L'ultimo guerriero / The Last Warrior / The Final Executioner

The bomb has fallen – cue a montage of stock footage of nuclear test explosions and volcanoes (?!) – and the survivors have split into two groups: The elite, who have managed to avoid radioactive contamination and stay in enclosed, fortified and guarded communities, while the masses, who are contaminated, live wherever they can, and are hunted for sport by their superiors.


Post apocalypse wasteland...


... and volcano

Alan Tanner (William Mang) is one of the elite, but is banished from his community along with his wife as “expendable material”.

His crime was discovering and threatening to reveal the truth, that the masses are no longer contaminated. This isn’t a spoiler, since it’s revealed in the opening voice over and, one suspects, was included at least in part because the film’s budget clearly didn’t extend to doing mutant make-up jobs.




Some of the hunters

Not having honed their survival skills through necessity, the Tanners are soon hunted down. Alan’s wife is gang raped and killed, while he is left for dead.


Not Last House on the Left


Not Kurt Russell

He is then found by old timer Sam (Woody Strode), who nurses him back to health and equips him with the skills he needs to evade the elite’s defences and take his revenge.

Alan has become The Final Executioner…




Delivering the goods

As a mixture of sundry post-apocalypse films, Escape from New York and The Most Dangerous Game amongst others, The Final Executioner could hardly be called original.

Neither is it particularly well made or well thought through, being the kind of film where almost all the high-tech on display is of 1980s vintage, and where a gang supposedly eking out a marginal existence doesn’t try ambushing their rivals but instead race in doing wheelies and jumping over cars. (An amusing inadvertent sight gag: A motorcyclists has an Oakley helmet, the brand proclaiming to offer “thermonuclear protection” if memory serves correct.)

Yet, amid the general stupidity and unpleasantness – the gang rape is ordered by a woman and is then repeatedly watched by one of the elite, like Otis’s home movie in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer – there are some interesting subtexts.

The relationship between Mang and Strode’s characters is reminiscent of those between Lee Van Cleef and Guiliano Gemma or John Philip Law in the spaghetti westerns Day of Anger and Death Rides a Horse, but purer in motive. Rather than being compromised for a personal vendetta, Strode here just wants to pass on his skills to “junior” so that the younger man might accomplish what he no longer has the will to do, namely pursue justice.


The male gaze

Then there’s the class conflict aspect. The filmmakers make it clear whose side we are supposed to be on and who the bad guys are. But the ways things are worked through and resolved is unlikely to pass muster with politically minded critics attuned to the debates initiated by Cahiers du cinema in the late 1960s and continued by Screen in the 1970s.

We’re most certainly not talking a film that is radical in terms of both form and content, rather one which has the right (i.e. left) sentiments but whose approach subverts or even negates these.


A good composition, but a bad dummy that falls into the eye

Specifically we have the individual protagonist motivated by the classic personal goal of revenge. He takes no interest in the wider class that he is now a member of, failing to help it change from a class in itself into a class for itself through his words or his deeds.

Cast thus, the film seems the polar opposite of Cahiers' “Category E” film, the film which at first seems conservative but whose excesses and contradictions open up space for more radical readings. This is, of course, a grouping that I would argue many Italian exploitation films can be positioned within.

Or perhaps there is an area where The Final Executioner is radical, albeit in a reactionary way. This would be its misogynistic / anti-feminist stance, that (elite) women are just as bad as (elite) men; see also the likes of Cannibal Holocaust’s Faye and Macha Meril’s character in Late Night Trains.

Is the myth of universal sisterhood just that, a myth?

RIP Paul Naschy

Just found out about this :-(

http://thekinskifiles.blogspot.com/2009/12/rip-paul-naschy.html

Weird that only last Thursday I watched Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll again...

La mano che nutre la morte / The Hand that Feeds the Dead / Evil Face / Ölümün nefesi

Even if it had nothing else going for it, The Hand that Feeds the Dead is a worthwhile view for the Italian horror fan for one of the funniest in-jokes ever: The deceased mad scientist, whose coffin remains prominently displayed in the dungeons of the mansion, is none other than Ivan Rassimov.



The actor himself doesn't appear in the film, however, making one wonder if the use of his name was a vague attempt at revenge on the part of the filmakers for his declining to work with them or similar – a motive that was behind the naming of a grave as that of Sam Peckinpah in Sergio Leone and Tonino Valerii's My Name is Nobody.

Thankfully, however, The Hand That Feeds the Dead does have plenty of other things to offer the more tolerant viewer – precisely the type who reads this and who is in a position to get the Rassimov reference straight away.

