June 17: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Lucio Fulci! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

When writers cover Italian exploitation film genres, often the concentration is on horror, cannibal movies, mondos, Westerns, giallo. Anything but musicarello, which are jukebox musicals inspired by Elvis’ Jailhouse Rock and Love Me Tender. The movie that really broke this filone — a small stream, so to speak, that flows from the larger river of Italian cinema — was  Go, Johnny, Go!, which was directed by Paul Landres and starred Jimmy Clanton, Chuck Berry, Ritchie Valens and Eddie Cochran. Released in Italy as Vai, Johnny vai!, it had sequences filmed just for the Italian market with singer Adriano Celentano opening and closing the movie.

In a pre-MTV world, musicarello featured young singers in the main roles — like Gianni Morandi, Al Bano, Mal Ryder, Tony Renis, Adriano Celentano, Bobby Solo, Orietta Berti, Little Tony, and more — as they performed songs from their latest albums.

As you may expect, several of the same directors who excelled in other Italian genres made their own music movies, including Bruno Corbucci (Questo pazzo, pazzo mondo della canzone), Ferdinando Baldi (Rita of the West), Ruggero Deodato (Donne… botte e bersaglieri), Duccio Tessari (one of the founders of the Italian Western, he made Per amore… per magia…) and the unholy team of Antonio Margheriti and Renato Polselli (Io Ti Amo).

Yet the originator of native Italian-made musicarello is the very same man who most in America only know as the Godfather of Gore. Yes, Lucio Fulci made Ragazzi del Juke-Box and the second example of the genre, Urlatori alla Sbarra (Howlers In the Dock).

Wikipedia says that the musicarello is a mix between “fotoromanzi (photo comics or fumetti), traditional comedy, hit songs and tentative references to tensions between generations.” This is before the Days of Lead and radicalized political moments that would make up much of the late 1960s and 1970s in Italy. And as the genre gets older, generational revolt wouldn’t be something studios wanted to sell to, particularly as the music in this genre was no longer being directed toward young people. Think how the American-International Pictures beach movies seem so dated in just a few years versus movies that Hollywood was releasing by the end of the 60s and early 70s.

A company that makes blue jeans has to rethink their image because of a group called the Teddy Boys, young men and women who love American rock ‘n roll. The leaders of this music-loving group of kids are Joe Il Rosso (Joe Sentieri, whose biggest song was  “Uno dei tanti,” which was translated by Leiber and Stoller and recorded by several English-speaking artists as I (Who Have Nothing); he appears in several films, including The Most Beautiful Wife with Ornella Muti), Mina (Mina, Italy’s best-selling music artist of all time; known as the “Queen of Screamers” and the “Tigress of Cremona;” she was banned from TV and radio due to her relationship with married actor Corrado Pani and out of wedlock pregnancy. She was so famous and beloved that this ban ended in a year despite her songs being about religion, sex and one of her favorite things, smoking. Her look was so alien to Italian audiences — shaved eyebrows, dyed blonde hair and fragrant sex appeal — which makes Mina look as cool in 2024 as she did in 1960) and Adriano (Adriano Celentano, who introduced rock ‘n roll to Italy with songs like “24.000 baci”, “Il tuo bacio è come un rock”, and “Si è spento il Sole;” he’s in Fulci’s first music movie as well as a singer in La Dolce Vita. His daughter Rosalinda is best-known for playing Satan in The Passion of teh Christ).

The jeans company wants the kids to improve their image and do good deeds, yet their remain suspicious of them. While this is happening, Joe falls in love with Giulia (Elke Sommer, Baron Blood) — and can you blame him? — whose father Giomarelli (Mario Carotenuto) runs the TV network and wants these rockers off television and to stop influencing other young folks.

Thanks to Italo Cinema, I can report there are nearly twenty songs in this:

• Joe Sentieri: “Let’s Go,” “Moto Rock, ” “Millions of Scintille” and “Don’t Talk:
• Mina: “I Know Why,” “Nessuno,” “Whisky” and “Tintarella di Luna”
• Adriano Celentano: “Rock Matto,” “Blue Jeans Rock,” “Nikita Rock,” “Impressive for You” and Your Cheek is Like a Rock
• Chet Baker: “Arrdividerci”
• Brunetta: “Precipito” and “Beby Rock”
• Umberto Bindi: “Odio”
• Gianni Meccia: “Delicate soldiers”
• Corrado Lojacono: “Carin”
• I Brutos:” I, Blue Devil”

You may look through that list and be somewhat amazed that Chet Baker is in it. The “Prince of Cool” was seen by Hollywood as a potential movie star but the promise of his early career was marred by a life filled with drug addiction. That comes up in this movie, as he is often sleeping — and often, yes, he really was nodding off — and it’s turned into a comedic plot point.

