play with Tigers

There’s quite a difference between the Italian and English titles for this three part sex comedy anthology directed by Sergio Martino.

The Italian, Ricchi, ricchissimi, practicamente in mutande literally translates as rich, richer, practically in (the) underwear, referring to hotter / colder kind of game and thus providing a more apt analogy for the ‘nearly there’ sexual outcomes of the three stories.

They are framed via the device of a day in the life of a court, where the judge presides over the three cases, each presented via flashback narrated by the male accused, incarnated by Pippo Caruso, Lino Banfi and Renato Pozzetto respectively.

In the first he takes his wife and sons to the beach and builds a beach hut but is then understandably threatened and troubled by the presence of a free-living and loving group of French nudists, led by a rather well-endowed man, who have also decide to set up camp there...

In the second he’s a businessman, the owner of a successful sausage factory, who believes he has attracted the attentions of a German contessa, with all manner of farcical antics ensuing as he thus tries to avoid his own family...

In the third he’s another businessman, the owner of an struggling shipbuilders, who sees salvation in the form of persuading an Arab sheik to commission a yacht. Unfortunately the sheikh takes an undue interest in his wife, wanting her to join his harem as the brunette pearl amongst the existing 12 blond ones as part of the deal.

While the second and third episodes also feature Janet Agren and Edwige Fenech respectively, the latter also being paired with her old giallo colleague George Hilton as the Sheikh, fans of the two actresses may be disappointed the lack of actual T&A on display, all of which is concentrated in the first story and of an equal opportunities nature.

If the filmmakers may be accused of playing on stereotypes, particularly in the third episode, this is offset by their fair-minded skewering of various Italian types, whether the judiciary, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat and the various comic reversals and misidentifications that occur as the narratives are resolved.

Here, we might also consider a skit from the contemporaneous British show The Young Ones, representative of a new comedy that purported to reject the racist and sexist values of its predecessor: in an Arab court, the advisor asks the sheikh if he would like to see the foreign ambassador over the subject of their alleged mandatory cruelty. Yes, replies the sheikh. Which bit of him would you like to see? asks the advisor.

Above all, however, is that it is simply funny - and more specifically essentially harmlessly so.

Spiando Marina / The Smile of the Fox / Foxy Lady

Foxy Lady has three things going for it. The first two are the most obvious: Deborah Caprioglio's 'charms,' prominently displayed throughout in all their glory. The third, the direction by George Raminto, takes a little, but not much more discernment, as he places the camera in somewhat unexpected places and moves it in somewhat unexpected ways, as with an early shot that begins as an establishing shot before tracking back as the characters advance.

Who is this guy and why have I never heard of him before, I wondered. Maybe he's not a top-flight filmmaker but definitely someone with the air of a solid B-man whose whose work would be worth exploring further.

I did a spot of investigation and it became much clearer: behind the George Raminto pseudonym lies none other than Sergio Martino, one of the undisputed masters of the giallo form.

Or maybe not, as a second mystery then arises: Martino, while sometimes using a pseudonym, is not the sort of guy who you'd think would want or need one here.

True, Foxy Lady is the kind of film that might be labeled a giallo for convenience sake, being a hitman revenge drama cum erotic thriller more than your traditional murder mystery, but some more traditional elements - voyeurism and sexual perversion, a protagonist troubled by traumatic flashbacks to a life-defining incident in the past, rendered in slow-motion for added impact - are there as well.

The biggest problem the film has is its script, courtesy of Martino and Piero Regnoli. Going for surprise over suspense, the narrative both strains credulity whilst you are watching and raises a number of Hitchcockian "icebox" moments afterwards.

There is the odd self-referential touch, with Caprioglio's character remarking at one point that hers is "Such a stupid story [which] sounds like a trashy soap opera," but these aren't enough.

The first issue here, excusable in terms of market realities trumping others, is the basic set up: Steve Bond is a corrupt ex-cop, who was caught working for a drug smuggling cartels and then turned on them to save himself, with the consequence that they killed his wife and son.

The second, slighly less excusable but still probably explicable in terms of co-production opportunities, is the setting, Buenos Aires, Argentina, as the supposed home of the cartel: how many Argentinean drug cartels have you heard of?

The third is the thing which brings Bond and Caprioglo's characters, Mark and Marina, together, that they are neighbours in the same apartment block.

In itself this wouldn't be a problem, other than the possible implausibility of Mark being assigned to do the hit and then having to wait weeks for his target to be announced to him.

Well, that and the eventual identification of said target as Marina's effective owner, who conveniently beats and brutalises her for added emotional impact, along with remarks made by Mark's contact which imply that they and she are all part of the same conspiracy.

