Enter the Dragon (1973)

The British secret services convince Shaolin martial arts master Lee (Bruce Lee) to attend a martial arts tournament taking place on the fortress island of international drug lord and all around evildoer Han (Shih Kien). Since Han has disgraced the shaolin martial arts he once studied, and also murdered Lee’s sister (Angela Mao in a short but sweet flashback), there’s quite a bit of motivation provided for our hero to destroy Han’s operation.

Han for his part mostly uses the tournament as a way for recruitment, but at least two of the other martial artists, blaxploitation movie protagonist Williams (Jim Kelly) and roguish adventurer Roper (John Saxon) will turn out to be just as unhappy with their host’s lifestyle as Lee is, and thus make for natural allies.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that Bruce Lee never meant as much to my appreciation of martial arts cinema as he did to other people. Despite his obvious talent, the movie star image first approach he tended to take – and which fit Hollywood much better than it did Hong Kong – always did rub me the wrong way a little.

Which isn’t to say Enter the Dragon is not a fantastically successful attempt at mixing Hong Kong style martial arts, blaxploitation and spy adventure in the Ian Fleming style. This is one of those movies that seem to absolutely embody the sprit of 70s exploitation cinema (which has always been, and will always be, on of the loves of my life). There’s very little here that isn’t enjoyable – from the fights, to the gimmicks, the so wonderfully of its time production design, to the breathing noises so loud, Sonny Chiba heard them over in Japan and decided to make them even more absurd. The film is carried by a spirit of generosity towards its audience, really going all out to not just belong in half a dozen genres or so, but to provide a viewer with everything they could wish for from every single one of them.

And all that from a director like Robert Clouse who usually doesn’t understand pacing, or style, or how to direct action. Well, looked at objectively, for most of the film, it isn’t actually Clouse doing much of the heavy lifting, but the choreography, the production design and a gang of actors that appear to have a great amount of fun; the director for mostly tries not to get in the way of what he has. Which, given most of Clouse’s other films, I can’t help but wish he’d used as an approach more often.

The Glove (1979)

Sam Kellog (John Saxon), something of a loveable loser, works as a bounty hunter to – barely, if at all – pay the child support he owes his ex-wife for their daughter. While he’s perfectly willing and able to beat you up when he’s trying to catch you, he’s a bit too soft to be a proper money-grubbing bastard, bound to let a target go if their particular true sob-story is too much for his feelings.

Right now, a very large man we’ll soon know as Victor Hale (Rosey Grier), dressed in body armour, is using the titular steel glove to occasionally but heavily beat up a specific group of former and current prison guards. It’s gotten so bad, the local prison guard union has put out a bounty of $20,000 to whoever catches Victor, preferably dead instead of alive. Sam would really rather like that money, but finding and catching Victor is much more difficult than you’d think. Turns out the supposed violent maniac is otherwise a genuinely lovely person with a tragic backstory who is nice to neighbours and kids, and has a surprisingly pleasant singing voice. So it’s not that easy to find anyone willing to sell information on him, even more so when the guy trying to buy is white like Sam.

While marketing and title suggest a bit of fun and brutal exploitation, in reality Ross Hagen’s The Glove is quite a different film that mixes a couple of brutal gloved-based beatings with many a scene of Rosey Grier (in a much better performance than he gave as racist Ray Milland’s second head) being nice to people, and many more scenes of Sam episodically going through his sad sack bounty hunter daily life, letting a nice elderly lady go, learning that gay people can hit you really hard as well, and philosophizing about the evils of a world that’s all about the dollar, while having to hustle for it himself. Also, going through a lot of off-screen monologuing to somehow stitch this thing together.

Which does of course mean that the film mostly doesn’t work as a thriller, crime, or action movie – apart from that couple of genuinely effective beatings – but is more like a road movie that takes place in a single city, with John Saxon encountering various characters and having fun interactions with them that reveal his flaws and virtues as well as, perhaps, some of the flaws of the world he lives in. Thanks to what must have been quite a bit of adlibbing and a cast that for some reason managed to attract everyone from Saxon to Grier to Joanna Cassidy, from Joan Blondell(!) to Aldo Ray the result is rather fun to watch, at least if you’re like me and just like to see interesting characters interact.

The film goes about its business so charmingly, I’m even willing to believe its somewhat anti-capitalist and anti-racist agenda to be genuine, though not thought through or argued well.