This is also the first film appearance of model — and the only woman fashion designed Valentino ever loved — Marilù Tolo. She’s also in one of my all-time favorite Italian Westerns, Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!

Fulci co-wrote this with Giovanni Addessi (who would later write and produce Web of the Spider) and Vittorio Vighi (I Maniaci!). Yet his closest collaborator was Piero Vivarelli, who is listed as screenwriter and assistant director. Vivarelli — according to previously cited Italo Cinema — “had been working for radio stations since the 1950s and from the 1960s onwards was editor of the music magazine Big, for which he always wrote the editorials himself and which was regularly devoured by young people looking for good music. Vivarelli’s opinion carried weight; whoever he thought was good could become famous, but whoever he ignored was ignored by the audience.”

Vivarelli lived a wild life. In addition to his music influence, he directed comic book adaptions Avenger X and Satanik, wrote Django and later in his career wrote the story for D’Amato’s Emauelle In Bangkok and the lunatic Emanuelle In America. Besides that, he was the only foreigner other than Che Guevara to have his membership card for the Cuban Communist Party signed by Fidel Castro.

Working together with cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo (who would go on to shoot 8 1/2, The 10th Victim and Juliet of the Spirits before dying way too young) , Fulci and Vivarelli created a new visual template for how young audiences saw music that would be adapted by Scopitones and music videos.

Not to be a broken record, but Fulci remains, as ever, so much more than his horror movies.

You can watch this on YouTube.

June 17: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Lucio Fulci! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

I was reading through Letterboxd reviews the other day and I saw someone mention in a Fulci horror film that there was a humorous moment that they didn’t enjoy but that made sense because Fulci wasn’t known for making comedies.

Except that Fulci wrote Toto In the Moon and directed The Thieves, Letto a tre piazze, The Swindlers, I Maniaci, I due evasi di Sing Sing, Oh! Those Most Secret Agents, I due pericoli pubblici, How We Got into Trouble with the Army, 002 Operazione Luna, The Two Parachutists, How We Stole the Atomic Bomb, Operation St. Peter’s, The Eroticist, Dracula in the Provinces, My Sister-In-Law and The Long, the Short, the Cat.

Of the 57 movies Lucio Fulci directed that are listed on Letterboxd, 16 are comedies.

Anyways…

Like many of his comedy films (thirteen, in case you were guessing), this stars the team of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia. As always, they play two Sicilian morons. Franco is completely deranged and uses his body and wild face to try and communicate in the loudest ways possible while Ciccio is the mustache-having bully who thinks he’s the more intelligent of the duo but is quite dumb.

In this movie, they have an older brother who is such an incredible thief that he is known as the Master. Paolo (Maro Pisu) wants his brothers to stop being criminals so that they don’t lead the police to him, so he sets them up with money, homes and girlfriends. Yet the two are so annoying that they can never keep these women and way too dumb to not want to be criminals like their brother.

Then Paolo meets two singers, Marilina (Lena von Martens, Operation Counterspy) and Rosalina (Mirella Maravidi, Requiescant, Terror-Creatures from the Grave) who are totally gorgeous and just as insipid as his siblings. He sets them up and leaves the country to hire experts to pull off his most daring and final heist, robbing the Bank of Italy.

The problem is that the ladies are gangsters and want the brothers to show just how good they are at being crooks and pull off their brother’s plan before he gets back.

A heist film that is a comedic version of Seven Golden Men, this even finds Franco and Ciccio dressing up as Diabolik to rob a safe. Plus, you get appearances by Solvi Stubing (Strip Nude for Your Killer), Kitty Swan (House of 1,000 Dolls), Maria Luisa Rispoli (Kriminal) and Adriana Ambesi (Fangs of the Living Dead).

Fulci wrote this with Roberto Gianviti (who wrote 134 movies including Don’t Torture a Duckling, Murder Rock, A Lizard In a Woman’s Skin and The Psychic) and Amedeo Sollazzo (who wrote the Italian Western with my favorite title, God Was in the West, Too, at One Time) from a story by Alfonso Brescia, who would use the name Al Bradley to make the music video-like Ator movie Iron Warrior, as well as the director of The Beast In Space and a whole galaxy full of Italian space operas.

