No matter what Charlie Sheen and Black Emanuelle tell you, snuff movies are urban legends. This movie is probably the reason why so many people think they’re real.
Starting out as a low-budget exploitation film called Slaughter — made by the husband-and-wife team of Michael and Roberta Findlay — it was filmed in Argentina for the low, low price of $30,000. Shot with no sound and concerning a Manson-like cult, it made the film’s moneyman Jack Bravman some money before it was released, as AIP paid to use the title for its Jim Brown blacksploitation vehicle of the same name.
Allan Shackleton, who produced Misty and Blue Summer, had shelved the film for four years when he released with a new ending, shot to look like actual footage, based on an article he had read about South American snuff films. This led to the film’s tagline: The film that could only be made in South America… where life is cheap!
The new ending shows the crew of Slaughter killing one of the actresses for real, with the abrupt ending and lack of credits all planned to make the movie appear legitimate. Then, Shackleton hired fake protesters to picket movie theaters showing the film. That blew up, as even though the fact that the film was exposed as a hoax in a 1976 issue of Variety, it kept getting more popular. At one point, protests reached such fervor that New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau investigated the movie.
The plot of this movie is paper-thin. Actress Terry London (Mirta Massa, Miss International 1967) and her producer Max Marsh visit South America. She gets pregnant by another man and a female-filled biker cult led by a man named Satan stalks and murders her.
As for the infamous murder sequence, shot in the New York production studio of adult film director Carter Stevens (who made movies for the Avon Theater chain as well as the adult film Punk Rock), it’s very tacked on. But if you’re coming to see someone get murdered, do you even care about art?
Also known as The Devil Master, Master of Evil and Coven, this movie purported to tell you the whole truth — finally — about demons. It seems that demons are kind of like the kids left behind in my small hometown, stuck drinking in bars, doing drugs and balling because there’s nothing else to do but rot.
It comes from the team of Donald Jackson — yes, he of the Roller Blade, Rollergator and Hell Come to Frogtown fame — and Jerry Younkins, who only made this film. It was shot close to my wife’s hometown in Jackson, Michigan.
MIT graduate students Jeff Kreines and his girlfriend Joel DeMott, along with soundman Mark Ranc, shot a video diary while filming this movie, entitled Demon Lover Diary. It details the film falling apart as its being filmed. However, it’s been alleged that the incompetence and infighting shown in this video were all made up to get publicity for the film. But who can say? Any movie that ends with Ted Nugent’s guns being fired directly at the filmmakers is totally worth a watch. Kreines and DeMott would go on to co-direct the documentary Seventeen while Kreines would be a cinematographer on the documentary Depeche Mode: 101.
As for the actual film The Demon Lover, it’s all about a group of teenagers hanging around a cemetery that gets involved with a Satanic priest named Lavall (Younkins) who conjures up a demon from hell that looks like an ape that kills all of them. That’s pretty much the entire movie, right there, minus some scenes of the upper class dabbling with the occult that go absolutely nowhere. Oh yeah — there are also disco, nude sex slave and kung fu scenes just to ensure that this regional wonder got to play on some screen, somewhere.
Also — Younkins severed a finger at work to pony up the $8,000 to make this movie, so that pretty much explains why he got to do pretty much anything he wanted. He’d go on to write Combat and Survival Knives: A User’s Guide and wears a black glove throughout to hide his missing digit.
According to L.A. Weekly, the filmmakers so loved The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that they “initially consulted director Tobe Hooper for info on film stock, hired Chain Saw cinematographer Daniel Pearl until their money ran out, solicited original Leatherface Gunnar Hansen for a two-day top-billed cameo, and eventually played the Lyric Theater on 42nd Street in New York City, whose marquee can be glimpsed sporting the Chain Saw title in a famous shot from Taxi Driver.”