Or, it's Martino as director versus Martino as screenwriter, with the former not quite able to overcome the inadequacies of the latter. But if Foxy Lady is thus a failure as a film, it is also a revealing one, by virtue of identifying how much Martino needed a screenwriter such as Ernesto Gastaldi to make it all work and the distinction between his gialli and those of an Argento, where style and substance were inseparable.

Delitti privati / Private Crimes

The discovery of murdered businessman Marco Pierboni sends shock waves through the small Italian town of Lucca. At first journalist Nicole Venturi (Edwige Fenech) sees the crime and the mystery surrounding it as an opportunity to make her name But then, as her own daughter Sandra proves missing and is subequently found dead, her involvement takes a decidedly more personal turn....

Also investigating are Rome-based crime reporter Andrea Baresi; Sandra's former boyfriend Paolo and Inspector Avanza (Ray Lovelock) with a plethora of suspects for one or other murder and all manner of intrigues involving the town's prominent citizens (including Alida Valli, Paolo Malco and Gabrielle Ferzetti) in blackmail, loan-sharking, prostitution and so forth...

There's no getting away from it: Delitti privati often appears very much to be Twin Peaks all'italiana. But while it's certainly possible that it was put together in the style of Lynch's series, there are certain elements that thankfully show its creators were not just slavishly attempting to copy their US model and instead adapted it to their own context.

One obvious difference is what, for want of a better description, we might term the 'weirdness' of the two series. Whereas Twin Peaks increasingly moved into surrealistic terrain, Delitti privati remains firmly within the realm of the mundane. Crucially, it's not that director Sergio Martino couldn't have done a more supernaturally tinged mystery thriller, as illustrated by All the Colours of the Dark, more that he and his collaborators again seem reluctant to abandon 'narrative' logic (Colours' approach to the occult) in favour of 'cinematic' logic (Tragic Ceremony's approach to similar material), with this further demonstrated by the importance of various McGuffins here, most obviously the ten letters that will reveal the identity of Sandra's killer.

Indeed, it is also telling that the two apparent exceptions to the mundane within Delitti privati, a spirit medium who attempts to determine the location of the missing Sandra and a ghostly appearance at the window of a supposedly abandoned villa, are retrospectively explained away in non-supernatural terms. (A wider Martino thought / question: is one of the distinguishing characteristics of his cinema a basic refusal of non-rational / scientific explanations, of countenancing any world beyond what can be known empirically?)






Fragments of yellow

Another related difference is the relatively closed nature of Delitti privati as a text, running six hours, as a duration more comparable to the first series of Twin Peaks than the seemingly endless second, and containing a clear beginning, middle and end narrative trajectories in the discovery, the investigation and the resolution of the crime / mystery.




Little details and impossible points of view

Perhaps, however, the real point of comparison is less Twin Peaks than one of its sources, namely Peyton Place, insofar as it introduced the small-town with secrets setting common to both Lynch and Martino's series, along with the more soap-opera like intrigues of affairs, illegitimate children and suchlike.

Whie Martino's direction appears less stylish than his 1970s gialli, it is evident on closer examination that this can be attributed to a combination of the smaller dimensions of the screen; the limitations in presenting graphic content in a prime-time series for which international sales were sought; and the sheer imaginative challenge that presenting even the set pieces in a poetic manner would pose given the series’ length. If Lynch arguably achieved poeticism through the aforementioned atmosphere of weirdness, the increasing alienation of the mainstream audience from Twin Peaks’ second series seems indicative of a more fundamental problem of expectations and understandings here.


Not an image for ailurophobes...

What we do get within Delitti privati are, however, a number of more subtle touches that serve to indicate Martino’s ever-adaptable talents. There are some nicely executed suspense sequences, including one featuring a gliding Steadicam shot that would not have been out of place in Opera and is belatedly revealed / justified as being from a dog's point-of-view; some clever set-ups and lighting effects, involving the symbolic use of reflections and colour, as with the image of Fenech reflected, multiplied and fragmented in a crystal glass lamp shade, or a tellingly demonic-looking close-up of her normally peaceful white cat, Minou; and the recurring but crucially not over-emphatic use yellow objects to remind us of the giallo filone itself.

Not, in truth, that the viewer would really need reminding given the plethora of intrigues and mysteries, the important role played by the amateur detective relative to the professional; the director, star and cast's previous history; or the various possible allusions to other gialli.