I have to confess that I hated the movies of Franchi and Ingrassia when I first watched them but now find them charming. Maybe it was Argento discussing. how great they are in an interview I saw with him or it could be that I had to learn how to appreciate their basic humor. However I got here, I laughed several times while watching this and loved the space age sets and opening super thief action.

You can watch this on YouTube.

June 16: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Bruceploitation! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Originally a South Korean movie called Amelika bangmungaeg (also called Visitor of America), this was released in the U.S. by Aquarius Releasing with new dubbing, an incredibly insane poster of Bruce Lee emerging from a grave to defend a half nude woman and battle a flying bat baby as well as a new beginning filmed in the U.S. where lighting strikes the grave of Bruce Lee, who soon emerges, ready to fight. In an amazing display of absolute lunacy, that’s it. No more Bruce Lee.

No, instead, we follow Wong Han (Jun Chong, a judo master who used the name Bruce K. L. Lea; he’s the founder of the World United Martial Arts Organization (WUMAO); has trained Lorenzo Lamas, Sam J. Jones, Phillip and Simon Rhee, and Heather Graham; he also shows up in L.A. Street Fighters, Silent Assassins and Street Soldiers) as he makes his way to America to try and learn who killed his brother Han Ji-Hyeok.

Also: It appears that Wong’s brother died by jumping off his apartment building and is being incinerated in the furnace of the same building, which ends with Wong scooping up all the burned bones and placed them around his neck, along with a photo of the deceased and wandering the streets looking for answers. He’s then attacked by a man in black, who he defeats and kills, which leads to his arrest.

Wong is bailed out by a rich man named Scott Lee and asked to find a woman named Susan (Deborah Dutch, Deep Jaws, 976-EVIL II), who ends up being a waitress. Why Lee hired him is a mystery because he’s shown that he has no idea how to find the killers of his brother, so it’s not like they had a precedent for his detective skills. Anyways, he decides to help Susan and teaches her martial arts so quickly that she can fight nearly as well as him in mere days. She soon informs our hero that she learned from her job in Lee’s Turkish bathhouse that five men were involved in the death of his brother: the black man Wong has already battled, as well as a white man, a Japanese fighter, a Mexican and a cowboy. Seeing as how there are about 4 million people in Los Angeles, this won’t be easy to find them. Then again, he didn’t find the killers yet and did find Susan, so he’s batting .500 which would get you in the hall of fame.

Then, our hero goes to a Christmas parade. Why? So the people there can look directly at the camera and the filmmakers could shoot this without permits. Our hero is a strange guy, one who won’t sleep in Susan’s house for moral reasons, so she buys him an RV to sleep in outside her house.

Anyways, the cowboy is the last alive, killing the other killers before Wong and that means that our hero and he will have to battle one on one. He fights like a pro wrestler, which I can appreciate, and then we learn that maybe Wong’s brother is still alive as nearly everyone else dies. Yes, our hero can’t even protect the woman who helps him, choosing to do a fancy flying kick instead of just disarming the bad guy.

Directed by Lee Doo-yong and written by Hong Ji-Un, this movie is really something else. It’s not good and yet I loved every moment. I kept thinking about the trailer and the poster and how they had to have led people to say, “Bruce Lee versus the black angel of death? How can I not watch this?”

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 15: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Free Space! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

I approached this movie with a strange and melancholic blend of joy and sadness. Joy because it’s everything I love about movies: Italian maniacs let loose in Miami making a movie that at once combines Lethal Weapon, Ghost Dad and Tron while being shot on film in the very late for the Italian exploitation film industry year of 1997. Even better, it has the high concept of combining Terence Hill and “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler as buddy cops.

The cheerlessness comes from the fact that this is at the end. This is the last movie that Antonio Margheriti (Anthony M. Dawson in America) would direct, the last that Bruno Corbucci would write and really the event horizon of an era of films that I love with all my heart.

Yet in this bubble of time, you still get Margheriti combining actual car chases with the practical miniature effects that you hope for in his movies. The explosions are as big as they can be. And sure, maybe Terence Hill is thinking about better days alongside Bud Spencer. Perhaps Marvin Hagler is probably remembering when he fought world middleweight champ Alan Minter, who said, “No black man is going to take my title.” Then he hit him so many times so quickly that he opened four gigantic wounds on the champ’s face and Hagler won his first title as the fans in Wembley Arena launched beer bottles his way. How did he end up here in Miami trying to tell jokes and being in his fourth movie for these wacky Italians?* And was Margheriti dreaming of filming cobwebbed staircases being navigated by a candelabra-wielding Barbara Steele?

