Brillantina Rock / Disco Crazy

This Italian musical looks to have had an eye to establishing Monty Ray Garrison as the filone cinema's answer to John Travolta, at the time riding high on the success of Saturday Night Fever and Grease; note here how the Italian title references rock and a hair styling product, the English one disco.

Monty Ray plays Roberto, or as he prefers to be called Robbie, a young dancing enthusiast.

He and Rick, a member of a rival gang -- Robbie's wear colourful outfits, Rick's dress all in black -- become rivals for the affections of Cindy, a visiting American girl from a rich family and a talented dancer to boot.


Cindy


Cindy and Rick

With Monty Ray never appearing in any other films, the main cult interest lies elsewhere.

Among the cast, Cindy is played by Auretta Giannone, better known as Auretta Gay and who appeared under that name as the ill-fated tourist Susan in Zombie. Fiamma Maglione, who appeared in Cannibal Ferox and a few others as Meg Fleming and composed as Budy Maglione, has a small part as Robbie's pregnant sister. She does not contribute to the score here, however, which is instead credited to Gianfranco Reverberi. Jimmy Il Fenomeno makes a cameo appearance as a gas station attendant.


Top Jimmy

Comedy specialist Michele Massimo Tarantini co-wrote and directs. He handles things competently but unexceptionally, with the inclusion of motorbike race and a car chase scenes alongside the dance numbers highlighting the film's crowd-pleasing approach of something for everyone -- comedy, romance, musical numbers, and even a bit of social commentary in the contrast between the privileged Cindy and Robbie's old friend Sandra, like him from a less advantaged background.

A similar opportunistic eclecticism is apparent in Reverneri's musical numbers, which include a phonetic English disco version of the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction, some rock numbers, and a weird disco-country and western combination. All very cheesy, but infectious -- in fact, a good summation of the film overall.

Il cacciatore di squali / The Shark Hunter / Django and the Sharks

Surveying the Italian popular cinema from the late 1950s to the late 1980s we might draw an initial distinction between those who were able to shape trends and those who had to adapt to them.

In the former, much smaller, category we might place Sergio Leone and Dario Argento:

Leone was not the first to make a western but A Fistful of Dollars signalled a shift from Hollywood style westerns made by Italians to distinctively Italian style westerns.

Argento occupies a comparable position in relation to the thriller, although in his case Bava’s The Girl Who Knew too Much and Blood and Black Lace meant there were already existing distinctively Italian models to draw upon.

In the latter, larger, category we might place Bava, Sergio Martino, Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi, Antonio Margheriti, Sergio Corbucci and just about everyone else.

Differences emerge between these filmmakers, however, when we plot their work on a horizontal axis of filone and a vertical axis of approximate accomplishments: Martino made films in all manner of filone and though clearly more comfortable in some than others generally produced work of a relatively high overall quality. Lenzi’s output was equally diverse but also showed more differences in quality if we compare, for instance, his poliziotto films with his forays into comedy.

Then, somewhere in between, there is Enzo Castellari. On the one hand his output is more diverse than that of Leone and Argento. On the other hand it is less diverse than that of the other directors mentioned.

Castellari excels as a director of action, whether in a western, war, crime or – as here – adventure context. Though he sometimes ventured further afield, as with his giallo Cold Eyes of Fear, he also famously turned down the opportunity to direct Zombie. He felt horror was not his thing, and was confident enough of being able to get work on his own terms.

Perhaps reflecting this, The Shark Hunter at times feels a bit like Castellari and his regular screenwriter Tino Carpi re-working Zombie for themselves:

You imagine them thinking of the shark meets zombie scene in Zombie and asking themselves how they could rework and build on it to accord with Castellari’s strengths.

The answer: Remove the zombie, add more sharks as one of the many obstacles in the way of Franco Nero’s protagonist, and generally rework the film as The Deep, all italiana.

Unfortunately this shift still doesn’t quite showcase Castellari at his best.

The main issue, one suspects, is that too much of the action is outwith his control: There are lots of underwater scenes where there was nothing he could really do but issue instructions to the stunt-men and the underwater team. (Have you ever seen an underwater scene which is directed in the same manner as a surface one; are there those trademark Fulci extreme close ups and rack focus in the shark-zombie scene in Zombie?)

But Castellari also doesn’t help matters: The first ten minutes of the film come across like a music video, full of images and sounds – the De Angelis brothers supply the soundtrack, which is very nice in itself – but with minimal narrative significance.