Thus, for example, the murder in the rain, the conservatory students and the revenge-seeking boyfriend cum suspect – the last admittedly also a Twin Peaks-ism – all recall The Bloodstained Butterfly, the small university town setting and suspect professor Torso.

Similarly, whilst a necklace found in one character's possession again has its counterpart as a McGuffin in Lynch's series, it can also be read in relation to the likes of The Case of the Scorpion's Tail; that it is of St George might be understood as an obscure in-joke targeted at Dario Argento's penchant for wearing a similar piece of jewelery.

Another point of interest for the fan of the early 1970s giallo is in seeing how things have changed over the course of the intervening two decades.

Fenech's strong, independent, divorced protagonist with an actual career of her own as a journalist – an element which goes largely unremarked upon, unlike in Deep Red – is about as different as can be imagined from the fragile, neurotic, in need of male protection characters typical of her earlier films for Martino, suicide attempt notwithstanding, and thus might be read something a testament to feminist progress.




Fenech deglamourised

The use of technology is also worth noting. On the one hand, computers are omnipresent tools, a suspect worries about the DNA evidence that would surely incriminate him, and the pragmatism of the gun has triumphed over the fetishism of the straight razor. On the other, the mobile phone has not yet rendered impossible certain classic scenarios, whilst the old device of a typewriter's tell-tale signature is used rather than the more anonymous laser printer.




A statement of strength and independence

As with the performances, the production values are always at least competent, serving to indicate that the decline of the Italian popular cinema around this time – or its retreat onto the small screen – was less about a lack of talent as of opportunities for this talent to prove itself to a wider audience. (Who, watching Monica Belucci as one of Dracula's brides in Bram Stoker's Dracula, would have predicted a wider international career for her in 1992?)

As indicated, Fenech, who co-produced the series through her company Immagine e cinema, really demonstrates how far she had come as an actress over the previous quarter century. Though certainly still incredibly attractive in a MILF-y way, it's less about removing her clothes at almost any opportunity than showcasing her hard-won range and, in some sequences, an admirable willingness to appear distinctly un-glamorous. This in turn also helps explicate why she has endured in a way that otherwise comparable starlets such as Femi Benussi – equally lovely though she was stripping nude for her killers – have not.

Natale Massara's music is a bit of a mixed bag. His orchestral themes, which I felt betrayed the influence of frequent collaborator Pino Donaggio, were more effective than his action and suspense cues, which suffered from artificial, cheap and anonymous sounding synth and percussion work. While the two numbers sung by Milva are welcome, one appearing to be an attempt at producing something comparable to the Twin Peaks theme, the overall impression was of a relative lack of coherent identity of the sort that Bruno Nicolai – admittedly sadly deceased by this time – brought to Martino's 1970s gialli scores.

In sum, a series that requires a bit of effort to get into and appreciate and which, as such, is better recommended to the already committed giallo fan than the newcomer, but which nevertheless proves rewarding watching – especially if one is also a Fenech fan.

American risciò / American Rickshaw / American Tiger

How many films about a rickshaw driver can you think of?

Well, chances are that unless it's your chosen specialist subject, American Rickshaw will probably increase your total by an either infinite amount, or somewhere in the region of fifty to one hundred percent.

Therein lies the first of many questions about Martin Dolman / Sergio Martino's 1990 film. Why make a film about a rickshaw driver? Was he hoping to start a new franchise along the lines of the American Ninja series by taking advantage of those who would watch anything with the magic word 'American' in its title?

It might make sense, although I can't recall rickshaws exactly being big in the 80s, unlike ninjas. There were no Teenage Mutant Rickshaw Drivers, after all.

Whatever the motivation, there's certainly a strong east-meets-west aspect to the production, not only in the hero's occupation but also the mysterious old Chinese woman who, as we will eventually learn, represents the forces of good in opposition to Donald Pleasance's televangelist, Reverend Mortom

If this combination suggests that Martino and company might have been drawing some inspiration from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, which also starred Pleasance, and Big Trouble in Little China, these also seem somewhat odd choices for models given their relative lack of box office success at the time and somewhat belated cult recognition. (Thinking back to my own teenage years, I can remember catching up with Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York and The Thing, but never thinking about seeing Big Trouble in Little China and Prince of Darkness, either in the cinema or on home video; my loss.)

Regardless of its inspirations American Rickshaw emerges as a somewhat confused film, with the list of supporting characters including the televangelists son, who has a penchant for hiding behind one-way mirrors and filming people having sex; the stripper-cum-hooker who ensnares our hero, Scott, for one such film; Reverend Mortem's murderous minion, played by ex-Fists of Steel cyborg Daniel Greene, and Scott's friends and colleagues, including an amusingly / offensively camp gay rickshaw driver.