No matter. Here they are in Miami and a movie needs to be made.

Skims (Hill) is an ex-cop turned computer salesman who comes back to Miami to see his old cop friend Mike Davis (Hagler). But we know why he’s in town. He’s undercover, investigating a microchip stealing plot. He’s also excited to reconnect with former cop — and the widow of his partner — Chelo (Giselle Blondet) and bond with her tech-loving daughter Lily (Jennifer Martinez).

Our hero finally tracks down the villain behind all of the drama in this, a man named Abel Van Axel (Stephen Edward, who showed up in three episodes of Miami Vice), who goes by the even cooler — if unnecessary — name of Mr. X. What is he, the final boss of a Konami beat ’em up?

Despite being informed that Skims is the greatest cop of all time, he gets blown up real good and dies. We even see his funeral. I’m shocked they didn’t run the credits.

Except that Skims has somehow survived and shows up on Lily’s computer, looking like Trinity by way of Automan, fighting dinosaurs and transforming like he’s fueled by Energon. His power set is beyond crazy here, even moreso than the goofball abilities Hill had in my beloved Super Fuzz. He can be invisible unless someone tells him they love him, he can travel through telephone lines and is now a hologram, which is explained as “the result of modern technology and Biblical faith.”

Of course the bad guys pay and Skims carries around the bad guy’s gun, turning it on him, and everyone is all smiles by the end. Even me, as I watch the credits and try not to think that it’s over, it’s over, all the rainbows in the sky start to weep, then say goodbye. Apologies to Roy Orbison, obviously.

The best thing in this whole movie is that Skims forgets that he’s just been killed by techno gangsters and real estate lords and decides to screw around with his fellow cops while they’re lifting weights, playing ghost reindeer games with them like he’s Super Fuzz — “He’s a super snooper. Really super trooper. A wonder cop a one like you never saw.” — and I could watch a 90-minute movie of these antics.

You may ask, who else is in the cast? Well, who isn’t? This is the last movie of Richard Liberty, who unites the decades of Romero films by playing Artie in The Crazies and Dr. Matt “Frankenstein” Logan in Day of the Dead. He plays Captain Holmes. The old lady who pulls out a gigantic handgun and fires it at criminals is Florance McGee, who was also a senior citizen in Super Fuzz and was Phoebe Russell in Empire of the Ants. Tommy Lane was a stuntman who was in Shaft and Ganja and Hess along with playing the trumpet and flugelhorn. Wikipedia thinks that he’s the same Tommy Lane who was in the Rock ‘n’ Roll RPMs with Mike Davis. He wasn’t.

There’s also Roger Callard (Conan the Librarian from UHF), Edoardo Margheriti (who would go from doing effects on Yor Hunter from the Future to being a second unit director for Hudson Hawk) and a lot of folks who were in Florida-based productions such as Wild Things and B.L. Stryker.

Beyond Corbucci, this was written by Terence’s son Jess and executive producer Ferdie Pacheco. It was the only movie that Ferdie ever wrote or produced. He was better known as the personal physician and cornerman for Muhammad Ali. He left Ali’s team in 1977 when after Ali won against Earnie Shavers, he felt that the post-fight physical showed that the boxer was falling to pieces. In the book Muhammed Ali: His Life and Times, Pacheco said, “The New York State Athletic Commission gave me a report that showed Ali’s kidneys were falling apart. I wrote to Angelo Dundee, Ali’s trainer, his wife and Ali himself. I got nothing back in response. That’s when I decided enough is enough.” When they reunited in 2002 and Ali was suffering from Parkinson’s, The Greatest told The Fight Doctor “You was right.”

This also has one of my favorite things about Italian movies going for it: absolutely strange alternate titles. I get Virtual Weapon as it tells you that this is a Mel and Danny ripoff with a tech twist and the French title Cyberflic means Cybercop. But then the Japanese title is Point of Dead, which is a great title that says nothing. Germany got Zwei Fäuste für Miami (Two Fists for Miami), Hungary the very metal Én vagyok a fegyver (I Am the Gun) which spoils the ending of the movie and Italy had Potenza virtuale (Virtual Power).

I always worry that I am going to run out of Italian movies to obsess over but so far, I keep finding new things to write over a thousand words about.

*In case you wondered, Indio and Indio 2 for Margheriti, as well as Across Red Nights for Maurizio Bonuglia.