Exploito All’Italiana: Roma Violenta (Marino Girolami, 1975)

Released in the USA under the name ‘Violent City’ (but definitely not to be confused with the 1970 Sergio Sollima / Charles Bronson joint of the same name), ‘Roma Violenta’ (no translation needed, I’m assuming) represents the Italian poliziotteschi at its most reactionary and utilitarian, boiling the right wing fantasies of ‘Dirty Harry’ and ‘Death Wish’ down to a sticky, unpalatable paste, and serving it up with a skimpy garnish of cut price action and lurid sadism.

The film is historically significant however for introducing the world to Euro-Crime icon Maurizio Merli, and to his signature character Commissario Betti – an expressionless, blonde moustached human torpedo on a one-man mission to crack the skull and/or puncture the lungs of every small-time hood who dares set foot in one of Italy’s major metropolitan areas.

Generally assumed to have been cast as a result of his passing resemblance to Franco Nero, who had recently had recently scored big at the box office playing crusading cops in Enzo Castellari’s ‘High Crime’ (1973) and ‘Street Law’ (’74), Merli’s dead-eyed, suspect-pulverizing persona must have proved popular with audiences, as he went on to reprise the Betti character in both Umberto Lenzi’s ‘Napoli Violenta’ and Girolami’s ‘Italia a Mano Armata’ [export title ‘Special Cop in Action’] the following year, before essaying a series of similarly two-fisted Inspectors and Commissarios in films for Lenzi, Stelvio Massi and other directors throughout the late ‘70s.

An entirely generic distillation of everything you might expect of one of these movies, ‘Roma Violenta’ begins the only way it could, with a bunch of gun-toting, stocking-masked punks hi-jacking a city bus and stealing valuables from the passengers. Of course, it all goes wrong, and of course an innocent bystander (a seventeen year old boy – guaranteed to elicit maximum hand-wringing from proponents of the poliziotteschi’s none-more-macho mindset) is callously gunned down. A promising life, senselessly wasted! Is Commissario Betti going to stand for this? Hell no!

In between blustering through the offices of his uncaring, desk-jockey superiors, angrily demanding more men and more money for his ‘special squad’ to combat this intolerable crime wave, Merli is soon on the trail of the bus robbery’s perpetrators, thus treating us to an explanatory demonstration of his no nonsense approach to police-work.

This basically consists of Betti meeting with his top undercover man Biondi (played an impossibly youthful-looking Ray Lovelock), who tells him, “it was that guy over there”, prompting our hero to trap said guy in an empty bus (irony, ‘Roma Violenta’ style) and beat the living shit out of him (information gathering, ‘Roma Violenta’ style).

Already, the film’s political stance has been taken to such a comical extreme that for a moment I almost suspected it had crossed the line into a Judge Dredd style parody of fascistic law enforcement. Certainly, as Merli beats this unarmed youth to verge of death whilst demanding he “confess”, it is difficult for our sympathies to remain fully on the right side of the law… but then, I’m bleeding heart, liberal do-gooder, so what the hell do I know?

Perhaps in order to off-set this potential drift of audience sympathy, ‘Roma Violenta’ is notable for its failure (or refusal?) to in any way engage with the lives and activities of its criminal antagonists. Surprisingly, there is no suggestion at any point in the film that the teen hoods and low rent villains Betti combats are connected to an organised crime network or criminal syndicate, and, disappointingly, there are no cigar-chewing, Lionel Stander Mafiosi, twisted, Tomas Milian-style psychopaths or calculating John Saxon overseers to liven things up either.

Though some solid performers (John Steiner and the ubiquitous Luciano Rossi, for example) are on hand to play the more experienced crooks, none of them are ever given the chance to develop much of a personality, and for the most part the film’s baddies remain nameless, gun-toting young hooligans, whose criminal ambitions are limited to opportunistic hit-and-run attacks and the occasional, poorly planned armed robbery. All of which rather makes a mockery of Belli’s repeated insistence that he needs greater resources and special legal dispensation to fight this existential threat to law & order, needless to say.