Yes, okay, Nero is the shark hunter.

We get it.

And?

The narrative proper doesn’t begin until 20 plus minutes in and even then we aren’t cued in to Nero’s motivation until much later: His wife and child were killed by a drunk-driver. He was a member of a mysterious organisation. He took advantage of a plane crash to go AWOL. He’s now intent on getting the money that was on said plane, which lies with the sharks...

Moreover, Nero wears a bad wig; think Keoma with a bleach job.

Up against him are (the always welcome) Werner Pocath and Eduardo Fajardo, along with Castellari, who plays a hitman and also shows of his puglistic abilities.

The final scene nicely replays Castellari’s spaghetti western Any Gun Can Play.

Whatever...

Finalmente... le mille e una notte / Les mille et une nuits érotiques / 1001 Nights of Pleasure

One of the basic criticisms made of filone cinema is that it it was imitative. Clearly imitation and innovation are placed in hierarchical terms, the latter valued above the former. But what then isn’t clear is what we should make of non-filone art films when they themselves form series.

Should Pasolini have made The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights after The Decameron? Should there have been a Trilogy of Life? Why couldn’t he have said everything he wanted to in the one film?

These questions are all the more important here in that what we have is a Decamerotic made in imitation of The Decameron but which takes as its source text The 1001 Nights – and this a good year or two before Pasolini’s version.

Antonio Margheriti’s approach is very different from Pasolini’s, of course, but this serves to further establish that the film and other Decamerotics were selectively rather than slavishly imitative, tending to get rid of the more serious elements.








Though probably not a particularly big-budget film, the money is all there on the screen.

Taken in its own right the film has a lot going for it, with attractive locations, production design and costumes – the last often not amounting to much as far as the female cast are concerned.

It is also pretty funny in places.

The film consists of three stories – how far they are actually found in The 1001 Nights I cannot say – vaguely connected by a framing device in which sultan Al Mamoun challenges three storytellers to arouse him with erotic / pornographic tales in order that he can satisfy the latest addition to his harem, Zumurud, incarnated by Femi Benussi.


Benussi's boobs

The first of the three stories features another arbitrary and unjust sultan whose magic mirror tells him that he is not the greatest lover in the kingdom. He has the man who is sought out and sets him a test intended to demonstrate otherwise. Inevitably it doesn’t do what the sultan wanted...


More boobs, and some strategically placed fruit

This also means, however, that the storyteller’s work fails to satisfy Al Mamoun, who has him executed. Cue the second storyteller, whose fate is equally certain.

The second stort features Aladdin – or more exactly an Aladdin – and a Genie. Aladdin has the genie turn him invisible in order that he can sneak into a rich merchant’s house and make love to his wife Mariam, incarnated by Barbara Bouchet. Aladdin then makes use of a flying carpet to sneak her away. This flying carpet is distinguished by not going down until whoever is using it also ‘goes down’. Aladdin doesn’t have a problem with this when it is Bouchet, but inevitably the husband soon ends up on the flying carpet instead...


Bouchet auditions for The Sex Life of the Invisible Man

The third story begins with a parody of a spaghetti western as a mysterious stranger arrives in town to take up the challenge of satisfying a cruel princess thirteen times in one night. He proves more than up to this thanks to some duplicity that’s nicely, well, mirrored in Margeriti’s compositions...

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.

Il consigliori / The Counsellor

As the title suggests, Il consigliori / The Counsellor lies squarely within the filone inaugurated by the success of The Godfather.


An Amati film set in San Francisco with a Riz Ortolani score, but it's not Perversion Story

But as a cut-price Italian imitation of its model, it also necessarily differs from its Italian-American counterpart in a number of significant ways.

Most obviously there is its duration, an hour and a half rather than three hours, along with the concomitant lack of epic grandeur.

But it is also evident in the western rather than eastern US settings, which take us away from the traditional US mafia heartlands, and the composite rather than xerox nature of the three main characters, as incarnated by Martin Balsam, Tomas Milian and Francesco Rabal.

Balsam plays the film's godfather figure, Don Antonio Macaluso.

Milian plays the Don's adoptive son, consigliori and lawyer Thomas Accardo.

But with Don Macaluso having no actual family Milian also occupies a somewhat Michael Corleone type role as reluctant heir-apparent and through his relationship with Dagmar Lassander's Kay Adams-like schoolteacher.

