Star Knight (1985)

Original title: El caballero del dragón

There’s trouble afoot in the realm (consisting of his castle and one measly village, apparently) of the Count of Rue (José Vivó). His main henchperson, the ironically named Klever (Harvey Keitel, apparently having come to medieval times via New York, dubbing himself and therefore thee-ing and thou-ing with a Brooklyn accent that won’t leave a dry eye in the house) is overly ambitious and permanently annoys him with his wish to be knighted as well as with his painful attempts at wooing the count’s daughter, Princess (medieval titles work rather strangely around here it seems) Alba (Maria Lamor). Alba for her part can’t stop going on about wanting to find true romantic love – but please not Klever’s. To make the poor count’s life even more miserable, his priest Lupo (Fernando Rey) and his alchemist (Klaus Kinski as…a nice guy) don’t get along, either. Oh, and his vassals don’t love him either, which might have something to do with him being a bit of a tool and – being a member of the ruling classes – a parasite.

Things become really complicated when an UFO the populace takes for a dragon lands at a place charmingly dubbed “the Mouth of Hell”. Soon, Alba is abducted for a bit by its pilot, one Ix (Miguel Bosé), while she is sneaking out of the castle for a bit of gratuitous skinny dipping, and falls in love with him. Alas, interspecies romances are difficult, particularly since Lupo sees the devil everywhere it’ll get him ahead and Klever would really like to improve his place in life by a bit of dragon slaying.

I have no idea how Fernando Colomo’s deeply peculiar SF comedy came about, or how he managed to cast Kinski, Keitel and Rey, and I’m not too sure about what this thing is actually supposed to be about. exactly. I do know I rather enjoyed my time watching a dubbed PD print – with all the potential for cuts, the heart-breaking full screen image, and the generally mediocre visual quality that comes with this sort of thing - of it.

The film’s comedy is broad but not beholden to slapstick. Instead, is consists of a series of asides against church, state and authority figures that somehow take up most of the running time, some running gags like the regular appearance of a Green Knight who has a hell of time with his inability guarding a bridge or the local peasantry regularly having to dye their single piece of clothing a different colour depending on their count’s mood of the week, and a smidgen of perfectly undramatic yet somehow charming plot.

One really shouldn’t go into this one expecting excitement brought by narrative or storytelling. The joy – and I for one found a lot of joy hidden away here – is all in watching Keitel pretending to be a very stupid would-be knight or Kinski being benign, or just in being held in pleasant anticipation of the peculiar or goofy thing Colomo will come up next. That last bit is a surprising source of funny, silly and pleasing moments of the sort that will keep a slight pleased grin on the face of any viewer as childlike as I like to be when watching a movie.

As a surprising bonus, the production design – particularly Ix’s space ship – isn’t half bad, the castle looks homely enough, and even the bad print can’t hide that the photography is nice to look at too. That’s quite a lot of pleasing and enjoyable nonsense for one’s fifty cents.

In short: L'occhio dietro la parete (1977)

aka Eyes Behind The Wall

If you have seen enough movies of a genre that was a local and temporal phenomenon, you'll in the end reach a point where a large part of the films in it that are still new to you just aren't very good at all. Case in point is my relationship with the giallo, so it is like a minor gold find when I encounter a film in the genre I haven't seen before that isn't complete crap. Giuliano Petrelli's movie (the only writing and direction work by an actor) is such a film, and certainly worth watching for the more jaded giallo fan.

Sure, the film suffers a bit from typical 70s psychology (including some really unpleasant ideas about homosexuality) and the resulting character clichés it pretends to be deep characterization, there's dialogue that confuses pseudo-intellectualism for intelligence, and a dominant wish to underplay the script's most lurid elements as if Petrelli were a little ashamed of them and would in truth have preferred to make a more straightforward psychological thriller about voyeurism and bourgeois sexual desperation without wandering too deeply into the fields of melodramatic sexual perversion it can't quite keep away from. Or it might be Petrelli thought he was being subtle about the sexual melodrama of his plot instead of a bit prudish.

Be that as it may, the film still has things to recommend it: some solid acting by Olga Bisera, Fernando Rey (how often did that poor guy have to play an impotent man in a wheelchair in his career?) and John Phillip Law (who applies himself so much he even has a frontally nude muscle training sequence, so fans of nude John Phillip Law can very much rejoice), a script that from time to time manages to not just shy away from certain genre conventions but actually manages to surprise by subverting them a little, a Goblin-esque soundtrack by Giuseppe Caruso, and stark yet stylish visuals that make the film look more thoughtful and precise than it actually is.