Technically, The Glove is all over the place: there’s a lot of standard competent 70s exploitation filmmaking here, but also improbable stuff like an incredible moment where the actors obviously flub not just a line but a whole dialogue interchange, but the camera just rolls on through the grins and the suppressed giggles. It’s pretty shoddy in that regard, but in context of the leisurely rest of the film, this just adds to The Glove’s curiously companionable quality. It’s as if you’re not watching a product or a work of art, but simply a group of people doing stuff while a camera happens to roll.

In short: Mitchell (1975)

Police detective Mitchell (Joe Don Baker) has few fans in his department. It’s not just his schlubby style and his somewhat dubious manners, it’s also his unwillingness to play politics. When influential mafioso Walter Deaney (John Saxon) shoots a Latino housebreaker in cold blood in the back, Mitchell quickly realizes that the man’s story about self-defence is a badly constructed lie. But when he wants to go for it, his boss calls him off, for apparently, there’s a big FBI investigation running (not that we ever get to see even a single FBI agent) for crimes more important than shooting Mexicans. Instead, as something of punishment, Mitchell is to alone conduct a solo twenty-four hour observation of another gangster, one James Arthur Cummings (Martin Balsam). In this case, Mitchell’s job is to annoy the guy so badly, he’ll talk business with the police. Mitchell, being as hard-headed as he is smelly, and not willing to take any murder lightly, swears to somehow arrest Deaney and get Cummings for something, too.

At least he is indeed an expert at annoying people, so there’s that. From here on out the film turns into a series of increasingly bizarre scenes broken up by standard 70s movie action, our man Joe Don having nice chats with Cummings, getting gifted the services of a high class prostitute (Linda Evans) by an unknown friend – content warning: hot Joe Don Baker action – and a plot about a hijacked heroin delivery develops.

Andrew V. McLaglen’s Joe Don Baker vehicle Mitchell was apparently the victim of a Mystery Science Theater episode (I wouldn’t know, I’m not the point and laugh kind of cult movie fan), but honestly, this isn’t a worse film than many a mid-70s crime/action movie. It’s certainly competently enough filmed by veteran McLaglen, with a couple of improbable but neat enough to keep me awake action sequences embedded into a mix of cop movie clichés; and hey, at least this violent movie cop is sticking it to the big guys (well, the kind of big guys like Cummings who apparently can’t afford more than one thug), seeking justice for the kind of victim movie cops – let’s not even talk about too many real ones - usually don’t cry any tears about.

Mostly, one’s liking for this one will depend heavily on one’s love for watching a sweaty Joe Don butt heads with John Saxon and Martin Balsam in often pretty peculiar surroundings. I take to that sort of thing like Joe Don Baker to free prostitution samples or Linda Evans’s character to Joe Don (I’d have to take the film much more seriously than it does itself or than I do to find these plot elements risible), so I had a fine time watching Mitchell.

Three Films Make A Post: He's good at taking friends

Come Play (2020): If you are one of those peculiar people who think The Babadook isn’t great, you might like Jacob Chase’s risible rip-off instead. After all, it does replace careful writing and thoughtful characterisation with jump scares and regurgitated tropes, grinds down the personality of the original in favour of bland slickness and basically sands down everything that’s good about the film it is ripping off into nothing, while not even acknowledging the debt officially. It’s everything that doesn’t work about contemporary mainstream horror squashed into a single film, without anything about this part of the movie universe that’s actually worthwhile and good (and there’s a lot of that to go) making an appearance.

In a way, the film’s total, nearly aggressive, blandness is some kind of achievement, I’m sure, but not one anyone should be proud of.

Boss Level (2020): By all rights, a film by Joe Carnahan about Frank Grillo as a man of violence with the usual problems finding himself caught in a time loop, fighting ridiculous caricatures again and again, should at the very least be a pretty fun watch. It never really was one for me, though. The film’s ironic use of clichés is never actually as smart and funny as it apparently believes it is, and the attempts of making an audience connect with Grillo’s character suffer heavily from him being a vapid idiot and an arsehole (and not the interesting kind) whose rise to heroism is something the film declares instead of actually doing anything to convince the audience of.

The action is perfectly okay, but I wish the filmmakers had taken a good hard look at a lot of low budget action movies with basic plots but heavy emotional stakes, skipped the ironic sneer, and instead learned something from them about how to creatively turn violence into an expression of a dozen different emotions.