It is this that creates a tension with Rabal's character, Vincent Garofalo.

If he's the prodigal son and villain of the piece, he's also one who we can have some sympathy for, considering the way he he is treated by the Don.

The story begins with Accardo about to be released from jail and the Don and Garofalo deciding that former colleague Lucchese must be killed as, insane and liable to shoot his mouth off, he is a threat to the organisation as a whole.


Lucchese

The key tropes are the classic ones: First, once you are in, you don't leave except for via a casket. Second, it's nothing personal, only business.


Re-united, if only temporarily; note the classic use of empty space to suggest distance

When Accardo is freed and announces his intention to leave the family, Don Macaluso breaks these rules by agreeing to let him go. What makes this all the worse in Garofalo's eyes is that the Don also refuses to let him establish his own family.

Accordingly Garofalo makes a deal with some rival families and attempts a coup. Unfortunately for him the attempts on both the Don's and Thomas's lives fail...

Around about this point another key difference between The Godfather and The Counsellor emerges.

The Corleone family would personally act only if there was no other option, as with Michael's killing Solozzo and Captain McCluskey, or when it took precedence over business concerns, as with Sonny's tendency towards hot-headed impulse decisions. Personal involvement entailed greater risk of being implicated in a crime, whose actual commission was best left to a “button man”.

Here, by contrast, the Don, Accardo and Garofalo tend to lead their men by example, entering into the fray when it isn't strictly necessary. It's maybe not particularly plausible – though, again, given the cut-rate nature of these mobs, it could be – but does at least allow for plenty of action.


Obligatory car chase

Another pleasing aspect of the film in this regard is the unpleasantness of its violence, as with the little girl who gets blown up by the package intended for Accardo or the feeding of a restaurant owner who shelters the Don into a pizzeria oven; since the film's cinematographer was Aristide Massaccessi, one half wonders if this image inspired Annie Belle's fate in Absurd.

Those who prefer Milian's more mannered performances may be disappointed by the relative restraint he displays here. The important point is that this is in line with his character and, as such, serves to demonstrate Milian's dynamic range.

Alberto De Martino's direction is functional, efficient and very much what the film needs. It's only business (filone cinema), after all, and nothing personal (auteur cinema).

A thesis on Brutality in Filone cinema

Abstract and download link here: http://theses.gla.ac.uk/608/

Wish you were there #2?

Italian popular cinema conference:

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/content/1/c6/03/38/89/Fullconferencedetailsandabstracts1.doc

Tentacoli / Tentacles

Yes, this is a rip-off of Jaws, with a giant octopus in place of a great white.

But isn't Jaws itself a rip-off of Moby Dick, with the shark being less a natural creature than a supernatural one embodying our collective fears about nature, the return of the repressed and all that?

Wasn't making rip-offs what the filone cinema was all about anyway?


Now you see him...




Now you don't


Another early victim is the one-legged old salt/Ahab/Quint type

And doesn't Tentacles also work its own variations upon its model, one of which – the monster's going after the kids as they sail – actually seems to have been taken up by Jaws II, an film which, along with III and IV, exemplifies Hollywood's own less than perfect record when it comes to opportunistic cash-ins?


Now you see it...


Now you don't

Likewise, doesn't the fact that the octopus can grab victims from above the surface and sucks their flesh and marrow away add its own frissons; It's not so much “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water... “ as “It's not safe to even go near the water”

Another variation is the splitting of the evil businessman / politician type into two. On the one hand we have the President of Trojan Construction, played by Henry Fonda. On the other we have his underling. While Fonda defends his company he's horrified to learn of his underling's corners-cutting on a tunnel – the one that's led to all the trouble.

Other US actors collecting their paychecks are Shelley Winters and John Huston, who in his other career had actually directed a version of Moby Dick.

They're cast opposite a number of familiar Italian faces and names, including Franco Diogene and Sherry Buchanan, while Stelvio Cipriani contributes the score. Whether out of economy, laziness or environmental concern, some of his cues seem recycled from What Have You Done to Your Daughters.


Sherry, in uncharacteristically exploitation-avoiding image


Franco, the comedy fat man as per usual

While Ovidio G Assonitis / Oliver Hellman is clearly no Steven Spielberg, he does a decent enough job. There is plenty of underwater action and some nice colour work, with yellow and blue contrasts often being used, the budget obviously being large enough to allow for a reasonably broad canvas.