At this point in my giallo-watching career, Eyes Behind the Wall is a minor discovery worth celebrating.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,giallo,giuliano petrelli,john phillip law,fernando rey,olga bisera

Cold Eyes Of Fear (1971)

Original title: Gli occhi freddi della paura

Italian prostitute-in-London-exile Anna (Giovanna Ralli) did probably not expect going home with charming young solicitor Peter Flower (Gianni Garko) would end up to be quite as dangerous.

Soon after the couple has arrived at the home Peter shares with his uncle, Judge Flower (Fernando Rey), the corpse of the house's butler falls out of a cupboard, and they are threatened by a cockney with a gun (Julián Mateos). Quill, as the guy is called, doesn't actually seem to want anything from his victims right now, so a long, tense wait for something the criminal's victims are not sure of ensues.

Eventually, a cop (Frank Wolff) sent by the judge with a snarky "put away your strippers for a moment and look up some law for me" letter for Peter arrives. However, when Peter tries to clue the cop in on his plight, all he gets in return is a fist in his face, for the cop isn't really a cop, but Arthur Welt, the brain behind the whole strange criminal affair. Arthur has a plan that involves murdering the Judge for revenge and looting his house of certain files; his problem is that he doesn't know where the files are located, so he and Quill need to stay much longer at the Judge's villa than they'd like to. A cat-and-mouse game between them, Peter, and Anna begins that may turn deadly at any moment.

We who know and love the body of work of director Enzo G. Castellari mostly love him for his Eurocrime films, his handful of Spaghetti Western and his post-apocalyptic movies - all basically different kinds of action films - while ignoring his horrible TV action comedies (don't talk to me about the Extralarge films, maaan) as well as his more interesting sporadic expeditions into other genres. Often, that's pretty understandable, for the films Castellari took on outside of his core genres often aren't quite as exciting or complex as his action films are, even when they are not utter tripe.

Cold Eyes Of Fear is Castellari's contribution to the giallo. The film comes down heavily on the suspense-based thriller side of the genre, working with a plot thrillers have used at least since the time of the noir (I suspect since the beginning of time). Large parts of the film (with the big exception being the pretty random inclusion of a fight between bikers, what looks like fat karateka to me, and the police that might hint at the direction Castellari's post-apocalyptic movies would later take) take place inside of a few rooms inside of a villa, the Judge's office and a police call centre, therefore preventing Castellari from indulging in the awesome, largely movement-based action scenes he is so good at.

Instead the director uses fast, sometimes nervous cuts, his zoom lens, a bit of standard giallo stylishness and lots of close-ups on the faces of a fine cast doing fine work to bring a sometimes tight, sometimes flabby script to life. Castellari also indulges in moments of pop-art surrealism to illustrate his characters' inner lives, which clearly isn't playing to his strengths; these scenes work on a camp level, but aren't as good at fulfilling the function of fleshing out the characters as they are supped to do, especially when you keep in mind that an actor like Wolff really has no need for this sort of visual crutch to show that his character is losing it fastly.

Still, the film does work more often than not, and even finds time to ask questions about some of Castellari's pet themes - the difference between justice and the law, as well as the influence of class on the two - as ever without finding any satisfactory answers. In fact, there's an especially great, silent moment between Garko and Rey right at the film's end that probably says more about the nature of corruption than any long philosophical discussion ever could.

Yet even if it weren't for that moment or the performances of the cast throughout the film, it would be worth it getting through Cold Eyes of Fear's too slow moments for the fantastic climax that once again demonstrates Castellari's class as a director of physical violence, be it between hordes of thugs or just between four frightened and mad people in a dark house.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,giallo,enzo g. castellari,giovanna ralli,frank wolff,fernando rey,gianni garko

The Big Muscle Tussle: Goliath Against the Giants (1961)

Original title: Goliath contro i giganti

Throughout February, the members of M.O.S.S. have decided to bring some meat onto their exoskeletons by taking a look at film's most beefcake-y heroines and heroes. And what better example of a male slab of meat is there than that guy from the bible?

The intensely heroic Goliath (Brad Harris) leads an army of his hometown Beirath (shouldn't that be Gath?) to free and/or conquer a town that may or may not be Sparta from the evils of tyranny. Or something.

While the notorious do-gooder is away slaughtering people, the evil yet dumb Bokan (Fernando Rey, providing his bad guy with all the menace of a petulant child), usurps the throne of Beirath, killing the old king and his wife in the process. Somehow - and we unfortunately never learn how exactly he manages that trick - Bokan convinces the old king's daughter Elea (Gloria Milland) that Goliath is responsible for her father's death; which really would be quite something even for the highly competent mass murderer Goliath, seeing as he was at the other side of the world at the time. Let's not even talk about the fact that Bokan's acting like a sadistic jerk, letting his men throw people down a cliff, and later even ruining gladiatorial combat through his dickishness, which does make him look about as trustworthy as the real-world dictator of your choice.