Moonshine County Express (1977): Hicksploitation and carsploitation have never been my greatest loves in exploitation cinema, so I’m not sure if my enjoying Gus Trikonis’s example of the form more than most would be a recommendation to anyone who actually likes the sub-genre. It’s certainly always nice to find a female-led (Susan Howard, Claudia Jennings and Maureen McCormick) exploitation film that takes said females’ attempts at taking vengeance on the killers of her dead dad (Morgan Woodward working for William Conrad are the guilty parties) seriously, adding John Saxon as the male helper, but really not making him terribly effectual or useful, and letting the villains and the women drive the plot.

Stylistically, Trikonis moves convincingly from mid-70s style brutal-ish shoot-outs, to corny but mostly inoffensive humour, to a bit of drama, and to the mandatory car chases and back again, letting things get a little weird from time to time as they should be in exploitation cinema, yet finding his way back from there, too.

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

Evil space overlord Sador (John Saxon) and his gang of mutants pop in at a tiny, pacifist farming community on an otherwise empty planet to announce the place, or rather its harvest, now belongs to him. He’ll get back once harvesting time has come; to prove his commitment to being evil, he lasers down some random farmer with his ship. After some discussion, the community decides to attempt and hire some mercenaries to protect them.

Spirited young Shad (Richard Thomas) sets out in the old ship of Zed (Jeff Corey) the only of his people who ever went out on space adventures to find help. During his own space adventures Shad manages to get together a team of seven (plus some additions that don’t count for my calculation) – shall we call them magnificent seven? There’s space trucker Space Cowboy (George Peppard), computer expert and professional love interest Nanelia (Darlanne Fluegel), space Valkyrie and wearer of very little clothing St. Exmin (Sybil Danning), hive-minded psi clones Nestor (Earl Boen, John Gowans and others), reptilian space whaler, opportunist slaver and Sador-hater Cayman (Morgan Woodward), and last but not least professional (space) killer Gelt (Robert Vaughan, pretty much reprising his role from The Magnificent Seven). Together, they just might beat Sador. Perhaps, there’ll even be some of them left to tell the tale afterwards.

Revisiting childhood favourites can become a bit of a drag, but I can happily report that the Corman-produced Battle Beyond the Stars is even more fun than I remembered it to be. As a grown-up (so-called), I can now understand quite a few more of the jokes and imaginative asides of John Sayles’s wonderful script which only improves the sense of fun, wonder and adventure of the film.

On paper, an attempt to get at some of that sweet, sweet, Star Wars money while also ripping off the structure and plot of Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven might sound like a dreary exercise. In practice, however, the film perfectly hits the tone, the bizarre imagination and the general craziness of classic space opera, working from a script that is perfectly conscious of the utter silliness of the whole proceedings but it also wallowing in it with great delight. Sayles’s script isn’t just funny but also packs in so many ideas ripped right from the SF pulps of the space opera persuasion it at times, particularly in the film’s first hour, feels as if he got paid by the idea, turning the film’s outer space into exactly the kind of weird and wacky wonderland it should be in this sort of film.

The rest of the people involved under director Jimmy T. Murakami certainly got into the same spirit. The space ship miniatures (art design in part by a young James Cameron) and other effects designs certainly suggest that Corman told his people to get as close to the Star Wars (and sometimes Westworld and so on) style as possible without getting sued, but the designs are also genuinely wonderful, putting all the strange beauty of 70s SF paperback covers right on screen, and that in often surprisingly – given the budget - accomplished effect sequences. The matte paintings are incredibly gorgeous, the costume design looks as if the clothes from all old SF movies and shows had gotten together and made babies, and the creature design is high pulp. There’s a good reason beyond his legendary stinginess why Corman would go on to use effects shots from the film in quite a few other productions during the next ten years or so.

Add to this box of the delights the inspired cast (John Boy Walton as Luke Skywalker! Sybil Danning’s breasts as Sybil Danning’s breasts! Robert Vaughan, the killer in space! And so on!), giving just the right kinds of performances – with John Saxon then eating them, the scenery, and probably our mothers, all up – and Sayles’s incredibly fun script, and you have yourself a film with all the feverish ideas of classic pulps, more subversive intelligence than the pulps ever dreamed of having, and just a whole load of beauty to satisfy everybody’s inner child, while keeping the outer grown-up at peace.