Damian Kaluta, one of the protagonists of the film, is played by Val Mayerik, who is also one of the creators of Howard the Duck. I’d assume that’s his art on the poster as well. The name of his character Kaluta comes from 1970’s comic book artist Michael W. Kaluta and many of the names in the film are also derived from comic and horror icons of that era, like Detective Tom Frazetta (painter Frank Frazetta, who designed most of Fire and Ice), Officer Lester Gould (Chester Gould, creator of Dick Tracy perhaps?), Profesor Peckinpah (director Sam Peckinpah), Elaine Ormsby (Alan Ormsby of Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things), Alex Redondo (Filipino Swamp Thing artist Nestor Redondo), Susan Ackerman (Forest Ackerman, of course), Charles Wrightson (Berni Wrightson, who drew the comic for Creepshow), Jane Corben (Richard Corben, who created Den from the Heavy Metal magazine and movie, as well as the painter of the poster for Spookies), Garrett Adams (Neal Adams), Janis Romero (George Romero) and Pamela Kirby (Jack Kirby).
This movie also features early special effects work by Dennis and Robert Skotak, who would go on to work on movies like Escape from New York, Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Mars Attacks!, Galaxy of Terror and so many more.
While this movie is junk — enjoyable junk that I will force people to watch — there’s a lot to be learned from it. Isn’t that what loving movies is all about? Actually, it’s also what the occult is all about too: the secret messages lurking behind the veneer of what seems like nothing.
You can watch this for free on Tubi or just check out the highlights below.
You brought us The Child. You brought us Wham! Bam! Thank You, Spaceman! You brought us Dr. Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, The Sinful Dwarf and Toys Are Not for Children, not to mention Suburban Pagans, Please Don’t Eat My Mother! and Indiscreet Stairway.
The Sultan of Sexploitation! The King of Camp! And as H. Hershey, you directed early 80’s hardcore like Moments of Love. You were scum and I say that with the kind of infection I usually reserve for small animals. I wish you were alive so I could hug you.
How can you not love any movie that starts with two young boys getting repeatedly bitten and killed by an entire pit of angry rattlesnakes after their parents pretty much ignore them for cans of beer?
Soon, the local sheriff has to call on underpaid college professor and herpetologist Dr. Tom Parkinson to learn why the snakes are just so darn aggressive. Of course, Dr. Tom can barely keep his own cobras in their cages.
Parkinson and war photographer Ann Bradley soon learn that the military base has authorized the disposal of a nerve gas called CT3 and it’s causing all this commotion. Colonel Stroud, the guy behind it all, ends up killing the base’s medical officer before the cops close in and gun him down, too. The snakes, presumably, are still on the loose.
Director John McCauley waited nine years to make another movie, 1985’s Deadly Intruder. The movie also features Darwin Joston, who was Napoleon Wilson in Assault on Precinct 13 and Dr. Phibes in The Fog.
You can watch the Cinematic Titanic riffed version of this movie on Tubi.
O Trapalhao no Planalto dos Macacos translates to A Tramp on the Plateau of the Apes and is part of a 1970’s series of Brazilian comedy films where The Tramps found their way to all sorts of situations and eventually other movies, such as The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars.
The Tramps are Didi, Dede, Mussum and Zacharias. Throughout the movie, they get in all manner of hijinks, starting when Didi and Dede are mistaken for jewel thieves. This leads them to a hot air balloon which brings them to a hillside where apes speak and treat men as slaves. Kind of like, you know, Planet of the Apes.
There’s even a Nova character, named Hula, and a Forbidden Zone, which kind of makes no sense as the rest of humanity hasn’t ended yet. That said, you should pretty much shut your brain off when watching this movie. It’s a silly Brazilian movie for kids that was made on a low budget and is all about making you laugh. It’s also worth noting that the human is very much Brazilan, so some of it won’t translate.
When audiences turned in to the ABC Friday Night Movie on October 29, 1976, they got to see the sequel to one of the biggest horror films ever. However, what they ended up watching had little to nothing to do with its inspiration, 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, or the Ira Levin-written sequel Son of Rosemary.
The only actor to return from the orginal is Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castevet and we all know that you can’t trust the combination of Old Hollywood and Satan.