Under such circumstances, even the most brutal of crime films would normally at least pay lip service to the social inequalities that might lead young people to embark on such crime sprees, but no dice here. In classic Michael Winner tradition, these punks come out of nowhere like goblins, depriving the well-to-do of their gold watches and man-handling their women, before scampering off again, leaving blood and bodies in their wake.

Having noted during the opening credits that the great Richard Conte appears in ‘Roma Violenta’, I could barely wait to see him pop up as a suave, sadistic mob boss (a stereotype he’d gleefully perfected over the years in everything from ‘The Big Combo’ (1955) to Fernando Di Leo’s ‘Il Boss’ (1973)), but again, the film defies our expectations by casting Conte as a good guy - namely, one “Mr Sartori”, a campaigning lawyer who invites Betti to join his freelance vigilante justice group after our man (inevitably) quits the police force in disgust.

Now, in any other crime movie, when a venerable Italian-American character actor invites our protagonist to shake hands with a group of men who are lined up in what appears to be a meat locker, and distributes glossy photos of some people he wishes them to track down and hospitalise… well, we might reasonably expect our hero to contemplate the possibility that his strict moral code has been somewhat compromised. But, as we have established, ‘Roma Violenta’ is a movie of very little brain, and Mr Sartori’s earnest dedication to the pursuit of justice is never questioned.

Instead, he very nearly finds himself becoming one of the film’s several vengeance-justifying sacrificial victims, when a gang of particularly scruffy-looking villains invade his home and hold him at knife-point. It is at this point that Mr Sartori’s previously unmentioned daughter descends the stairs, and the uncredited actress playing her gets to enjoy a full three seconds of screen time before – you guessed it – she is stripped naked and raped by the thugs.

A drearily nasty business, replete with cynically opportunistic frontal nudity, this sequence gains a touch of class from Conte’s appalled reaction shots; a real pro, even when working in such reduced circumstances, he sells his character’s wide-eyed horror very well.

Predictably, this treatment is about par for the course for female characters in ‘Roma Violenta’. There are a few brief scenes in which Merli goes to visit his girlfriend (played by Euro-cult regular Daniela Giordano), who appears to manage a hotel, but this has no connection with anything else that happens in the film, and basically feel as if it has been tacked on solely in order to establish that Betti is in a monogamous relationship with a woman - lest the audience suspect that he might actually be some kind of weirdo, vis-a-vis his “lone wolf” lifestyle and apparent enthusiasm for inflicting sadistic beatings upon younger men.

Nameless Girlfriend aside however, I’m not sure there is a single woman this movie who gets to speak more than a single line of dialogue before being arbitrarily murdered or assaulted…. which I’ll admit puts me in a bit of a critical quandary. After all, if I’m to continue to defend Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’ or Kinji Fukasaku’s yakuza films against accusations of misogyny, citing the argument that they are merely portraying (rather than endorsing) a hyper-masculine world in which women are forcibly denied a voice, surely I should do ‘Roma Violenta’ the same courtesy...?

As much as I hate to recognise distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cinematic culture though, at some point I suppose you’ve just got to draw a line in the sand and – in this case - declare that Peckinpah and Fukasaku made critically-engaged, emotionally-nuanced films which can (at a stretch) be read as implicit critiques of the kind of toxic machismo they specialised in portraying. Marino Girolami on the other hand…

Well -- I don’t know. For all that I’ve torn it apart above, I don’t want to come down too hard on ‘Roma Violenta’. As egregious and simple-minded as its content may sound in the abstract, the actual execution here is so pulpy and paper-thin that it is impossible to really take offense.