Three Films Make A Post: Sixgun Sirens Shoot To Thrill!

My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (2002): This is the sort of movie that keeps Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai in enough money for their less marketable films - a quite sentimental romantic comedy with ghosts, as emotionally manipulative as they come. Fortunately, it's also quite funny and honest in its manipulation attempts and its sentimentality, and I for one could never resist honest manipulation.

Additionally, there's the joy of seeing the whole bubble of actors known from every other To and Wai movie with everyone looking in the best of actorly moods. It's also a joy to see a comedy from Hong Kong without rape jokes.

 

True Legend (2010): So, what happened here? The first 80 minutes of this return of Yuen Wo(o)-Ping to the director's chair after more than a decade are an awe-inspiring mix of classicist yet cleverly updated martial arts, awful but conceptually fantastic CGI and choice (thanks to the performances of Vincent Zhao and Zhou Xun; even Andy On is non-shitty) melodrama taking place in semi-mythic China. After this part of the movie ends rather tragically, writer Christine To decides to repeat the worst parts of her script for Fearless and the film crashes down in historic China, does a few sentimental and dishonest character bits that just don't work and climaxes in one of those crappy drunken boxing versus Western wrestlers sequences that never work because those wrestling types are just too slow to look interesting in a fight against a martial artist. I know, it's all based on the "true story" of Beggar So, but that's no excuse; after all, this isn't supposed to be documentary.

What do I call a film whose beginning two thirds are one of the finest martial arts films made in the last two decades, but whose final third is just utter tripe?

 

The Cavern (1964): During World War II, a group of men and one woman of various nationalities are trapped in a cave system the Italian military used as a depot. Of course there are the usual tensions among the protagonists. Edgar G. Ulmer's final film, and not his best. The film is well-acted (by actors like a young John Saxon), reasonably well-written and at times tense, but it's also a bit slow and visually not very interesting.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,chinese movies,american movies,italian movies,johnnie to,wai ka-fai,yuen woo-ping,vincent zhao,zhou xun,edward g. ulmer,john saxon,comedy,martial arts,thriller,in short

In short: Death House (1987)

aka Zombie Death House

Vietnam vet Derek Keillor (Dennis Cole), chauffeur of gangster boss Vic Moretti (Anthony Franciosa), is double-crossed by his boss for sleeping with Moretti's girlfriend, and put on death row for a murder he didn't commit. Even without the electric chair business, Keillor's new home leaves much to be desired.

The prison doctor does viral behaviour modification experiments on volunteers for the pleasure of a Colonel Burgess (John Saxon) of the CIA. The doctor protests when the good Colonel wants to test out a very different virus on them, but of course Burgess gets his will in another way. It's just too bad that this virus is quite contagious and turns its victims into rotting, inhumanly strong psychos. Things in the prison deteriorate fast. Before taking the final step of cleaning his mess up by blowing it to hell, the Colonel sends the ex-CIA scientist turned journalist Tanya Karrington (Tane McClure) in to do, well, I don't have the faintest idea to do what.

While all this is going on, Keillor starts a big prison riot. His plan seems to be to get his enemy Moretti delivered into the prison to do who knows what to achieve some goal I'm not privy too.

Oh boy, there is a good reason why beloved cult movie actor John Saxon directed only one movie. His directorial effort lets Fred Olen Ray and Jim Wynorski look like genius artists, and demonstrates neatly and painfully that having lots of experience before the camera does not necessarily give one any insights into directing a film nor does it make one able to be a better director than a trained monkey.

In its way, Death House is quite an ambitious movie. It tries to mix the genres of the crap 80s action film, the crap 80s horror film and the crap 80s prison film, and I'll admit at once that it is very successful at being crap.

As the plot synopsis should make clear, the story here makes less sense than anything Bruno Mattei ever cooked up, but unlike the Italian masters, Saxon manages to make the pile of nonsense exceedingly boring. Scenes go on and on and on, and what should be the simple set-up of a cliché situation (guy gets set up by mafia boss; bad things happen in prison) is developed as awkwardly and slowly as possible. You could cut about half of the film and still have the same amount of plot, mood and character development.

The less said about Saxon's actual direction the better. Let's just call it drab and seemingly made by someone who does not care his film is going to be inflicted on actual human beings at all.

