Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: A movie with a Goblin soundtrack

From 1976 to 1984, Tomas Milan starred in eleven movies in the Squadra antiscippo series. Starting with The Cop in Blue Jeans, these films include Hit Squad, Squadra antitruffa, Little Italy, Assassino sul Tevere, Delitto a Porta Romana, Crime at the Chinese Restaurant, Delitto sull’autostrada, Crime in Formula One, Cop in Drag and this movie.

In each of these movies, Milan plays Nico “Il Pirata” Giraldi, progressively goes from a tough Italian movie cop to a cop with a Chiense twin, one that becomes a race car driver and finally investigating Rome’s gay community to investigate a murder.

Producewr Galliano Juso got the idea when he and director Bruno Corbucci were filming Il trafficone. Juso had his purse stolen by thieves on Kawasaki motorcycles, which make him wondered what would happen if the cops had an anti-snatch and grab team.

The fifth film in the series, The Gang Who Sold America has Giraldi now an Interpol agent in America. He meets the mob family from the last movie — Little Italy — including Salvatore (Enzo Cannavale) with his family and Giarra (Margherita Fumero, whose character is so close to Edith Prickley in both voice and dress that i wonder what came first; SCTV started airing in 1976, so it could go both ways), who is in love with him. Eli Walach, who played Don Girolamo Giarra, did not come back for this.

Giraldi puts two mob bosses against each other but this movie is mostly about broad comedy and action scenes, including air boats and plenty of fistfights. The beginning may be the best part, as Milan is dressed in a military jacket with a straw hat and a scarf, carrying a boombox and dancing to disco down 42nd Street. There’s also a great scene where Indian singer Asha Puthli sings “The Whip” and fights criminals with Milan. Her name is Fiona Strike in this movie which is such a perfect Italian movie name.

Salvatore Baccaro, who is always an ogre in films. But the real reason I watched this?

The Goblin soundtrack. It’s great, embracing full disco. Boomkat said, “The film is set in the United States, and the soundtrack sounds very American, starting from the first two songs, interpreted by the warm voice of Asha Puthli, an Indian singer who is also an actress in this movie, “The Whip” and “The Sound of Money” seem to belong to one of the many Stax productions of those years, only that they’re played by… Goblin! The Roman band, whose line-up consisted of Claudio Simonetti (keyboards), Agostino Marangolo (drums), Fabio Pignatelli (bass) and Carlo Pennisi (guitar) was in those years nothing less than hyper-productive, but this did not prevent them from producing high-quality works. In fact, the album songs go through various genres (disco music, country, funky, soul, samba) with little concessions to some typical “Goblinian” moments.”

You can get it from Mondo.