The plot meanwhile veers uneasily between the mundane and the magical, with Scott having to worry about his college exams one day and the fate of the world the next, with curious coincidences and mystical Mcguffins.

Though it might be argued that this serves to make the protagonist easier for us to engage and also places us in a position somewhat comparable to his – what exactly the hell is going on? – it proves hard to really care when athlete Mitchell Gaylord's suffers from a severe lack of charisma as Scott and Martino's direction is utterly flat and uninspired.

If American Rickshaw has any value it's as a time capsule of late 80s fashions, technologies – check out those mobile phones – and attitudes. Fine if you're a historian or sociologist but not so good if what you want is to be entertained.

L'Isola degli uomini pesce / Island of the Fishmen

1891: en route to an island prison, the French transport the Cayenne is sunk, leaving one member of the crew, ship's doctor Claude de Ross (Claudio Casinelli), with six of the convicts on a lifeboat.

After seven days and nights drifting in the ocean a current catches the liferaft and smashes it to pieces just off an island. In the chaos one of the prisoners is killed by a mysterious creature, assumed by the others to be an giant octopus.

Of those who make it ashore one dies as a result of drinking from a poisoned pool, a third after going off alone and being attacked by another one of the creatures, now seen to be some sort of fish-men, while a fourth falls into a spike-filled pit that almost also does for de Ross.

Continuing on their way de Ross and the two surviving convicts – the superstitious, frightened José and the bullying, antagonistic Peter – find a cemetery with empty graves and signs of voodoo rituals:

“There are zombies here”

“Stop it José, you're talking nonsense. Zombies don't exist. They have never existed.”

The living dead don't appear, which is probably just as well given the range of dangers the island has already presents and those soon to emerge as the real story gets underway after de Ross is saved from a poisonous snake by the timely intervention of the beautiful Amanda Marvin (Barbara Bach).


Contrary to appearance, not a zombie hand

Keeping her distance, she advises the men leave the island immediately. It is the property of one Edmund Rackham (Richard Johnson), who does not take kindly to intruders.

This is easier said than done, however, with the men having little choice but to continue on their way regardless, eventually happening upon Rackham's plantation style house. He proves surprisingly welcome given Amanda's warnings, inviting De Ross to join him at their table while accommodating the two convicts in an outbuilding.

After Amanda leaves, Peter follows after her with rape on his mind, only to be himself attacked and slain by one of creatures.


One of the fishmen

The next morning José decides he has had enough and flees. Rackham says to let him go, but de Ross goes off in pursuit. He doesn't find José but is knocked unconscious by one of the creatures and only saved from certain death due to Amanda's intervention. Awakening back at Rackham's estate, he finds her denying all knowledge and saying he must have been suffering from hallucinations – an interpretation Rackham also seems keen to foster, but which doesn't accord with de Ross's physical wounds.

Just what is going on? Let's just say it doesn't really get much clearer, though with a mad scientist and his experiments (think The Island of Dr Moreau in reverse); the lost continent of Atlantis; a fortune in treasure; a volcanic eruption, and all manner of pulp villainy and derring do still to come, there's is plenty more to keep you entertained.

Johnson's Rackham is a great villain, sadistic, superior, sneering and seemingly relishing every moment of it. Maybe not appearing on stage for Royal Shakespeare Company as Iago or Richard III but somehow comparable in its own little way...

Cassinelli again impresses as a thinking man's action hero, equally adept at using brain as brawn. The one noteworthy exception is when he destroys the mad scientist's greatest / most questionable achievement, where instinctual revulsion takes over and ironically makes him into just about as much of a criminal as those he was once transporting. (“In one moment you've destroyed the results of a lifetime's work. That was the only specimen with full human intelligence!”)

Bach is primarily there as eye candy and love interest and proves adequate to both tasks. At the level of prurient interest the absence of nude scenes, as distinct from wet, diaphanous dress ones, may however disappoint the male members of the audience – especially compared to Mountain of the Cannibal God, where Ursula Andress again displayed her charms.


Note the way in which Martino and Geleng co-ordinate the primary colours of the test tubes to provide a nice little visual touch; it's the kind of thing which shows they care and which helps elevate the film that little bit

Sergio Martino's direction is assured, helping, along with Eugenio Alabaso's crisp editing and Massimo Antonello Geleng's designs (including the fishmen, made with Rocchetti Carboni make-up) to overcome most of the obvious budgetary limitations. There are also some nice underwater sequences, along with a bit of model work and some stock volcano footage.