The editing is even worse. The film jumps randomly from scene to scene and back to the scene before, dialogue is cut off while the actors are still moving their mouths, and so on and so on. Calling it "amateurish" would be an insult to each and every backyard filmmaker who ever scratched money together to make a film.

On the acting side, Saxon and Franciosa are cheesing it up quite enthusiastically, but drown in the blandness and utter boredom the former cooked up in his role behind the camera. I don't want to remember the other actors.

The worst thing about Death House, though, is that it has robbed me of a lot of respect for one of my favourite cult movie actors. It's one thing to make a bad, even a very bad, film but it is quite another to make one so bad that it amounts to giving your audience the finger.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,in short,john saxon,horror

Blood Beach (1980)

An elderly woman is eaten by the Los Angeles beach she is walking her dog on. Since there are no eyewitnesses for this somewhat strange occurrence, the police think she must have just gone away somewhere. That is what people of a certain age always do, right?

Her daughter Catherine (Marianna Hill) sees things quite differently and returns to her native LA to find out what happened to her mum. Catherine has help in the form of Harry Caulder (David Huffman), her ex-boyfriend from long way off. The harbor patrol man can't help but find the disappearance of a woman whom he'd talked to just minutes before she vanished into thin air very strange indeed. And if spending some time with Catherine while looking for her mother can help him and Catherine get back together, then that's all the better for him. It doesn't seem to matter much to him (or the film itself) that he is already in a relationship. What a stroke of luck that his girlfriend is soon eaten and very fast forgotten anyway.

Yes, the monster living under the so innocent looking beach continues to strike. A decapitated dog, a mutilated woman and a de-phallused rapist later, even police captain Pearson (John Saxon) can't help but go with the monster theory. There's also a police scientist played by Stefan Gierasch who sprouts some pseudo-science, but he speaks so frigging slowly that I have never been able to puzzle out what he is trying to tell us. Something about mutations, and the thing just having crawled from the sea and probably going to learn to walk in the future, I think.

Now it is only a question of time until the authorities find the creature's dwelling place and everything will be alright again.

For a film about a beach that eats people Blood Beach is surprisingly anaemic. I suppose all the blood went into the title, until the most colourful thing you get to see on screen is Burt Young doing a groan-worthy Harvey Bullock shtick as a certain Sergeant Royko and Saxon getting a single good scene in which he chews out some politicians.

Jeffrey Bloom, the film's writer and director, mostly worked in TV, and if not for a little nakedness, the dog head-munch and the most sedate penis loss in the history of humanity, he could have fooled me into believing this was a TV production too, with all the worst things people usually say about the quality of TV movies this once coming absolutely true.

The thing that truly kills the film is its glacial pacing, with scenes often going on much longer than necessary or good and other scenes, like the supposedly comical one in which the wife of one of the monster's victims describes in excruciating detail how her man was dressed, that should have been cut completely, especially in light of the fact that nothing at all seems to be happening for most of the time. Even worse, when something theoretically exciting is happening, Bloom's direction is so bland and lacking in imagination that even attempted rape and scenes of the beach monster dragging people under and nibbling on them come over as dry and boring as watching someone do her bookkeeping.

It doesn't exactly help that our supposed lead characters a) aren't doing anything interesting b) are about as charismatic as umbrellas and (in the case of Harry) c) are morally deeply unpleasant, but I won't blame the actors for more than trying to keep their performances on the same neutral level as anything else in the film.

It's a shame the movie doesn't even seem to be trying, for Blood Beach could (and should) have been a whole lot of low-brow fun (The Beach That Eats People!) if it had just tried to emulate the classic monster movie formula that people like Roger Corman used in the 50s. That way, we would have seen much more of the ridiculous looking monster - whatever it is supposed to be, and wouldn't have to get through quite this much filler and utter slowness for no climax to speak of.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,john saxon,reviews

In short: Mark Strikes Back (1976)

aka The .44 Specialist (not to be mixed up with The 44 Specialist, also featuring John Saxon and also made in 1976, but in the Philippines by good old Cirio H. Santiago)

Mark Patti (Franco Gasparri) is a small-time undercover cop working for the Italian police. Mark is quite unsatisfied with his position and the fact that he is only able to go after the small fry. It suits him just fine when chance lets him fall in with Olga (Marcella Michelangeli) and Paul (John Steiner), two international terrorists. The anti-terror squad is all too pleased to finally be able to get someone close to two people relatively high in the undefined terrorist organization and Patti is just too happy to finally be of real use.

