STREET WAR - VHS REVIEW

Reviewed by Steve Fenton.

Early English export press synopsis: ‘An elderly police captain, recalled to the force after being pensioned off, succeeds in his highly personalized manner, in fighting and ridding the city of a gang of criminals.’

Translation of an original Italian newspaper ad: ‘In a City Overrun with Crime, The Law’s Last Resort is Inspector Murri!’

Desk jock Franco Ressel, to career beat cop Maurizio Merli: “Have you gone crazy? You can’t just take the law into your own hands! Who the hell do you think you are?!”

Merli as Murri: “We have hijackers who say they’re ‘political scapegoats,’ bank robbers who go to jail for a rest cure, criminal violence is sweeping the country, and the Prosecutor’s allergic to bad press!”

Originally titled PAURA IN CITTÀ (“Fear in the City”) and also released in English-dubbed form as HOT STUFF, this 1976 release directed by Giuseppe Rosati – who also helmed the well-above-average crime drama SILENCE THE WITNESS (Il testimone deve tacere, 1974) – was the first film produced by Triomphe Cinematografica (formerly known as Castoro Film), a company jointly owned by Italocrime top gun “Lee Beaver”/Carlo Lizzani and producer Giuseppe Vezzani. Early in this film’s genesis, Jack Palance was hoped to co-star under Mason, but did not (at that time Palance would have been busy on any number of other take-the-money-and-run Italo projects). To stress the topicality of its subject matter, the present film’s original Italian title given above later reappears during the narrative as an incidental newspaper headline.

Incarcerated criminal leader Alberto Lettieri (genre regular Raymond Pellegrin) leads his gang on a massed breakout from the Carcere Giudiziario in Rome. Making good their escape in a paddy wagon, the fugitives – a dozen strong – take along a hostage for security. No sooner are they at liberty than Lettieri’s mob commences a succession of hits on squealers (“It’s as bad as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre!” remarks one observer). By no means coincidentally, all four victims had been instrumental in Lettieri’s conviction. Against the better judgement of the Polizia Commissioner (Mason), to ensure results the Minister of the Interior demands that he assign disgraced hotheaded Inspector Mario Murri (Merli, natch!) to the case. Murri had been under official suspension from the force, until ordered reinstated by the Minister. “One thing, however, you must get into your head,” explains Mason to Merli, “is that there’s to be no shootouts.” He then qualifies this statement with, “…unless of course it becomes absolutely necessary” (which we know it shall be!). In response, Merli replies, scarcely able to contain his contempt, “That’s easy to say, sir. Naturally, everything looks rosy from behind a desk!” Having gone after Lettieri’s ruthlessly violent crew in his inimitable take-no-prisoners fashion, Murri is commended by the Minister but condemned by the Prosecutor for using excessive force. Following further accusations of this, the Prosecutor places Murri under official judicial inquiry, accused of police brutality, for which the inspector again potentially faces being suspended without pay. Asking for just 48 hours longer to nail the case up tight, Insp. Murri goes on to foil Lettieri’s criminal master plan...

Italian fotobusta courtesy of the Ferguson Foundation.

This time out, Merli (“Wanna know what the shrink says about me? I’ve got a death wish!”) is initially introduced catching fish rather than crooks. He manfully smokes extra-strength, filterless, alveoli-clogging Marlboros and flashes back nostalgically to memories of his wife and daughter, who had fallen victims to a mob car-bomb (shades of  Duccio Tessari’s awesome TONY ARZENTA [1973], starring Alain Delon in the title role). During a later scene here, Merli is attacked by gunmen right at his dear departed loved ones’ graveside, whereafter he contemptuously plugs one attacker right in the forehead and back-shoots his accomplice. Elsewhere, Murri deals more even-handedly with some rowdies on the public transit system after they vandalize a passenger’s glasses (“Driver, stop the bus! These clowns are getting off!”). With the driver and conductor’s help, he then shows them the door, exercising far more ‘diplomatic’ restraint than Merli cop characters were generally known for. Complete with ‘you-are-there’ POV shots through its handlebars and super-boosted along by scorer Giampaolo Chiti’s raucous piano ’n’ bass accompaniment, Merli – doing his own riding stunts – commandeers a motorbike to chase down two rappinatori (“robbers”) mounted on a similar machine. As a consequence of the bikers’ reckless riding, a Ford Capri plows through a flower stall, after which the star first ‘trips-up’ the front wheel of their bike then goes mano a mano to capture the perps. This soon segues into an encounter with Pellegrin’s gang, resulting in an armed standoff during a bank heist. Merli thereafter stalks the culprits with a machinegun in a darkened, arched catacomb.