The dynamics of Rackham's black servants (including Beryl Cunningham as a Haitian voodoo priestess, Shakira) and the fishmen strongly resemble those of the cannibals and zombies in Zombie Holocaust, with 'primitive' practices in both cases having been encouraged by the white colonial master intent on exploitation. (Rackham's boat is ironically titled The Enterprise.)

Zombie, of course, presents a neat through line connecting them thanks to the presence of Johnson there and its sets in Zombie Holocaust. The key words, in line with the origins of the fishmen themselves, are perhaps mutation and hybridity, the thinking presumably that of refusing to stay confined and defined by one filone when three provide a wider palette of ideas and images to draw from.

The film also features some curiously forward thinking / anachronistic remarks for 1891 about the neo-malthusian threat of population outstripping food supply, a theme also seen in the contemporaraneous Hell of the Living Dead with decidedly more apocalytic consequences.


The future of mankind?

The soundtrack further suggests zombie or cannibal connections, with plenty of percussive jungle / voodoo drum type cues reminiscent at times of Nico Fidenco's work.

Mention must finally be made of the film's complicated distribution history in the US: Initially receiving a limited released in a dubbed version, the film was later bought by United Pictures Organisation who, together with Roger Corman's New World, recut it and added in new scenes featuring Mel Ferrer and Cameron Mitchell. This version, released as Something Waits in the Dark, wasn't a success, however, prompting the Screamers retitling and a more exploitative advertising campaign promising that viewers would actually “see a man turned inside out”.

Though they didn't, in truth there was already more than enough for it not to matter. If exploitation cinema is about selling the sizzle and not the steak, as David Friedman puts it, Island of the Fishmen was already a steak, with side dish of onions.

La Polizia accusa: il servizio segreto uccide / Silent Action / Chopper Squad

Three high-ranking military men, including General Stocchi, are found dead in suspicious circumstances within the space of a couple of months, prompting an inquiry by the army and considerable media and public interest.


Precise statements of time and place help to convey a sense of authenticity...


... of a story ripped directly from the headlines

The police, in the shape of Inspector Giorgio Solmi (Luc Merenda) and his men have other cases to investigate, however, such as the murder of electronics expert Carotti, found bludgeoned to death in his expensive villa.


The staging of a suicide; the black gloved figure is immediately given a face in a non-giallo move

The evidence points to his murderer being the call girl who visited him that night, with her attempted suicide and the tens of thousands of lira found in her apartment convincing public prosecutor Mannino (Mel Ferrer) of her guilt, “as good as a confession.”


A respectable noblewoman is soon revealed as the madam of a brothel, indicating both the deceptiveness of appearances and the pervasiveness of corruption

Solmi, however, is not convinced, refusing to “stop at first appearances” and strongly doubting that La Tunisiana had the strength to cave in Carotti's skull with three or four blows from a poker. Accordingly he assigns his men to stake out Carotti's place lest the killer – or someone else – return to the scene of the crime. This leads to the apprehension of Remo Ortolani and the discovery of a tape indicate that Carotti, who financed his lavish lifestyle through blackmail, had uncovered a conspiracy involving General Stocchi and another man, Renzi.

With the army again declining to share information and Ortolani revealing that he himself is working for one of the secret services whilst indicating that he knows nothing else, there is unfortunately no indication as to who Renzi might be.


Milian in pensive mood


The familiar sight of the tape reels

Ortolani's claim prompts Solmi to go see his superior, Captain Sperli (Tomas Milian) who denies that Ortolani – or whoever he might really be – is one of his men and casts doubt on his claims. Even more worryingly for Sperli the tape of the conversation proves to have been wiped, raising his suspicions that Mannino or someone else knows more than they are willing to let on. Still worse follows as Ortolani is assassinated by a gunman posing as a traffic cop, indicating that Solmi's investigation is a threat and that Renzi or whoever else it could expose are powerful and utterly ruthless....


Another cog in the machine; the fake policeman assassinates Alighieri

Happily, however, another lead in the case emerges around this time, as La Tunisiana confesses to Solmi that she saw Carotti's murderer. Unfortunately the same man then abducts her from the hospital, sub-machinegunning some guards in the process. While La Tunisiana manages to escape and to contact Solmi, to give a name to the face – Massu (Antonio Casale) – he soon catches and disposes of her...




Poison was the cure – two killers pose as medical orderlies but soon reveal their true colours

Solmi puts out an all-point bulletin on Massu and soon manages to apprehend him. An initial interrogation fails to provide much new information, while Massu is then himself murdered in a prison riot clearly engineered by Renzi or his co-conspirators, further establishing the pattern implied by the Italian title: the police accuse, the secret service kills...