Sam O’Steen, an editor on the first movie, directed this sequel. He also directed a ton of amazing films, such as Cool Hand Luke, The Graduate, Chinatown, Straight Time, Silkwood and Working Girl. He also edited perhaps the scummiest and most Italian horror movie to ever emerge from a major American studio, Amityville II: The Possession.
The movie breaks its story down into three different books.
The Book of Rosemary: A coven prepares for a ritual only to learn that Adrian, the son of Rosemary (Patty Duke, who was considered for the original movie, taking over for Mia Farrow) is missing from his room and hiding in a synagogue. Sure, the coven can hurt the rabbis, but because they’re in a house of God, everyone is safe.
The next morning, Guy (George Maharis from Route 66 taking over for John Cassavetes, which is the dictionary definition of several steps down) gets a call from Roman Castevet (Ray Milland taking over for Sidney Blackmer, so at least Old Hollywood stays in the picture) and asks him to keep an eye out for his wife and child. Roman could really care less, because he’s a big Hollywood star now.
While Rosemary calls him, Adrian is bullied by some kids and goes full on Daimon Hellstrom on them. Luckily, a prostitute named Marjean (Tina Louise!) saves them, but you know that she has to be a fallen woman in league with Satan. She calls a possessed bus to pick up Rosemary and drive her away from her son. Now, he belongs to the coven.
The Book of Adrian: Twenty years later, Adrian is living with his Aunt Marjean in a casino and acting up. He’s played by Stephen McHattie (Hollis “Night Owl” Mason from the Watchmen movie) and he loves speeding, drinking, fighting and getting into trouble with his pal Peter (David Huffman, F.I.S.T.). As he arrives at his 21st birthday, Roman and Minnie arrive and drug him, getting him ready for his ascension to be the Antichrist, which pretty much involves him possessing a bunch of people who just want to disco dance and standing by while his father kills his best friend. Oh yeah — Broderick Crawford plays the local sheriff, which means that even more Old Hollywood is here in the service of Old Scratch.
The Book of Andrew: The coven has allowed Adrian to take the murder charge as he wakes up in a hospital. Donna Mills plays a nurse named Ellen who helps him escape. This is probably the second-best thing Ms. Mills has ever done. The first? Her epic self-help VHS tape, The Eyes Have It.
Of course, Ellen is really the granddaughter of Roman and Minnie. Even as they lose Adrian as he runs away after his father hits Ellen with his car — of course she survives — they already have the next generation of the devil all locked up. Why this happens and why we sat through this entire film is the kind of mystery that I’ve made this site for. After all, I’ve watched this epic made for TV turkey so many times that I’m embarrassed to divulge the true number.
Here’s a mixed drink to go with this movie.
Chocolate Mouse Martini
1.5 oz. Baileys Irish Cream
1.5 oz. Kaluha
1 oz. vodka
1 oz. creme de cacao
2 oz. milk
Chocolate syrup
Chocolate shavings
Pour chocolate syrup on a plate, then dip rim of glass into it. You can also drizzle chocolate syrup into the glass.
Shake alcohol and milk in a shaker with ice for twenty seconds, then pour into glass. Top with chocolate shavings.
What kind of movie is this? Is it horror? A children’s film? A coming of age story? A feminist or child’s rights message film? Or is it as director Nicolas Gessner said, “a teenage love story”?
The American release of the film — which was rated PG and deleted the nude scene that Foster refused, with her older sister Connie acting as her body double — offers these words: “She was only a little girl. She lived in a great big house…all alone. Where is her mother? Where is her father? Where are all the people who went to visit her? What is her unspeakable secret? Everyone who knows is dead.”
If you need to put this in a neat box, the term I’ve been using for films like this — and others that we’ll talk more about this week — is “coming of age while the supernatural lurks around the corner.”
Let’s travel to the small town of Wells Harbor, Maine, where Rynn Jacobs (Jodie Foster) is celebrating her thirteenth birthday alone in the home she shares with her poet father. The son of her landlady, Frank Hallet (Martin Sheen), visits and is immediately sexually aggressive to her. Later, his mother visits and demands to see her father, who she claims is in New York City before taunting the older woman about her son. Then there’s the cellar, which she’s obsessed with seeing. Well, curiosity killed the cat. And it kills Cora Halley, too.