Most obviously, the film features Klaus Kinski. He probably didn't think much of the film or its companion piece, The Lover of the Monster (both were shot at the same time, on the same locations, with virtually the same personnel, and even have footage in common) but even going through the mad scientist motions as Dr Nijinksy (another in-joke, perhaps) he elevates the production somewhat.


Kinski's patented manic stare

This is something it needs more than most examples of its type on account of being an Italian-Turkish co-production, co-directed by Sergio Garrone and Yilmaz Duru: If this combination undoubtedly helped as far as the Turkish side of things went, giving a professional gloss often lacking in comparable domestic productions, it came at the cost of weakening the Italian side of things.


Erol Tas

For while Erol Tas, who plays Nijinsky's lurching, limping assistant, Vanya, might have been the most famous villain in Turkish cinema, these associations are likely lost on the foreign viewer.




Cue zoom in on the gore

But factoring in all the other ingredients, the film does enough anyway: There's a surgical horror scenario, derived from Eyes without a Face and The Awful Dr Orloff; gratuitous violence, nudity and lesbianism; rape and revenge; a doll; mirrors; and some dialogue that's retrospectively telling without being blatant signposting (“Our minds refuse bad things”).




The Three Mothers style lady, complete with mirror and doll

It also throws in some surprises towards the end, albeit perhaps at the loss of some coherence and consistency, and features some decent production design and locations.


The other woman's head is out of shot, down there...

Sergio Garrone's direction is very much of the point and zoom variety, understandable in the circumstances but something of a let down compared to Django the Bastard.

Redemption RIP

End of the line for Redemption films:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23782066-porn-firm-that-made-koo-a-star-collapses.do

Some less impressive giallo posters

The La casa della paura one isn't bad, but I tend to avoid posters with the box at the top and which are more photograph based.

Mya DVD

I hadn't noticed how strongly Noshame seems to have come back:

















Lucifera looks particularly interesting - does anyone know if it has anything to do with the fumetti of the same name? And doesn't the man's face come from the poster for Lo spettro?

Il fiore dai petali d'acciaio / The Flower with Petals of Steel

Although I had seen The Flower with the Petals of Steel before, it was only via a rather fuzzy bootleg video copy. As such, I hadn't felt comfortable about discussing it until now, when the opportunity to see the film via a considerably better looking Italian television sourced rip emerged courtesy of Cinemageddon.

As it turns out, my feelings about Gianfranco Piccioli's giallo remain much the same.


The enigmatic opening sequence takes place under water

Visually many of the scenes are still dark, though it is a film with a lot of skulking around at night. Aurally Marcello Giombini's score, while at least distinctive from the dominant Morricone/Nicolai idiom of the time by virtue of following his own style, still seems that bit out of place.

It has a decent cast, headed by Gianni Garko and Carroll Baker; some nice production design – especially the titular sculpture and a broken doll scene – along with plenty of early 70s fashions; some nudity – the ever-game Baker in the shower, plus more from Paola Senatore and Pilar Velazques – and, to top it all of, prominent J&B placement and use.


There's plenty of this sort of thing from Senatore and Velazques, a bit less from Baker

In the main the film can perhaps best be compared to Four Flies on Grey Velvet, in that it's a study of a guilty protagonist and places suspense over surprise.

The obvious difference is in what happens immediately after the pivotal death upon which the narrative rests:

In Four Flies' Roberto Tobias flees the theatre after accidentally stabbing the man who has been following him and causing his fall into the orchestra pit.

Doctor Andreas Valenti (Garko) here is not in a position to flee, the accidental impalement of his lover Daniela (Senatore) onto the sharp metal flower sculpture occurring in his own home.


An accident waiting to happen

Valenti's immediate provides for one of the film's more shocking sequences, as he calmly dismembers Daniela's body, bags up the pieces and drives off to dispose of them in a grinder.

But these actions also make sense, as we later learn that his ex-wife – whom he inherited a considerable sum from – was committed to an asylum shortly after their marriage, vanished from the institution, and has not been seen since.


A Spasmo-esque moment

Still, no body equals no crime – but for a few complications:

Someone saw Valenti in the act and soon starts sending him the evidence to prove it.

Another ex-lover, Evelyn (Baker), who is presently in a relationship with Daniela, wonders where she is, especially since her car is still parked outside Valenti's house, and duly involves the police...

This narrative is bookended by two underwater sequences, with the opening one remaining absolutely detached from the main narrative and remaining unanswered until the end. This in itself isn't necessarily a problem, if one thinks of the similar fragments in, say, Rabid Dogs, but there the beginning, middle and end at least cohere into one film. Here, by contrast, the linkage between the parts just feels arbitrary and strains credibility, even by the already tolerant standards of the filone.