Once Goliath is victorious, Bokan at once sends assassins to get rid of him. Obviously, these assassins don't succeed and only manage to convince Goliath that he's really needed back home. So home Goliath tries to go. Alas, travel in ancient times was not particularly safe. Consequently, our hero has to fight sea lizards, amazons, and bad weather and will lose most of his friends before he can return home and have a talk with the usurper. On his way, the muscled hero also picks up Elea, whom Bokan somehow managed to transport onto an island where every ship sailing to Beirath lands to take on drinking water before Goliath can arrive there. Initially, Elea's job is to kill Goliath, but soon enough, his mighty pectoral muscles, his kind heart and possibly his body count win her over to the beefy one's side.

Things don't look good for Bokan (or his wife, who is supposedly the brains in the operation but only compared to her hubby's utter idiocy), even though he still has more than one plan for getting rid of Goliath; too bad for him none of his plans are ever any good.

After the quite atypical for its genre Vengeance of Hercules I couldn't help myself and just had to watch another, altogether more typical, peplum for M.O.S.S.'s Big Muscle Tussle.

In one of the more surprising turns of events when it comes to the naming - or rather renaming - of peplum heroes outside of Italy, Goliath actually is Goliath in the film's Italian version, too. I suspect the producers of the US version were confident that their presumably bible-thumping countrymen would recognize the name of Goliath from their favourite book. But don't worry, gentle atheist friends, there's nothing Christian, and not much biblical about the film at all. Consequently, the only country where this particular film's hero isn't called Goliath is my native Germany. Around here, the film is known as Die Irrfahrten des Hercules which brilliantly translates to "The Odyssey of Hercules", because if Odysseus can have one, Herc can, too. At least, it's not all that less fitting a title than the original one - after all, Goliath fights the titular giants for about one minute, if in fact the cavemen he is fighting right at the end are supposed to be those giants.

Anyhow, compared to Vengeance of Hercules, Goliath is a film much more unified in tone, which is somewhat ironic in a film that's as episodic as this one. However, all the film's episodes at least seem to belong to the same genre and the same film. Plus, director Guido Malatesta (there are stories by writer and production designer Gianfranco Parolini about how Malatesta was fired from the movie and he finished it, but these stories are also full of Parolini telling us how awesome he himself is supposed to be, and how everyone else is an utter moron, so it's a bit difficult for me to see them as true) has decided to concentrate on his hero Goliath and not waste time on horrible emo sons or other horrors, and only leaves his hero's perspective to demonstrate how evil Bokan is.

Where the Hercules movie - possibly helped by its position early in the peplum wave - has ambitions on being something more complicated than your average peplum, Malatesta's film only ever wants to be an adventure movie about a buff and violent but also nice and not too dumb guy throwing people at other people (as a rule of thumb, if there's no scene of the hero throwing a bad guy - dead or alive - at other bad guys, the movie at hand clearly is not a true peplum), wrestling monstrous water lizards, the mandatory guy in a mangy ape suit (nope, I don't know why that one's caged in Bokan's dungeon either), lions that turn into adorable large lion dolls at the drop of a bodybuilder, monstrous land lizards, and rather large cavemen who may or may not be giants. I'm somewhat disappointed there's no scene of Goliath wrestling amazons, but at least his best friend and boring sidekick Blandy McBland (actual character name may differ) acquires a cute girlfriend (Barbara Carroll) there, who then proceeds to do nothing at all, robbing me of the opportunity of declaring this part of The Big Muscle Tussle as the one where muscle-carrying women finally get their moment in the spotlight. Okay, Barbara Carroll isn't muscular at all, but it would still have been a plan better than any of those Bokan cooks up.

Where was I before I was so pleasantly distracted by the thought of violent women? Right, as I was saying, Malatesta's film is a very standard peplum that treats its material like you would an equally standard adventure movie - just with a hero who really, really likes to show off his muscles - shot in a decent and straight style that's entertaining enough to watch but never even strives for the dream-like mood some of the better films of the peplum genre feature. If you're like me, always on the look out for the homoerotic as well as the sado-masochistic elements in these films, this one isn't particular fruitful, either, apart from a scene where Blandy McBland is tortured by what I hereby dub the Wheel With Blades. It's the kind of device that needs half a dozen slaves doing the Conan to work, and effortlessly wins the prize of least probable torture device of the week.

That scene, as well as the complete randomness with which the monsters appear (well, possibly the complete randomness of everything in the script), is of course very silly if one is the kind of viewer who takes herself very seriously, but then again, what business has somebody of those tastes watching a movie called Goliath Against the Giants? I, for one, welcome our half-naked muscular overlords, as long as they wrestle monsters.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,peplum,reviews,guido malatesta,brad harris,gloria milland,fernando rey,barbara carroll