A world without red


A real octopus

Inevitably the scenes with the octopus are variable: Sometimes you can tell it's a tank with a regular sized octopus and models, while the image of the octopus's head half out of the water as it races towards its next victims is pretty cheesy. But, to be honest, the special effects in Jaws really don't look all that special nowadays either.

So it's a rip-off, but so what?

Whether the same can be said for the producer-director's Piranha II, as a sequel to a knock-off, is another matter...

L'Onorata famiglia / L'Onorata famiglia - uccidere è cosa nostra

This is one of those films that both makes you glad for the existence of all manner of Italian rarities on Greek VHS and sad that the dubbed, panned and scanned presentation of them makes it unlikely that they will ever reach an audience beyond the cognoscenti.


This is the kind of thing we're dealing with here

For The Honoured Family – a better title than the on-screen The Big Family – is a powerful example of the sullo stesso filone Godfather mafia film with strong performances and direction and nicely mixture of action, suspense, intrigue and expose of the land of the lupara blast.

Some measure of the film’s capacity for surprise can be gleaned from its initial narrative. We begin with the introduction of Richard Conte and the establishment of his conflict with second-billed Raymond Pellegrin. Conte’s character, Antonio Marchesi, has recently come to Sicily from the US, whilst Pellegrin’s, Don Peppino Scalise, is longer-established. Believing that he has the support of his associates in New York, Marchesi refuses Scalise’s ‘offer’ to sell some land – at a cut-down rate, of course – and receives his reply in the form of an attack on his offices, in which his bodyguard are killed to convey to him that he had better accept.

So far, so predictable, if at the same time suggestive of the a different balance of power between old and new worlds than its US model. The same can be said of Marchesi’s over-confident reaction, as he plans a hit on Scalise. We might also read the resolution of this duel in similar fashion, as a tragic case of mistaken identity sees Marchesi kill his own brother to apparently provide extra impetus for what we assume to be a mafia war story between lighter and darker grey coded factions.

What happens next, however, is somewhat unexpected, if also helps to make sense of the role to be played by Commissario La Manna, a Sicilian born but hitherto Milan based cop.

For Scalise decides that Marchesi has had his chance and sends his executioners, played by Sal Borgese and Stelio Candelli, to eliminate his rival.

It’s an indication of the rules of the game here, that reality trumps star power, and neatly sets things up for what then emerges as the real confrontation between Scalise and La Manna to reveal the reach of the octopus’s tentacles across all levels of Sicilian society.


There could be a point about the shadowy nature of the legal system here, but it's difficult to tell

Thus we see La Manna being offered a fast-track promotion to a post back on the mainland by the local judiciary; the intimidation and murder of witnesses and innocents, including a particularly well-executed chase through an orange grove vaguely reminiscent of the caccia sequence in The Big Gundown; assorted admissions of impotence from police and civilians alike; and, perhaps most daring of all, an attack on the church for its willingness to accept dirty money. (Another nice touch here sees the Don sufficiently preoccupied with business that he closes the window on the orphans – how many orphaned through mafia activities, we wonder – whom the priest has sing a song in his honour.)

Another element that stands out is the way the filmmakers deal with the time-honoured car bomb: La Manna gets into his car and puts his key in the ignition. There’s a close-up and a pause, then a cut to a long shot, but no explosion. This is not to say it’s an impossibility, more that such a dramatic demonstration of power seems uncalled for at this stage in the narrative.

Director and co-writer Tonino Ricci also makes good use of the rural and urban landscapes of Sicily, with the atmosphere of place further enhanced by Bruno Nicolai’s score in which the marranzanu or ‘Jews harp’ is used prominently.

Recommended, though one also hopes that a restored DVD release will emerge soon to allow for a better recognition of the direction, cinematography and production design.

Zombies: The Beginning

The first thing to say about Bruno Mattei’s Zombies: the Beginning is that its title is misleading. The film functions as a sequel rather than a prequel to Island of the Zombies, picking up where its predecessor had left off.

Indeed, in order to do so it also immediately recontextualises that film's shock ending, in which the sole escapee from the island and the destruction of the Dark Star, Sharon, had transformed into one of the flesh eaters, into one of her recurring nightmares as she wakes up in the Middle East Asia General Hospital. (Here we also get the use of the “Dr Davis telephone please – Dr Blair, Dr J Hamilton, Dr J Hamilton” radio voice.)