That is, until he has reason to doubt the motives and methods of his new boss, a certain Altman (John Saxon). At that point, it might just be too late for Mark to change his mind about his job or to just get out alive.

Mark Strikes Back has every possibility to be an excellent film. Stelvio Massi's direction is unobtrusive, yet obviously skilled, the actors (especially Steiner) are doing great work, there's even a fine soundtrack by Stelvio Cipriani to round it all out.

Alas, Dardano Sacchetti's script really lets the whole film down. It all starts out well enough and for about forty-five minutes, the film seems to slowly but surely move into a direction where Eurocrime film and 70s conspiracy thriller meet, until the actual plot is suddenly cut short at the movie's halfway point and replaced by a very Sacchetti-typical episodic drifting from one loosely connected set-piece to the next. Why one would just stop one's plot in the middle of a film, robbing it of every sense of urgency in the process, is beyond me. Sacchetti might well be going for something like "terrorism has no head and more than one reason, so there can be no real throughline" (at least that's what the film more or less states outright), but this sadly ignores the fact that a thriller needs a plot and an audience needs a reason to care about the things that are happening on screen beyond the mere fact that they are in the script.

Thanks to everyone else's contributions, the film stays watchable as a technically excellent accumulation of scenes that probably would make an excellent movie, if someone would just bother to actually connect them.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,eurocrime,john saxon,john steiner,franco gasparri,stelvio massi,in short

Scorpion with Two Tails (1982)

The American archeologist Arthur Barnard (John Saxon in a tiny cameo) is on an expedition in the wilds of Italy. He's searching for an unopened Etruscan tomb that supposedly contains an unimaginable treasure.

He even finds what he is looking for, the trouble is that he's murdered in old Etruscan sacrificial style just as he is telling his wife about it on the phone.

His wife Joan (Elvire Audray) has had nightmares and visions about Etruscan rites as well as about the death of her husband (and also about a lot of maggots, charmingly) for some time. A combination of this, her dubious intelligence and some very ineffective persuasion attempts by her stinking rich father not to fly to Italy can obviously only lead to her flying to Italy at once. At least her friend Mike (Paolo Malco) accompanies her, and he will turn out to be indespensible when our heroine stumbles from one bad situation into the next into bouts of hysteria.

I admit that the script doesn't make her life any easier - she not only turns out to be the reincarnation of an Etruscan semi-goddess, but also stumbles into a quite nonsensical (the script is by Sacchetti and Gastaldi who have a reputation to hold up) web of drug-smuggling, tomb raiding and just plain killing.

 

I may be something of an admirer of Scorpion with Two Tails' director Sergio Martino, still I have to admit that this isn't one of his stronger efforts.

A lot of the problems the film shows are certainly caused by its nature as an Italian TV movie. The film's budget must have been quite constrained (I shudder to think of a production that can afford John Saxon only for one day, as is obviously the case here), so Martino's usual slick visuals aren't as hypnotic as I am used to. The violence also has to take some steps into a more casual-friendly direction, which shouldn't be that much of a problem for someone as technically excellent as Martino, but turns out to be a major stumbling block nonetheless. It looks like Martino didn't have the time or the imagination to think of a better substitute for blood than lots and lots of maggots.

Fortunately there are enough well-staged and interestingly filmed scenes to keep the jaded viewer with a healthy interest in the giallo watching.

And those scenes are bitterly needed: I'm willing and able to cut the acting in these films a lot of slack, but Elvire Audray's performance as our very blonde heroine is just atrocious. In fact, she is so bad that she's standing out in an ensemble of actors who at best look too bored to even try and at their worst seem to be simply unable to emote. John Saxon's cameo is nice enough, but does not help to make the rest of the cast any more believable. The abysmal quality (again keeping in mind the usual standards of Italian dubs) of the dubbing certainly is no help at all.

The script is the usual nonsense one expects from supernaturally spiced up giallos with most of the plot just a thin excuse to get the characters from one set piece to the next, which is perfectly alright in this kind of production if you don't watch movies only for the plot - in that case, you're beyond help anyway.

The ending even contains two very nice pieces of "what the fuck!?" I am not going to spoil here. Let's just say they are the kind of non sequiturs that can let me fall in love with bad movies all over again.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,giallo,sergio martino,reviews,john saxon