As with his other Euro-Cult calling card (1981’s hugely entertaining Zombi Holocaust), Girolami essentially directs here as if he were pasting together a cheap fumetti comic book, banging through scenes in a rough, first-take-best-take manner that, whilst it rarely crosses the line into actual incompetence, suggests an attempt to wring maximum impact from a bare minimum of effort.

Wasting no time on such niceties as character, narrative depth or visual interest, Girolami comes down hard on the pacing, producing a movie that – whilst it scarcely contains a single line of dialogue that doesn’t feel like a perfunctory reiteration of genre cliché – is rarely dull, remaining eminently watchable, and indeed rather likeable, in an “after a few beers” kind of way.

The film’s overall highlights are probably the moments in which robberies and assaults are staged on crowded city streets, complete with gawping by-standers and barely choreographed chaos, including a hilarious skit in which some purse-snatchers get their asses kicked by an undercover police karate expert, made up in drag as an old lady.

Merli’s numerous beat downs meanwhile are creditably staged, complete with quick edits and bone-crunching sound effects that could have come straight from a slightly sluggish kung fu movie, and, though comically under-cranked, the obligatory car chase also packs a punch, hitting all the necessary poliziotteschi pleasure points, as a bunch of those tiny ‘70s Italian cars we all love so much roar precariously around an unfinished motorway flyover, allowing Girolami to make the most of his minimal resources, cannily switching back and forth between overhead shots and ‘bumper-cam’ for a touch of proto-‘Mad Max’ excitement.

By far the best thing ‘Roma Violenta’ has going for it though is the music, which comes courtesy of producer Guido de Angelis, working as usual in collaboration with his brother Maurizio. And, the de Angelis boys are really on top form here too, working out a kind of propulsive, disco-influenced progressive rock sound with a strong melancholy undertone provided by some poignant lead playing on keyboard, flute and harmonica. As exemplified by compilation staple New Special Squad, it’s a stone-cold classic of ‘70s cop movie music, and comes highly recommended.

And…. that’s about all I have to say about ‘Roma Violenta’, to honest. It may not be one of the better poliziotteschi pictures, but, if you can turn off your brain (and your conscience), stop asking questions, and simply revel in the surfeit of ‘70s Cop Vibes it provides (mm, all that fuzzy, nicotine-stained brown), it’s a pleasantly psychotic timewaster.

I do wonder what Girolami thought about the fact that, whilst he was treading water on stuff like this, his own son (the aforementioned Enzo G. Castellari) was busy outclassing him with a series of vastly more accomplished additions to the genre, hitting his peak the following year with one of my all-time favourite European action/crime films, ‘The Big Racket’, but…. that’s another story, I suppose. For now, let’s knock this one on the head and hopefully we’ll get around to it one day.

Exploito All’Italiana: Zombi Holocaust (Marino Girolami, 1981)

(In the absence of any decent scans of an original Italian poster, let’s enjoy this splendid effort from Thailand.)

When it comes to the “rip off” aesthetic that increasingly dominated Italian genre cinema from the late ‘70s onwards, wherein cash-strapped producers ceased even trying to differentiate their product from the prior hits they were cashing in on, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more glorious example of the phenomenon’s ultimate, self-consuming end-point than ‘Zombi Holocaust’ – an infamously shoddy venture that forms something of a line in the sand for fans of Euro-horror/exploitation.

For many, this film represents the bottom of the barrel in terms of mindlessly derivative cine-sludge, whilst for others of a less discerning / more adventurous nature [delete as applicable], it instead forms the gateway to a whole new subterranean kingdom of trash-horror wonderment. Either way, it’s quite the thing to behold, and even the highest minded aficionados of this-sort-of-thing probably owe it to themselves to sit down and give it a try at some point – if only to test their individual tolerance for further trash-gore spelunking.