Finding none of her corporate masters willing to believe what seems like an absurd story about zombies, Sharon retreats to Wat Sung temple for six months where she is then approached by Paul Barker, a representative of another corporation, Tyler Incorporated.

Barker tells her that a consignment of materials were taken from the zombies’ island to research facility on another island, which has not been heard from since. A squad of corporate marines is ready to accompany Sharon on the mission, for which she will be rewarded with a comfortable place in the Tyler corporate machine...

From here on, as you can perhaps tell, the film unfolds as an earth-bound, contemporary set Aliens rip-off with zombies in the place of aliens, repeating situation after situation from James Cameron's film.

The sole exception, as Sharon meets the equivalent of the alien queen, is more reminiscent of Luigi Cozzi's Zombie-meet-Alien crossover, Contamination.

If the film obviously doesn't match up to the standards of its primary model, it is nevertheless not at all badly made, with dynamic camerawork and editing – here remembering Mattei's background prior to becoming a director – and a commendable straightness amongst the performers even when uttering the most cliché dialogue or repeating scenes straight from Aliens playbook.

There are also some nice stylised Suspiria / Bava style lighting effects inside the submarine that takes the team to the island, along with neat use of frame-within-frame monitor screens to present the chaos of the zombie ambush in the powder room, although the viewer more concerned with logic rather than effect may also question the appropriateness and consistency of the POVs expressed within these.

Whatever its limitations – and here the sound, in terms of both dubbing and scoring is less satisfactory – Zombies: The Beginning emerges as a fitting tribute to its director, his sheer belief in the viability of this kind of cinema and his willingness to take it into the digital realm.

L' Isola dei morti viventi / Island of the Living Dead

Whatever you may think of his oeuvre, there can be no questioning of the Bruno Mattei / Vincent Dawn's commitment to low-budget popular filmmaking.

How many other directors in their 70s would have been willing to go to the Philippines for work and adapt to using digital video? Jess Franco certainly meets the second condition, but hasn't ventured outside more familiar territories of late as far as I'm aware.






The shit is burning show


Vincent Dawn of the Dead

But far from being a case of too little, too late from someone who many may feel should never have made the transition from editor to director in the first place, Island of the Living Dead is a pleasing return to the give them what they want school of gore. It also manages, by way of filone expert Antonio Tentori's script, to throw in some allusions to the likes of Zombie, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and the Blind Dead films whilst apparently taking on board more modern influences in the unlikely seeming form of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise given the name of the production company, La Perla nera - i.e. the black pearl.

We begin with a prologue set during the colonial era, in which a group of Zombie-referencing Conquistadores are overwhelmed by voodoo-using native, slave and pirate forces.


1600 / 1980 / 2006

Following this we cut to the present day as a mixed group of treasure hunters, led by one Captain Kirk, find their vessel developing engine trouble. As (mis)fortune would have it, an uncharted island is nearby, allowing them to limp into shallow waters and apparent safety.

Whilst the engineer - thankfully not named Scott, but Max - stays on board to carry out repairs, Kirk and the other five crew disembark and, splitting up into two groups, go to explore the island. Needless to say they soon encounter the zombies along with their mysterious supernatural masters...

If the use of digital technology benefits Island of the Living Dead in terms of scale, the computer game-ish quality it imparts to some of the effects perhaps doesn't sit too well with the physical abjection so important to the zombie idea, with the more traditional exploding heads and ripped entrails working better in this regard.


An old school make a mask and blast it with a shotgun type exploding head effect

Otherwise the main departures from the old school likes of Hell of the Living Dead are the absence of Ed Wood-esque use of stock footage (thank $deity) and a more progressive seeming mixture of characters. The females not being reduced to tits and a scream figures, instead kicking as much ass as the males, while the ethnically diverse nature of the crew - like related to the film's production and future markets - helps preclude the reduction of the non-whites to comic relief and / or outright racist ignominies.

Indeed, if there's anyone one feels particularly sorry for here it's the actors who formed part of Mattei's stock company in the last years of his life and career. In particular Ydalia Suarez and Yvette Yzon are the kind of 'exotic' beauties who could well have enjoyed Laura Gemser type careers had they just been around 30 years earlier, Yzon also tellingly appearing in Mattei's late WIP film, Anima Persa.