The rest of the film involves Rynn hiding the body (and maybe even bodies), dealing with Frank and falling for Mario (Scott Jacoby, who of course was Bad Ronald), a young magician.
It also features Mort Shuman as a police officer. Shuman was once the partner of Doc Pomus and wrote “A Teenager in Love”, “This Magic Moment”, “Save The Last Dance For Me” and “Viva Las Vegas.”
While this is one of Foster’s least favorite films, I’ve always really loved it. That may be because she believed that one of the producers was crazy, as he wanted her to do have more nudes scenes. She also had a rough time filming the love scene.
While rated PG, this movie exudes menace and nascent sexuality. It also has plenty of dark moments, like Frank killing Rynn’s hamster. And then there’s the fact that Rynn’s father killed himself by drowning in the ocean before giving his daughter potassium cyanide so that she could kill her mother, then embalming her and placing her into that basement that interested the old landlady so much.
Call it Mansion of the Doomed. Or The Terror of Dr. Chaney. You may also refer to it as Eyes, Eyes of Dr. Chaney, House of Blood or Massacre Mansion. But whatever name you choose to refer to this Charles Band produced, Michael Pataki directed movie, you will probably enjoy it. Seriously, it’s packed with sleaze, eyeballs being removed and plenty of your genre favorites.
Dr. Leonard Chaney (Richard Basehart, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) caused the accident that cost the sight of his daughter Nancy (Trish Stewart, Salvage 1). Now, he is cutting up eyeballs so that he can get his girl to see again, starting with her fiancee Lance Henriksen and moving on to Marilyn Joi, who played Cleopatra Schwartz in The Kentucky Fried Movie.
Gloria Grahame — as Chaney’s wife — and Vic Tayback — playing a cop — are both in this, meaning that this is a Blood and Lace reunion. Pop the cork on that sparkling cider! Celebrate!
Frank Ray Perilli wrote this. He worked with Pataki on the softcore film Cinderella, plus he wrote the movies Dracula’s Dog, Laserblast, End of the World and Alligator.
Come for the stars, stick around for the Stan Winston effects and enjoy the craziness of Basehart as he goes from loving father to kidnapper of children to a man who has an entire group of eyeless victims just meandering around his basement.
This movie is pure scum. It’s even a category 3 video nasty, which means that you know I had to watch it at midnight when I really needed to go to sleep. You can do the same and watch it for free on Tubi.
23 years before Columbine, Massacre at Central High would predict not just violent school shootings but the rise of disaffected teenagers. It was directed by Rene Daalder, a Dutch writer and director who would go on to pioneer motion picture technology and virtual reality.
David is the new kid at Central High, but he already knows Mark (Andrew Stevens), a friend he has helped in the past. Mark relates that this place is a country club, but you need the right friends. Friends like Bruce, Craig (Steve Bond, Travis Abilene from Picasso Trigger) and Paul, who rule the school.
After watching these three bully — that’s putting it mildly — the student body, including beating up nerdy Spoony (Robert Carradine), deaf librarian Arthur, the poverty-stricken Rodney and the overweight Oscar as well as assaulting two girls named Mary (Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith!) and Jane (Lani O’Grady from Eight Is Enough), David has had enough.
David and the bullies are on a fatal collision course, particularly after our protagonist starts making time with Mark’s girl Theresa (Kimberly Beck, Roller Boogie, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter). One night while he’s working on Rodney’s car, the three kick out a jack and cripple him.
That’s when David goes slasher villain and takes them out, one after the other. Bruce’s hang-glided flies into a power line, Craig is tricked into diving into an empty swimming pool and then Paul’s van gets pushed off a cliff.
Now, the formerly bullied are the bullies and attempt to form alliances with David, but they keep dying off too. Arthur’s hearing aid takes him out. Oscar’s locker explodes and so does Rodney’s car. And Spoony, Mary and Jane are set up to look like they did it all when a rockslide and some dynamite kills them off.