Frequent genre guest star Cyril Cusack – one of whose most noteworthy outings is Fernando di Leo’s raucously rambunctious crowd-pleaser THE ITALIAN CONNECTION (La mala ordina, 1972) – is cast against his usual type as Giacomo Masoni, an accountant who served hard time for mercy-killing his wife, then ‘escaped’ from stir along with Pellegrin’s gang with only 40 days remaining on his sentence. In actual fact he had been the gang’s unwilling hostage, and Cusack is subsequently strangled to death by Pellegrin after he outlives his usefulness (in a later scene, Pellegrin’s Lettieri character – who is not a nice fella! – beats a railway worker dead with a shovel). Once leading lady Silvia Dionisio (one of the many main squeezes of director Ruggero Deodato) shows up playing Cusack’s onscreen niece, a high-priced call girl named Laura Masoni, the plot spends a bit too much time dwelling on Merli’s and Dionisio’s burgeoning romance, which at least includes her treating him to a slinky striptease. It develops that her late pops – a former railroad employee – had been abducted by Lettieri expressly in order to provide the gang with vital information pertaining to a Bank of Italy robbery involving up to 20-million lire’s worth in old bank notes destined via train from Milan for incineration at the Rome mint. To pull off this their biggest heist, Lettieri’s gang disguise themselves as carabinieri; but when their scheme is exposed, a desperate climactic shootout erupts at a railway siding.

Composer Chiti’s score accents avant-garde jazz, and for the most part might have been better suited to a giallo, and some funkier compositions would perhaps have been more apt here. A stylish freezeframe technique used in the opening jailbreak provides us with a handy ‘mugshot’ of each escapee.

A drag hooker informer (“Whaddaya say to some head?”) is executed by hoodlums. A vicious bank robber coldcocks an elderly priest named Father Saverio (Carcano) in the face with his gun barrel and sneers, “Whaddaya think this is, a confessional?!” The poor clergyman is then made a hostage (“‘Mr. Meek’... you better pray, cuz ya never know when ya gonna meet ya Maker...”). To the piously forgiving Fr. Saverio, Merli subsequently remarks, after decimating the bank robbers, “I’m at peace with myself. I’m not sure about these corpses. They’re the ones that need to be forgiven. Go hit ’em with a coupla ‘Hail Marys’!”

Ressel (“I have an innate distaste for illegal police activity!”) plays the Assistant Prosecutor Dr. LoCascio, who is described by Mason as someone who’d “be happy to put handcuffs on everyone – including the police!” Mason (whose aide is played by Claudio Nicastro, another seasoned genre character player) also opines, regarding Merli, “It’s a sad comment on the state of the world that men like you are so badly needed.” While not without its share of decent lines, dialogue is generally rather poorly dubbed, it should be said. While the name-brand English star obviously didn’t stick around long enough to dub his own lines, they were post-synched by a passable Mason soundalike whose voice is just a couple octaves too high.

As our antsy antihero expectedly guns down Pellegrin in the last act, we never do discover whether he was the one responsible for the killing of Merli’s family or not. The film ends with Merli as Murri returning to exile, taking Dionisio along for company. When all is said and done, STREET WAR (the film’s ’80s Mogul Communications domestic home video title) emerges as a fairly solid if unspectacular addition to the genre.

Notes: STREET WAR was first released on Italian Region 2 DVD in 2003 via Alan Young Pictures, which to this day, remains the definitive version due to the simple fact that it contains an English language audio option.  Enhanced for 16x9, the disc also contains a photo / poster gallery.  This disc was included in Alan Young Pictures’ “Poliziottesco Italiano Box Set”, alongside Stelvio Massi’s EMERGENCY SQUAD (1974), Michele Massimo Tarantini’s CRIMEBUSTERS (1976 – no English audio) and Paolo Lombardo’s DAGLI ARCHIVI DELLA POLIZIA CRIMINALE (1975 – no English audio).  A few years later, this AYP disc was also bootlegged in the U.S. by Alfa Digital as FEAR IN THE CITY, and then later, it was re-released in Italy by Cecchi Gori, but minus the English language audio option.

SATAN'S BLADE - BLU-RAY REVIEW

Original Prism VHS ad-line: “An unholy talisman of murder and madness.”