Often playing more like an extended cult cinema in-joke than a stand-alone movie, the sheer opportunistic shamelessness of the logic behind ‘Zombi Holocaust’s existence (basically: ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ was a hit? ‘Zombi 2’ [aka ‘Zombie’ (U.S.), ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’ (U.K.)] was a hit? Et Voila = ZOMBI HOLOCAUST!) is already somewhat irresistible, whilst the fact that one of the films it is chiefly cannibalizing was *already* an unauthorised Italian sequel to a successful American movie (‘Dawn of the Dead’, released in Italy as ‘Zombi’) takes cinematic plagiarism to what at the time must have been new and giddy heights. (I’m sure if you follow the bread-crumb trail a few years down the line, you’ll find that someone in turn started making rip-offs of ‘Zombi Holocaust’, and so the glorious cycle continues.)*

Actually, the lengths to which ‘Zombi Holocaust’ goes to rip off Lucio Fulci’s film in particular are really quite extraordinary. I mean, I can see the rationale for borrowing the basic plot outline, using similar zombie make up and even rehiring the same lead actor (fan favourite Ian McCulloch) - but was there REALLY an audience back in 1980 who were liable to sit there thinking, “OMG, that isolated house in the jungle looks EXACTLY like the one in ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’, and that low angle shot where the Landrover arrives in the village is exactly the same too! I am so psyched!”..?

I don’t know, but if such peculiar viewers did exist, they certainly would have found themselves well catered for here, as ‘Zombi Holocaust’ repeatedly reaches that baffling point on the “rip off” spectrum wherein the effort taken to painstakingly recreate entirely incidental details from an earlier film exceeds that which would have been necessary to feign originality by actually just shooting some new stuff that might have proved more appealing to the target audience… and scratching one’s head over the twisted logic of such decision-making is but one of many, many small pleasures that help make Girolami’s film such endlessly charming viewing for us jaded 21st century know-it-alls.

Taking a “2 + 2 = ?!?!” approach to combining elements of its two source texts, ‘Zombi Holocaust’s New York set opening – in which cultists belonging to an obscure Asian cannibal sect are found to be rampaging around a city hospital misappropriating body parts – is a pure, politically questionable b-movie delight. Reminding me somewhat of the equally unlikely Quetzalcoatl cultist sub-plot in Larry Cohen’s ‘Q: The Winged Serpent’, I can’t help wishing that they’d spun this idea out into an entire movie of its own.

But at the same time, I’m also glad they didn’t, because then we would have missed out on the earnest discussions conducted between the police and the pipe-smoking “Professor Drydock” (no, really) from the University, and their decision that the best solution to this problem is to ask the Mighty McCulloch (is his character a doctor of some kind, or a policeman? I’m not really sure it’s make clear) to step in and head up an expedition to the remote islands in the East Indies from which the cult originated, where, accompanied by a photogenic anthropology-studying nurse (Alexandra Delli Colli), some other guy and the obligatory interfering journalist, he will uncover the secrets of this benighted cannibal tribe and… well, I don’t know really.

I mean, wouldn’t be easier to just arrest the people who are getting up to all the monkey business at the hospital, and go from there? You know, interrogate them, look for witnesses, that sort of thing? But what do I know of police work. Pack your khakis and don’t forget the mosquito net - the boat leaves at dawn!

And so, as absurdity piles upon absurdity, ‘Zombi Holocaust’ repeatedly demonstrates that, despite its aspirations toward innard-chewing, brain-sawing video nasty infamy, at heart it really has more in common with old psychotronic favourites like ‘Mesa of Lost Women’ (1953) or ‘Horrors of Spider Island’ (1960) – a goofy, comforting little b-movie that is fully aware of its own silliness, whilst simultaneously remaining conscious of the fact that actually cracking a smile would cause the audience’s enjoyment to crumble like the Walls of Jericho.