Mark and Theresa know that David is the one who did it all, so they attend the school dance that he plans to destroy, refusing to leave. David then takes the bomb outside, where it explodes, making him a martyr hero and keeping the blame forever on Spoony, Mary and Jane.
Writer-director Rene Daalder was recommended by Russ Meyer, for whom the young man had previously worked for as a cameraman. That may or may not be the reason why this movie was released as Sexy Jeans in Italy, complete with pornographic inserts that are obviously not the same actors. I’ve seen it and have to tell you — it’s disconcerting.
This is a brutal and uncompromising film that would go on to inspire Heathers while sadly presaging the world we live in. Of note, the director intended for gravity to kill nearly everyone and no adults to appear in the movie, like some demented version of Peanuts.
DAY 19. VIDEO STORE DAY: This is the big one. Watch something physically rented or bought from a video store. If you live in a place that is unfortunate enough not to have one of thee archival treasures then watch a movie with a video store scene in it at least. #vivaphysicalmedia
I grew up in a small town about an hour north of Pittsburgh. Despite being a dying mill town of around 8,000 people, we still had three unique video stores to serve our movie needs — although eventually even the Uni-Mart and 7-11 would expand to have movies (the only ones I can remember getting from either are Death Bed and Gotcha!).
College Hill Video was a satellite store of the larger location in Beaver Falls, located on three spinner racks in a Giant Eagle grocery store. Their horror section was mostly new releases, nearly all mainstream.
Hollywood Video offered more video game rentals but didn’t have much selection. I can barely remember ever renting a movie there.
But Prime Time Video?
I haunted the horror section there, alternatively afraid of the lurid clamshell foreign horror and obsessed by their contents. They promised such foul delights! And of all the VHS boxes there, one cover promised the absolute bottom of the barrel. Somehow, in a small town where you had to verbally ask for adult films after looking through a gigantic binder of their covers, the forced embarrassment keeping you from every seeing something that filthy, this piece of sheer exploitation junk somehow ended up in my 16-year-old hands.
There’s really only one mom and pop rental place left that I can think of in Pittsburgh — Jack’s Discount Videos in Millvale — and three Family Videos which are located well out of the city in Moon Township, Lower Burrell and Greensburgh. Outside of Redboxes, we are sadly out of luck. So I’ve gone back to my childhood to look back at a movie I probably shouldn’t have been watching.
This is not the video store of my youth, only my dreams. Scarecrow Video in Seattle.
Bloodsucking Freaks is the kind of movie that — if it wasn’t so ineptly made — would make you think that anyone who watched it more than once certainly a maniac. And maybe I was back at that age, obsessed with Fangoria and heavy metal and trying to always find something heavier, louder and grosser.
Well, I found it.
This movie became the torture test for anyone that wanted to watch movies with my friends. We became fascinated with it, taking its villains into our roke playing games, drawing photos of the gore scenes and endlessly discussing how a movie like this could have ever been made.
We didn’t know that it ripped off Herschell Gordon Lewis.
We didn’t know that it was junk.
All we knew was that we had to watch it again.
While it was shot under the title Sardu: Master of the Screaming Virgins, it was retitled The Incredible Torture Show during its original run through grindhouses and drive-ins. By the time it made its way to the mom and pop video stores, it’d been purchased by Troma and retitled Bloodsucking Freaks.
We didn’t have an internet to teach us what this movie was about or spoilers to warn us of the content we were about to be barraged with. We just had ourselves.
What unspooled was a movie all about Master Sardu (Seamus O’Brien, a one and done actor who died shortly after making this movie, a victim of a burglar’s knife), who runs a Grand Guignol-style theatre with Ralphus, his demented little person. He’s played by Luis De Jesus, who was famous in Times Square for a loop he’d shot entitled The Anal Dwarf.
Yeah look — if you’re going to get offended easily, perhaps skip to our next review.