In 1985, during the waning days of the stalk ’n’ slash craze, SATAN’S BLADE (1984) quietly debuted on VHS videocassette courtesy of Prism Video.  It was also available via Mogul Communications and Galaxy (which appears to be one of Mogul’s subsidiary labels [?]), and that release’s rather striking cover-art – which adorns Slasher Video and Olive Film’s current DVD and Blu-ray release – was also reused on numerous other releases from Mogul, most notably Carlos Puerto’s SATAN’S BLOOD (1978).  According to director L. Scott Castillo Jr., SATAN’S BLADE was actually made in 1980 and remained in distribution limbo until 1984, where, at one point, even Warner Brothers expressed some possible interest.  Despite the allure of studio distribution, SATAN’S BLADE simply got lost among a glut of horror titles, which crowded shelves at most video stores of the time.

Static, bucolic shots of wintery locales – Northern California – are suddenly disrupted when a typical-looking hunting knife flies through the air and impales itself in a tree, and then, rather mysteriously, it begins to give off a red glow.  The film then quickly moves to the ‘Sierra Foothill Bank’, where a couple of bank robbers – all shot with low angles to obscure their identity, which makes it feel like some long-lost Doris Wishman film – not only rob the bank but viciously kill a couple of tellers working late that day.  They eventually make their way to a cabin – which we assume is in the very same woods from the opening – and wait for their contact, but in a nice twist of fate they fall prey to some mysterious madman.  A strange symbol is written in blood at the scene of the crime, which only baffles the local police (“I wonder what this means?”), but despite the gruesome double murder, it doesn’t stop the owners of this mountain getaway renting out both the cabin next door and the very same cabin where the murders took place.

Two groups of vacationers including Tony (Tom Bongiorno) and his buddy Al (Thomas Cue), who, along with their wives arrive on the same day as a group of college girls who are trying to ‘cheer up’ their friend Sue (Ramona Andrada), whose father recently passed away.  Despite warnings from one of the owners about a “mountain man” who was given a weapon by “the evil spirits of the mountains”, Tony shrugs it off as mere ballyhoo.  Slowing down considerably, the film aborts the rather energetic opening and focuses on ‘character development’ as Tony and Al neglect their wives, get drunk and play practical jokes on the girls next door (“Those ski instructors are just a warm-up for the main event!”), but then, out of the blue, a seriously creepy dream sequence enlivens the proceedings.  Thankfully, at this point, SATAN’S BLADE begins to pick up the pace as our weekend vacationers try to elude this “monster of death”.

Certainly not lacking in originality, this rather lowly effort remains oddly compelling despite the very amateurish performances, and while the supernatural angle is a most-welcome touch, the rather inconsistent pace will undoubtedly test many viewer’s patience, even though the film has all the requisite cut-rate gore and topless nudity, which epitomizes most Slasher films of the time.  The wintery locales always provide an aura of stillness and eerie menace, which the filmmakers capture quite well; while Martin Jaquish – who also edited the film – scores the film with a simplistic, but highly effective synth score, which amps up the chilly atmosphere considerably.

After a long wait, Slasher Video delivers SATAN’S BLADE on Blu-Ray – it’s also available on DVD – in what is undoubtedly the best the film has ever looked.  Mastered in 2K, the film is presented in an open-matte 1.35:1 transfer, which definitely displays a little too much ‘headroom’ in many scenes, but, if you so desire, zoom into the picture and it actually works quite well compositionally; although some brief nudity is cut off the frame during an obligatory shower scene.  As for the extras, the disc also includes ‘Director’s Narrative’, an interview with the director, which helps shed some light on the production and ‘Remembering Satan’s Blade’, a rather poorly shot interview with the director showing off some props, the original 35mm film cans, a couple of VHS releases and a poster.  Other extras include the trailer (which is the original Prism video trailer), extensive still and artwork galleries and a couple of deleted/extended scenes from both the Japanese and Dutch videotapes.  Unfortunately, the fan produced SATAN’S BLADE 2 trailer is not included, despite what the packaging proclaims.

Not for everyone, Slasher Video has nonetheless pulled out all the stops for this once forgotten (some viewers may think it probably should have stayed that way) film, which, in this new re-mastered edition, makes it infinitely more digestible than viewing it through some muddy old VHS tape.  Order SATAN'S BLADE at DiabolikDVD.  

SPINE - DVD REVIEW

One of the many, regionally-produced SOV (shot-on-video) efforts from the heyday of the home video boom in the ’80s, this once-forgotten ‘film’ began to garner some notoriety among VHS collectors when said tape – housed in one those big oversized boxes with typically garish cover art – started commanding exorbitant prices online.  Well, thanks to Massacre Video, anyone who wishes to revisit this film can now do so without breaking the bank.

