Speed Cross

A little patience is required for this film, but hang in there because the kick-ass Rollerball-like motorbike race at the end is totally worth it. I'm saying it's like Rollerball, but think Rollerball on a really tight budget. Really tight.

Hunky Fabio Testi and not hunky but keen Vittoria Mezzogiorno are two motocross enthusiasts who join up for a race in Germany somewhere (or Switzerland, I'm not sure). From the get-go it seems to Testi as the race might by a bit iffy, as a bunch of heavies lead by campily-dubbed Romano Puppo try and supress the local journalists who are voicing their suspicions causing Testi and his mate to step in. Vittoria also has an eye for the ladies, especially blonde, short-pant wearing petrol station attendant Ilga, and she might like him too, but she still beds Testi first.

The sinister dude Meyer who runs these races has the whole thing fixed and knows who's going to win already - it's Puppo, who's a bit of a swiss-army hired goon in that he wins Meyer's races and kills off nosy people on his downtime. The guy he killed off has somehow managed to ditch the evidence, but did he give it to Ilga?

Ilga ends up dead next and Testi comforts Vittoria by telling him she wasn't all that in the sack which earns him a sock in the jaw. The hired goons then turn on these two but the question is - when are we going to get to the killer, stunt filled race at the end? And will anyone pick-up impossibly good-looking hooker Lia Tanzi?

I didn't think Massi's Speed Driver was the greatest, but Speed Cross is more like it - cheesy, funky (love that song at the beginning and end!), with Testi being dumb and good looking and a violent race at the end with bikes and bodies flying everywhere. Freeze frame ending too, with some slow motion punch ups on the side. It's about as realistic as those lip filler things people keep getting but I enjoyed, so maybe those people enjoy their swollen, unnatural lips as they try and get some soup in there.

Another collaboration between Fabio Testi and director Stelvio Massi, and slightly better than the same year's SPEED DRIVER. This time around Testi is a motorbike racer who gets involved with the usual gang of goons who proceed to make his life a misery. A good cast in this one doing their bit, but the story is rather small scale and slightly dull in parts. It makes up for this with the excellent and violent motorbike race that makes up the climax of the movie.

You gotta hand it to the Italians. They can find a genre in anything & make movies about them. In the early 1960's they made movies about Gladiators. Then they made Spaghetti Westerns. Then Spy Movies, Gothic Horrors, War Flicks, Giallo Slashers, Crime Trash Epics, Racing Movies, Rampaging Shark thrillers, STAR WARS ripoffs, and then modern horror. What's really neat about the Italians is that scripts & performances really didn't matter, often being reused from movie to movie, just like their stock pool of B movie actors.

So what distinguishes individual examples of Italian cult cinema are the people involved: This one happens to be about racing motorcycles and stars Fabio Testi as an undercover cop who infiltrates the closed world of professional motocross racing to solve an old case and settle a personal score, or something to that extent. The movie mixes stock footage of motorcycle races with scenes of off-tack intrigue that when edited together & given a musical score function as a feature length narrative.

This film has a lot of almost Gladitorial bike riding with competing riders trying to force each other off the road combined with a political corruption subplot, and may have been inspired by ROLLERBALL with James Caan. Such concerns are irrelevant -- The movie has a familiarity to it that is decidedly Italian in it's proprietary nature. You don't have to see a lot of motocross racing movies to enjoy the show, and as offbeat, obscure macho man entertainments go this one is pretty good, even if it is all pretty silly after all is said & done.

"Relaxingly stupid", with a fine disco era soundtrack, excellent color photography, a good buddy role for Fabio's sidekick, and another gem of an appearance by my hero, the late Romano Puppo, playing a bare-fisted motocross thug named "Kurt Schmidbauer" who works for Mr. Big. His job? Beating people up: Can you say "Posthumous Lifetime Achievement Oscar?" I tell you, give me two hours of this any day and you can keep your Tom Cruise, pointless remakes, juvenile superhero thrillers and movies about whacko candy magnates who creepily resemble Michael Jackson. Hollywood may be out of it's slump but their product is still in decline, and the honesty of these dumb little Italian films is refreshingly invigorating.

6/10.