This is the kind of actor who just randomly would decide to gather all the other principals and stage an orgy. While he continued to act in adult films until the 1980’s — he’s Mr. Big in Let My Puppets Come, which Vinegar Syndrome just re-released, as well as appearing in movies like Fantasex Island, where he played Pu-Pu in an obvious send-up of Herve Villechaize’s famous role as Tattoo — he also tried to break into the mainstream, playing in Under the Rainbow and as an Ewok in Return of the Jedi. Yet in the very next year after he appeared in a Teddy Ruxpin video, he was back in adult before dying two years later.
Basically, just like Wizard of Gore, Sardu and Ralphus torture people for real on stage in front of an audience that thinks that what they are seeing is art. Then, they sell their victims into slavery.
The film unfolds in a loose collection of scenes, such as the two wiping out theater critic Creasy Silo — based on critic Clive Barnes — who made the mistake of giving them a bad review. I kind of love that the same actor who plays Creasy, Alan Dellay, also shows up as a judge in one of the junkiest mainstream films of all time, the utterly reprehensible — and fully awesome — Amityville II: The Possession.
Then, our evil duo abducts the ballerina Natasha Di Natalie and seek to break her will. She was played by Viju Krem, who is also in the aforementioned Let My Puppets Come, as well as Eros Perversion, a softcore send-up of Shakespeare, and an adult ripoff of M*A*S*H* where she appeared alongside Annie Sprinkle. Adding to the strange history of this film, she’d die young too, a victim of a hunting accident in 1983.
Football hero Tom Maverick (Niles McMaster, yes, the father from Alice, Sweet Alice) is seeking to save her before it’s too late. Speaking of that film, Alphonso DeNoble — who so memorably played the obese neighbor Mr. Alphonso in it — shows up here as a white slaver.
There are also a fair number of New York City-based adult actors of the era cast as female victims, such as Jenny Baxter, Ellen Faison (who is also in the British video nasty Dawn of the Mummy), Juliet Graham (who dated the previously mentioned Mr. Gillis) and Arlana Blue.
Basically, all of them are tortured, whether by being turned into a human dart board or being attacked with a vice, bone saws, thumb screws, meat cleavers, forced dental surgery, a drill, a guilotine and so much more. It’s still the only film I’ve ever seen where someone uses a straw to sip blood out of a person’s skull or throw darts at a naked woman’s rear.
Director Joel M. Reed — who would make Blood Bath the same year — didn’t want to make this movie. He had another script about a rock star haunted by a groupie, but he never got the money to make that one. He’d also make 1981’s Night of the Zombies, starred gonzo pioneer Jamie Gillis as CIA special agent Nick Monroe.
With good reason, this film was decried by Women Against Pornography. None of its female victims are named and they only show up to be maimed and decimated. Is there art and humor under the surface? Sure, but man, you need to crawl through an ocean of scum to get there.
I’ve always wondered how today’s internet-plugged in generation will handle life, as they’re not held back from adult materials at any time. They can basically jump right into the deep end when all we had was random issues of Playboy thrown into the woods. Then I remember that somehow, in the middle of comparatively chaste slashers, Bloodsucking Freaks was on the shelves of the mom and pop video store in my cozy and safe hometown. It made it’s way from the fecund streets of 1976 end of the world New York City to the same VCR we watched birthday parties and cartoons on. And we all watched it, over and over again.
DAY 12. THE FRACAS AND THE FUZZ: Something revolving around cops and criminals.
While he may be most famous for Cannibal Holocaust, a movie so controversial that he lost his license to make films and was arrested for the suspected murder of the film’s cast, Ruggero Deodato is no one-trick pony.
After growing up nearby Rome’s film studios and being friends with the son of director Roberto Rossellini, he worked his way up to being the assistant director on the film Django before helping Antonio Margheriti finish Hercules, Prisoner of Evil, a peplum that also has horror elements like a werewolf. He also directed the superhero film Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen and Zenabel before taking time away to work in advertising.
He returned in 1976 for the film Waves of Pleasure and then made the film we’ll be discussing today. Later Deodato films of interest include Jungle Holocaust (which stars future cannibal icons Ivan Rassimov and Me Me Lai), Concorde Affaire ’79 (which has a veritable murderer’s row of junk cinema stars in it, like James Franciscus, Mimsy Farmer, Joseph Cotten and Edmund Purdom), The House On the Edge of the Park (which rips off The Last House On the Left so much that it even has Davis Hess in it), the slasher Body Count and late in the game giallo like Phantom of Death and The Washing Machine.