[Twitch Film discussion of Mattei's late films: http://twitchfilm.net/archives/008021.html]

Sette uomini d'oro nello spazio / Star Odyssey

These are the continuing voyages of the spaceship Giallo Fever. It's five-year mission: to seek out the worst in European cinema, to boldly go where few trash film fan have gone before...

Yes, it's Al Bradley / Brescia's Star Odyssey, one of that select group of Italian filone films that make their Turkish counterparts seem almost accomplished by comparison.

The model, however, is not less Star Wars, as was the case with Luigi Cozzi's Starcrash and most other entries in the sci-fi filone circa 1978-81 – although we do get a spot of light-sabre style action – but rather Star Trek, with the film taking place in and around Earth a few hundred years in the future, rather than a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.


The bridge of the Enterprise Mark I


Dig that moustache

In this time mankind has started patrolling the other planets in the solar system, but has not yet developed any kind of faster than light travel. We also soon learn that people have developed the mental ability to control others' minds and to move small objects, and that a new metal – call it Unobtanium, since that's total world production apparently only amounts to around 1kg – has been discovered.


These aren't the droids you're looking for...

But if man is technologically more advanced than now, he is also several hundred years behind the alien species to whose attentions he has new come. Worse, these aliens are if anything behind contemporary man in terms of their culture and civilisation, inasmuch as they soon decide that Earth makes for a useful supply of resources, including slaves, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.


The professor and his robot

Needless to say the Earth government is not about to take this lying down if they can help it, as the advice of the smartest man in the world is sought and a hand picked team of superheroes are assembled to take on and repel the invaders...

The German Marxist theorist Ernst Bloch posited the idea of uneven development, noting that in any given civilisation economically, culturally and politically development need not necessarily follow from one another and, indeed, could be in inverse relationships. Though it may admittedly seem something of a stretch to introduce such notions to a discussion of Star Odyssey, I think they apply at at least two levels.


You can tell he's evil because he doesn't look like us?

The first is the obvious subtext of the film itself, with the Professor remarking upon how the aliens' desire to enslave and exploit man is really no different from that of the relationship between the white coloniser and the non-white colonised a few centuries earlier, as a theme which further cements the filmmakers Star Trek-like future utopian message:


A lethal boxing robot, further illustrating technological development outstripping moral development.

The second is as a no doubt unintentional comment on the status of the Italian sci-fi film in relation to its better-resourced Hollywood counterpart. For if Space Odyssey is a clearly impoverished production it's also a well-intentioned one where the filmmakers have clearly tried – if failed.


The inter-galactic auction of Earth

When the alien warlord demonstrates his super weapon, he does so by destroying a city or two. Perfectly (un)reasonable, except the stock footage used is in black and white in an otherwise brightly coloured film, and is clearly of WWII vintage. Was the idea was again to cement that the bad guys, for all their technological superiority, were really no more than fascists, and, if so, perhaps not that different from Star Wars, with its unthinking, unfeeling, supremely loyal to their leader / fuhrer Stormtroopers?

The enslavement of mankind is represented only by stock footage of Africans but not the other people that the aliens apparently sample from, like the Japanese. If budgetary considerations were clearly to the fore here, it also helps reinforce the idea that the aliens are only doing what we Europeans were doing a few hundred years ago.


Brescia's scrapheap challenge: make a film from this


Wir sind die roboter...

Another reference point, oddly enough, is Douglas Adams, specifically in the form of not one but two paranoid – or more specifically suicidal – robots, Tilk and Tilly, who provide for some intentional comic relief with their Romeo and Juliet style romance. Tellingly the pair are also rescued from a rather contemporary looking scrapyard and again provide a 'we've learned something today' reinforcement of the message from space:

Tilk: Great integrated circuits! What's that thing? Look Tilly! A prehistoric cave robot!

Tilly: I've never seen anything so ugly.

Tilk: They say creatures like this shouldn't be allowed to run around loose. They ought to be kept in zoos.

Tilly: Now Tilk, that's just prejudice. He has as much right to activate as we have, even if his tin is a different color.

Of course, if all this serious, pseudo-intellectual stuff isn't your thing you can always enjoy the sheer awfulness of the film and the misfortune of the various filone veterans, including Gianni Garko, Franco Ressel and Chris Avram, reduced to appearing in it; the bleep and sweep heavy synthesiser based score, and the sheer MST3K-ness of it all.