This densely-plotted 1975 poliziotto from Sergio Martino fits very much into the same mould as its predecessor, Milano trema - la polizia vuole giustizia /The Violent Professionals, on account of the presence of Luc Merenda in the lead and the same exposure of a wide-reaching conspiracy in which identities, boundaries and issues of guilt and innocence become ever more muddled.


Another otherwise giallo moment rendered poliziotto style


Assassinate the assassin, the trope of the footage or shots of the crime and of the fall of man...


... and the forbidden photographs of a citizen above suspicion...


A car bomb takes out one of Solmi's underlings, but was clearly meant for him

If the filmmaker’s popular / vernacular approach and lack of an obvious left- or right-wing stance prevents them from offering much in the way of analysis, insight or thought-provoking conclusions in the manner of more political counterparts like Francesco Rosi’s Exquisite Cadavers and The Mattei Affair, the overriding state of confusion that reigns throughout the piece can also be argued for as a genuine reflection of the political situation in Italy at the time.

Similarly, if the full scale pitched battle between Solmi’s men and the private army that leads to the identification and apprehension of the mysterious Renzi strains credibility, the reality of CIA sponsored “stay behind” armies in Italy and elsewhere indicates that something similar certainly could have existed, albeit perhaps in a more clandestine, less spectacular fashion.




Despite appearances these are not images from a war movie

Unfortunately the battle sequence and the sundry chases and shoot outs in between plot points come across as competent rather than genuinely inspired when compared to, for example, Castellari’s work.

While Martino earlier proved himself more comfortable at the giallo than Castellari, comparable criticisms might also be levelled at the more investigative and suspense scenes, with a second-hand quality to the identification of Massu via a distinctive piece of jewellery (as previously seen in The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail) or the locked room suicide scenario (as found in The Strange Vice of Signorah Wardh).

The mise-en-scene likewise has that predictability to it, where Martino will endeavour to turn on the style from time to time, in going to the handling camera for instance, but otherwise seems content to just go through the motions; the issue then being that the selfsame obviousness of the dramatic moment is as much undercut as emphasised.

Much the same can be said of Luciano Michelini’s score, which has the right ingredients, but never seems to bring them together into something particularly memorable; in this regard it’s telling that of Michelini’s dozen credits as composer the majority have been for films either directed by Sergio Martino or produced by his brother Luciano.

On the plus side, lead actor Merenda and special guest star Milian are better balanced than they were in Destruction Force, with the latter’s restrained performance sitting better with the former’s typically relaxed, easy-going style.

The ending – complete with dramatic slow-motion to add gravitas – is also surprisingly bold, although one is nevertheless confident that more politically committed naysayers will nevertheless interpret it negatively, as encouraging an attitude of despair about the prospects for changing the system more than as confirmation that the paradigm of the individual hero able to resolve all society's contradictions is now outmoded.

Morte sospetta di una minorenne / Suspicious Death of a Minor

Over an kinetic organ-drive title track that sounds like it could have been an out-take from Goblin's Deep Red score, a young woman is pursued by man wearing mirror sunglasses and seeks temporary refuge in the arms of another before continuing her flight. Though she is caught by the man in the sunglasses and again escapes, her salvation is only temporary as he then kills her in a seedy motel that night.

The police investigation is characteristically inept, the inspector unable to even prevent a scooter-riding bag-snatcher from robbing him, this incident being observed by the other man from the opening sequence, Paolo Germi (Claudio Cassinelli).

Indeed, he turns out to be our point of identification, even if his own investigations into the case remain on a don't ask, don't tell basis, recruiting the bag-snatcher to help him but declining to tell who they're working for beyond “the FCT,” or, colloquially, the “mind your own business”.

At any rate, the trail from the dead girl leads to a babysitting agency and from there to the kidnappers of a chocolate magnate's son – an odd combination if ever there was one.






Typically dramatic compositions and camera set-ups; the mirror shade wearing assassin has an implacable and unstoppable Terminator-esque quality to him

Round about this point the police reappear, leading to a protracted car chase that ends up at their HQ, for Germi is in fact an undercover officer who now tells the superintendent (Mel Ferrer) what he knows thus far, that there is clearly a wider criminal conspiracy afoot involving, inter alia, vice, drugs and kidnapping rackets.

The issue is finding out who is behind it all before they cover their tracks, leaving the inevitable trail of bodies and whether anything can even be proven against them...