Like most of these SOV efforts, the plot is rudimentary, which this time revolves around Lawrence Ashton (R. Eric Huxley), a sadistic killer in mirrored sunglasses who has been cutting up nurses in the L.A. area, removing their spines, and sometimes leaving the name Linda written in blood, hence the film’s original vidbox tagline, “He’s looking for Linda…and that could be anybody!”  Obviously, this leaves the police baffled, and during a debriefing between the detectives (including lead detective Leo Meadows [Antoine Herzog], whose baseball cap continually changes from scene to scene, in some sort of obvious in-joke) and their police captain, all they can deduce is that “he’s obviously pissed off at someone named Linda!”  Lawrence continues his murder spree – sometimes right under the noses of our “shrewd” lawmen – and then enters the home of two nurses, Carrie (Janus Blythe) and Leah (Lise Romanoff), and holds them captive for the remainder of the film, where, to our benefit, he explains everything.

Contrary to the rather lurid subject matter, SPINE is actually devoid of any nudity (save for some partial, fleeting breasts) and decides to play it relatively “safe”.  As revealed in an interview (contained as an extra on this disc) with co-director Justin Simonds, he and his co-director John Howard were persuaded by the cast to refrain from nudity, which, in hindsight, he actually regrets.  Just the same, an aura of sleaziness still permeates the entire film, which is most likely mainly attributable to the look of the shoddy lo-res ¾-inch videotape on which it was shot; and, to a larger degree, the numerous scenes of bondage (always involving knots and ropes), which the killer subjects his victims to before “removing their spine”.  In an interesting side-note, Simonds also reveals that before embarking on this project, he and Howard were shooting “specialty” videos with the thinnest of plots, whose main impetus usually revolved around “women being tied-up”, and like those earlier projects, SPINE simply expands on those with a ‘fleshed-out’ plot.  The film’s modus operandi is still the same (both Blythe and Romanoff spend a good portion of the film tied-up), but this time, lots of stage blood is splashed around as the killer does away with his victims.  Although, similarities to the real life Richard Speck murders - on July 13^th, 1966, Speck held a number of nurses captive at their dormitory and methodically raped and killed them - are uncanny, co-director Simonds swears he and Howard were never influenced by this heinous event, but Howard was inspired, to a degree, by Brian De Palma’s DRESSED TO KILL (1980).   

Lawrence Ashton (R. Eric Huxley) removin' a spine.

Much of the narrative is also devoted to scenes of police procedurals (“17 stab wounds in the chest…27 in the back”) with the lead detectives, who can’t ever “get a handle on this thing”.  But, in a hilariously naïve moment, detective Meadows uses a “state of the art” computer system that can “correlate different factors” like “nurse”, “strangle”, “knife”, and “Linda” to help find anyone associated with these murders; but it isn’t until he types “spine” into this ‘super-computer’, that our murderer is revealed (“Alright!  We’ve got ’em now!”).  Why he never did this in the first place is anyone’s guess, but hey, this is a silly movie, after all.

The biggest surprise of this film is the presence of actress Janus Blythe, who, before this film, appeared in a number of horror and exploitation films, including Stu Segall’s C.B. HUSTLERS (1976) and DRIVE-IN MASSACRE (1977), Tobe Hooper’s EATEN ALIVE (1977), William Sach’s The INCREDIBLE METLING MAN (1977), and, most famously, in Wes Craven’s The HILLS HAVE EYES (1977) and its sequel The HILL HAVE EYES PART 2 (1984).  Aside from the other two leads (Huxley and Romanoff), Janus Blythe is the only one who displays any modicum of acting talent, while the rest of the cast is only amateurish at best; the scenes with the cops are especially awful!

Certainly not for all tastes, the fine folks at Massacre Video have nonetheless rolled out the red-carpet treatment for yet another forgotten SOV production.  Originally released by 4-Play Video, a company that also apparently distributed porn films, even back when it was first released, copies of SPINE were difficult to locate, so it’s nice to finally have this obscurity readily available once again.  Like most of these “spur-of-the-moment” productions, the backstory is always much more interesting than the actual productions themselves, and Massacre Video managed to locate both co-director Justin Simonds and actor R. Eric Huxley, who are rather perplexed that fans of the film actually exist.  In a pair of on-screen interviews as well as an audio commentary, they are amiable about SPINE just the same, and provide plenty of info about its genesis and the pitfalls of low-budget filmmaking.  A stills gallery and a couple of trailers for other Massacre Video titles round out the extras, and as per their usual high standards, they have also provided reversible cover-art, which replicates the original – and unique – big box cover art.  Order SPINE here.