[The film is available for download from Cosmobells blog]

Blastfighter / Force of Vengeance / L' Exécuteur

Released from prison after serving eight years for killing the hitman who murdered his wife, ex-cop “Tiger” Sharp's first thought is to assassinate the corrupt District Attorney behind the crime. But after former colleague advises Tiger to think things over a bit, whilst also incongruously supplying him with an experimental, state-of-the-art, multi-function gun, Tiger instead returns to his old home in rural Georgia, complete with blind, mutant banjo player.

His peace is soon disturbed by the some of the local rednecks who are systematically killing the area's wildlife population to make into Chinese medicine. Their no-good leader, Wally, turns out to be the younger brother of Tom, with whom Tiger has a history. He was responsible for injuring Tom, leaving him with a limp that has kept him in the small town. It may have been a blessing in disguise, however, since Tom has subsequently built up a successful logging business.


Tom and Tiger

Out of mutual respect, the two men agree to disagree over the slaughter, though Tom also makes it clear what will happen if push comes to shove:

“You want a war?”
“Nope – you just tell your brother to leave the animals alone and I'll leave them alone.”
“Tiger – if something happens between you and my brother you know whose side I'm going to have to be on.”

And, with Wally and his idiot gang foolishly escalating the conflict, going beyond the point of no return by raping and murdering Tiger's daughter Connie, who had shown up wanting to bond with the father she has never known, this is exactly what happens...


Connie and Tiger

Though obviously drawing inspiration from both Deliverance and First Blood, this 1984 actioner from John Old Jr. / Lamberto Bava, Blastfighter seeks to be a bit more than hicksploitation through also throwing in touches of science-fiction, in the form of Tiger's experimental super-weapon; giallo, through a traumatic flashback scenes incorporating a black gloved killer that seems to pay hommage to his father's Blood and Black Lace and mentor Argento's Tenebre in equal measure; (super)cop on the edge poliziotteschi; western style a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do attitudes and settlings of accounts, and post-mondo / cannibal survivalism.

If the giallo and poliziotto elements are perhaps misplaced, its worth thinking about the western one in relation to Deliverance and First Blood themselves, as respectively a film in which the redneck is the equivalent of the unknowable Native American other and a film in which the hero is coded as the Indian against the white man, and what they thus highlight about the increasingly confused boundaries of Hollywood cinema around this time. If, that is, both films have certain western qualities, these are also those of the post-spaghetti western with its very different worldview.




Special make-up effects, rather than mondo / cannibal no-effects

As far as the mondo and cannibal filone are concerned, meanwhile, I say post here because in its pro-ecological message and avoidance of actual animal slaughter – thought apparently a deer suffered a seizure and died during the production – Blastfighter distinguishes itself from these earlier cycles, whose own logical end point, Cannibal Holocaust, he had worked on as assistant director.






Giallo imagery

If Bava seems to be atoning for this involvement here, his experiences on Deodato's film would seem to have also stood him in good stead, insofar as he works well with the rugged locations and up to the kinds of filmmaking challenges they pose – challenges very different, we might note, from the characteristically studio-based and more heavily resource-constrained films made by his father.

Michael Sopkiw makes for an agreeable lead, capable of being troubled and taciturn without turning the viewer off from caring about his character, whilst Valentina Forte is appropriately everyday attractive and sympathetic as the ill-fated Connie.

Though bad guys are written as a bunch of backwoods redneck clichés for the most part, being all 4x4s, plaid shirts and retrograde attitudes, the filmmakers also succeed in conveying something of their limited world through this, including the hostility it breeds towards those who are different from them and the desperate self-destructiveness that all too often result as they attempt to (im)prove their worth in abiding by outmoded doctrines of rugged and macho individualism.

It further helps here that the various Italian performers hiding behind Anglo-sounding pseudonyms also look and feel the part rather than standing out like sore thumbs; besides the always useful Luigi Montifiore / George Eastman we've also got the likes of Ottaviano Dell'Acqua as one of Wally's gang and Michele Soavi, credited as Michael Saroyan – and also performing second unit duties – as Connie's doomed forest ranger boyfriend.


The Deerhunter hunter




Things exploding

Nicely shot by Lawrence Bannon / Gianlorenzo Battaglia and scored by the Barrymore / De Angelis brothers with a combination of suitably mauldin Country & Western and energetic pumping action themes, Blastfighter is simply a good, unpretentious little filone film that accomplishes all it sets out to do in delivering action thrills, with plenty of things and bad guys exploding, and its messages, however rudimentary this may be to the (non-filone) cognoscenti.