By 1975 the giallo boom was well and truly over. The two emblematic films in this regard are Dario Argento's Deep Red, witnessing both his return to the filone and the introduction of horror elements, and this film from Sergio Martino. For while Morte sospetta di una minorenne / Suspicious Death of a Minor is not a purist's giallo in the way its predecessors were nor is it quite the typical poliziotto in the manner of 1973's The Violent Professionals. Rather, it's a curious hybrid of the two that also features a strong comedy element to remind us of yet another filone occupying the ever-adaptable director around the same time.






Ill-advised Keystone Kops slapstick comedy

Thus, while the opening sequence makes the move of identifying the killer and, retrospectively, the man who will ultimately prove to be at the nexus of the various criminal conspiracies (the contemporary Italian audience would likely have attached more significance to his fleeting appearance, seeing as he is played by Massimo Girotti) the introduction of Cassinelli's character is somewhat ambiguous. Yes, if we know who he, as the top billed star, we can probably work out that he is the good guy, but he is not explicitly and quickly established as the undercover and unconventional cop, as happens – for instance – with Luc Merenda in The Violent Professionals.






A complex, mediated universe of representations where the investigator and viewer alike must learn to read the signs

The combination of giallo, poliziotteschi and slapstick comedy elements proves an uncomfortable one at times, with the extended played-for-laughs car chase between the police sitting ill-at-ease with the conspiracy that emerges.

You half wonder if part of the reason the bad guy can get away with it, beyond their positions as citizens above suspicion, is that the good guys are not so much inept and / or hamstrung by the need to follow procedure – the former the characteristic giallo trope, the latter the characteristic poliziotto one – as too busy goofing off, cheerfully destroying all in their path in a manner that wouldn't be too out of place in one of John Landis's destruction derbies.




The giallo and poliziotto as cinema of attractions - the shoot out on the rollercoaster

A key sequence in this regard is a shoot out on a roller-coaster, which might be compared to the bizarre mechanical doll preceding Professor Giordani's murder in Deep Red. Neither has narrative or logical sense, making you shake your head in disbelief whilst taking pleasure in their sheer audacity, that the film-makers would think of such a thing and then realise it on screen.

The difference, and the problem as far as Suspicious Death of a Minor is concerned, is that it lacks the sense of an overarching structure into which everything somehow fits, which the supernatural and subliminal provide for Argento's film. Thus, for example, whereas Marc Daly's remarks there about bashing his father's teeth in whilst playing the piano tellingly and ironically foreshadow Giodani's having his teeth bashed in, the way Germi keeps breaking his glasses here is more a running gag, invariably being followed by his exasperated exclamation of “sporca putana,” than a commentary on any metaphorical blindness as “the police feel around in the dark”.

On the plus side, Martino handles suspense, shock and action with customary efficiency and effectiveness, whilst a penchant for left- and right-of centre compositions within the more talky scenes serves to indicate an engagement with the material as a whole and to conveying something of a more general sense of a world out of sorts in a Pasolinian “poetic” manner.

Claudio Cassinelli makes for an engaging lead, bringing energy, enthusiasm and depth to the role, the latter most evident in the final scenes when the viewer may be unsure if he has given in to temptation or gone into avenging mode; I won't say anything more for fear of spoiling your enjoyment.


Yellow is again dotted through the film in an often symbolic manner.

There is also a nice little in-joke as Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key plays at the cinema used as a meeting point; trivia fans may also note that the actress playing the bag-snatcher sidekick's mother was also one of the Romanian ogres in Suspiria.

La Coda dello scorpione / The Case of the Scorpion's Tail

Following her estranged husband's death in an air disaster Lisa Baumer (Evelyn Stewart) is surprised – or at gives the impression of surprise – at learning she is the sole beneficiary of a half million pound insurance policy.

The catch is that she must go to Greece to complete the paperwork; the complication that her junkie ex-lover has some potentially incriminating letters and tries a spot of opportunistic blackmail. But when Lisa goes to reluctantly pay him off she discovers that someone else has gotten there first, taking the letter and leaving a dying man.


Minutes in and the first of many J&B bottles makes its appearance


The model plane


Kurt Baumer looks familiar - who is the actor?


Just in case you did not get that the film starts in London

Arriving in Athens, Lisa is called to a clandestine meeting in an empty theatre with her husband's mistress, Lara (Janine Reynaud). She informs Lisa that Kurt Baumer had intended to change his will and that, in exchange for the half-million she will return the incriminating letters that her “lawyer” / henchman Sharif (Luis Barboo) has just obtained. Or Lisa could always meet with an accident of her own...

Fortunately for Lisa, insurance investigator Peter Lynch (George Hilton) has been following her and makes a timely intervention, allowing them to escape the knife-wielding Sharif.