But Deodato will forever be known for his cannibal excesses, so much so that he was in Hostel II as a cannibal character.
When Edgar Wright was writing Hot Fuzz, Quentin Tarantino played him this film and Walter Matthau’s The Laughing Policeman for inspiration. On the commentary track for the movie, Tarantino says that it has “one of the greatest titles of all time, and it lives up to its name.”
Screenwriter Fernando Di Leo was behind several of the most well-regarded spaghetti westerns, like A Fistful of Dollars and Johnny Yuma before moving into the poliziotteschi genre. His Milieu Trilogy, which he both wrote and directed, includes Caliber 9, Manhunt and The Boss.
This movie, however, is all about the Fred (Marc Porel, Don’t Torture a Duckling) and Tony (Ray Lovelock, The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue), two members of the Special Squad. This secret arm of the Italian police seems to have complete impunity and grants their agents a license to kill.
Fred and Tony take full advantage of that. The film begins with them chasing purse snatchers — to be fair, the failed heist leads to them killing a woman directly in front of children waiting in line to meet Santa Claus — for nearly twelve minutes before impaling one and breaking the other’s neck before the normal cops arrive. As people wait for them to be arrested, they just casually walk away and ride their motorcycle together. Yet for all the killing, shooting and wanton seduction of women these two will accomplish in the next 100 minutes, they really have no issue holding one another.
Keep in mind that Deodato shot this epic sequence with no permits whatsoever and you may see that he saw these two as kindred spirits.
Their boss is played by Adolfo Celi, who you’ll probably recognize for playing Ralph Valmount, the villain in Mario Bava’s Danger Diabolik. They pretty much drive him crazy for most of the film, with him opining that they’re probably worse than the criminals that they go after.
Yes, this is probably the only cop movie you’re ever going to see where the good guys wait for the bank robbers to start their job, then just walk up and shoot them with silenced handguns with no due process. And then they go off and do target practice, which is pretty much them shooting at one another and dodging the bullets.
Silvia Dionisio plays Norma, the tough secretary for their boss. The film pretty much sets its tone when they have their conversation with her before seeing him. You expect the Bond/Moneypenny type flirting until she tells them that men often talk a great game, but she can go twenty times in a night while they’ll be sleeping after one orgasm. That’s why she keeps flirting with both of them, because they may have to team up to satisfy her. It’s disarming and shows that she’s no shrinking violet. Also, if anyone in this movie was smart, it’s Deodato, as he married Dionisio right around this time.
The boys’ big assignment is to stop crime boss Pasquini, which they start by visiting one of his finest clubs and setting all of the patrons’ cars on fire. He eventually comes after them, even slicing out the eye of one of their informants (and stepped on the eyeball, in a screen that Fulci must have been jealous he didn’t direct) to get them mad. This scene was censored from how it originally was intended, but the intent is there. There’s also a bonkers scene where the boys visit a relative of Pasquini and end up taking their turns with his needy niece.
Of course, everything works out for our heroes, thanks to their boss being a much better cop than both of them. But hey — they still get to blow up a boat.
If you ever watched a movie like Lethal Weapon or Cobra and thought, boy the captain is coming down pretty hard on this cop and he’s just doing his job, you should check this out. These supercops make Dirty Harry look like a third-grader with their near-limitless brutality.
Sadly, this was Ruggero Deodato’s only poliziotteschi film. But really, where do you go from here? A sequel was in the planning stages, but ended up being canceled due to Marc Porel and Ray Lovelock not getting along.
This is one of the most entertaining films I’ve ever seen, a cops with guns movies that rivals the excesses that Hong Kong cinema would achieve a decade later. It really has no story, just hijinks, but you won’t notice. You’ll be too busy trying to get your jar off the ground, trust me. If it didn’t come through in all these words, I love this movie.
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