The next day Lisa goes to collect the insurance. Rather than simply having the half-million transferred to her account and returning to London, she instead takes it in cash and books a plane ticket to Toyko.

That evening she is murdered and the money taken.

Suspicion initially falls on Lynch, but the lack of clear motive, an obvious alibi and general willingness to co-operate in doing whatever is needed to bring Lisa's killler to justice means that Inspector Stavros (Luigi Pistilli) can do nothing but confiscate his passport.

Interpol man John Stanley shows up, explaining that he is conducting his own intersecting investigation into the air disaster and ruffling Stavros's feathers somewhat in the process, while journalist Cleo Dupont (Anita Strindberg) allies with Lynch in her search for an exclusive story.


Watching the detectives: Insurance investigator Peter Lynch tails an apparently unwitting Lisa Baumer...


.. while both are the subject of John Stanley of Interpol's gaze

From here on in things get even more complicated as the various parties strive to achieve their incommensurable goals of the truth and the money, leading to the inevitable double-crosses and demises and the explanation of what the titular McGuffin is all about, before the last surviving conspirator provides a convenient and necessary summing up...

A few moments of awkwardness – the unconvincing exploding jet and the wider issue of why the deaths of presumably hundreds of other people in the same explosion provokes no comment, for instance – aside, The Case of the Scorpion's Tale is a quality example of the giallo that once more confirms the position of director Sergio Martino as one of the greatest exponents of the form.

Or perhaps not.

For when we consider the contributions of co-writer Ernesto Gastaldi – to whom I would be tempted to attribute the Hitchcockian stratagem of unexpectedly killing off the apparent protagonist one-third of the way through in the light of films such as the Vertigo meets Rebecca styled The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock – composer Bruno Nicolai; cinematographer Emilio Foriscot; editor Eugenio Alabiso; and that entire ensemble of familiar faces, each performing their respective duties reliably, the sense that emerges is one of the “genius of the system” all'italiana.

To explain: this was a term proposed Andre Bazin in relation to Hollywood cinema of the studio era. Opposing the near exclusive romantic, individualist focus on the auteur, qua man of genius who stood against the system, as promulgated by some of his more impressionable disciples, Bazin instead emphasised instead the way in which the entire edifice worked to produce a reliable quality of output and even, on occasion, the odd anonymous masterpiece.

Or perhaps the true genius in the Martino family is Luciano, who in his capacities as writer and producer – David Selznick, all'italiana perhaps – arguably provided his brother with what he needed. (It was Luciano, after all, who was probably responsible for giving then-partner Edwige Fenech all those starring roles.)

Whatever the case, I suppose the difficulty I have with Sergio Martino is that his films, while competent and enjoyable, just do not seem to present any distinctive personality or worldview in the manner of Fulci or Bava.
















Martino always endeavours to do something interesting visually, even if the results frequently come across as empty displays of technique for its own sake

A slight overuse of the zoom lens aside, his technical abilities are not in doubt – witness the plethora of unconventional angles and compositions; dramatic camera movements and lighting effects, or even some judicious slow motion. But what does he actually have to say?

Lisa's drug addicted ex-lover does not lead into a critique of hippy culture akin to that made by Fulci in Lizard in a Woman's Skin.

The mounting body count resulting from the pursuit of the elusive half-million do not amount to a blackly comic critique of the (il)logic of capitalist accumulation like those made by Bava in Five Dolls for an August Moon and A Bay of Blood.

And nor does the enigma represented by the titular scorpions and investigated in a Blow Up-inspired darkroom sequence (here Martino even repeats Antonioni's technical error of having the photographer photographing a detail of the photograph to make it clearer) and the recurring plays upon voyeurism – a repeated configuration of one party watching another, unaware of themselves being the subject of a third gaze – amount to a thoroughgoing interrogation of cinematic epistemology and ontology, as in Argento's masterful Deep Red.



La Dolce vita...


... and la dolce morte...


... and the McGuffin

Maybe this leads us back to auteurism, and the positioning of Martino as “Italian Hawks” to Argento's “Italian Hitchcock”, precisely because of this apparent lack of concern for theoretical and intellectual matters coupled with the expression of a confident, self-effacing professional competence as signature trait. But, then, what about the fact that Argento = Italian Hitchcock is itself a too easy comparison that is reductive of both filmmakers.

In the end, perhaps the only thing that can really be said with any degree of certainty is that The Case of the Scorpion's Tail delivers as suspenseful and thrilling entertainment and, as such, is well worth your time / money.