That the credited director of this mess was actually the FATHER of Italian action supremo Enzo G. Castellari was something I initially found inordinately amusing (it’s easy to imagine Enzo taking breaks from whatever ‘Jaws’/’Dirty Dozen’ rip-off he was making at the time to field excruciating “No Dad, THIS is how you do a tracking shot..” style phone calls) - until that is, I checked IMDB and discovered that ‘Zombi Holocaust’ was actually Marino Girolami’s seventy second film as director, and that he had in fact been calling “action” on lower budget genre pictures pretty much non-stop since 1950.

We could speculate as to whether it was a deficit of quality or sheer bad luck that ensured that none of Girolami’s films prior to this one have ever gained much exposure outside of Italy, but given the number of technically accomplished European directors who found themselves delivering absolute rubbish when the VHS horror boom hit in the ‘80s, it would seem manifestly unfair to make a judgment call on his work based solely on ‘Zombi Holocaust’ - so I won’t.

Either way though, it seems likely that the director’s veteran status may have contributed somewhat to the strangely old-fashioned feel of ‘Zombi Holocaust’. Whilst it is ostensibly still a gore-soaked rampage through a tropical hell, the film somehow ends up feeling just sort of… I don’t know… nice, even whilst poorly paid local extras in ridiculous b-western Indian get-up are gobbling cream of tomato soup from some poor unfortunate’s latex torso.

Despite what I take to be the producers’ best efforts to pile on the nastiness, this one entirely lacks the mean-spirited extremity or queasy gross up agenda of a contemporary Fulci or Deodato film. Much like the minimum-of-effort “bloodshed” usually employed by Jess Franco, this is purely emblematic gore – any resemblance to the real thing is purely coincidental. Like everything in ‘Zombi Holocaust’, it’s all offered up in a spirit of pure, casual fun, with little suggestion that anyone is ever actually in pain.

And, essentially, I could continue trudging through a blow-by-blow account of all the great stuff in ‘Zombi Holocaust’ until the cows come home. There’s the square-jawed, cheque-collecting determination of McCulloch’s “I-failed-the-audition-for-Indiana-Jones-and-woke-up-here” lead performance for instance - or how about the perfectly shaped stone mold that the cannibals have lying around ready for Delli Colli after they strip her naked and body-paint her with some pretty flowers? (Hippy cannibals, eh? Well, you live and learn.).

From the adorably off-beat antics of Donald O’Brien as one of the least hygienic yet most strangely sincere mad scientists seen this side of the 1950s, to the to the bit where one of expedition’s dubiously portrayed ‘native porters’ almost throws an “oh man, you mean I gotta bury ANOTHER body..” style teenage strop after our heroes respond to the grizzly demise of his friend with scarcely more than a “huh, there ya go” shrug… well, you get the picture. There is just so much to enjoy here.

You can mock ‘Zombi Holocaust’ all you like, but to give Girolami his due, at the end of the day it is a vastly more entertaining prospect than most of the other bottom-feeding zombie/cannibal snoozefests that emerged in the early ‘80s (yes, I’m looking at you, Eurocine). This is chiefly due to the fact that, for all of its many shortcomings, the picture rattles along like a goddamned freight train, never resorting to dreary ‘padding out the run time’ type footage and rarely going more than a couple of minutes without throwing us something divertingly awesome and/or ridiculous to chew on.

Add one standing ovation-worthy Classic Gore Moment (all I need say is: outboard motor), the eventual appearence of some genuinely kind-of-scary looking zombies (well, I liked them), and a pitch perfect grinding, electronic dirge of a score from Nico Fidenco (whose 70s/80s CV is so sleazy, this almost counts as a career highlight), and, for those with the alchemical suss to suitably process it, ‘Zombi Holocaust’ is pure gold - a mighty anti-classic that no one with even the slightest fondness for Italian trash cinema could fail to love like a disfigured child.

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* On the cannibals-meet-zombies tip, Bruno Mattei’s actually-pretty-great ‘Zombie Creeping Flesh’ aka ‘Hell of the Living Dead’ (which premiered about six months after this film) springs to mind as an obvious ‘Zombi Holocaust’ descendent, although I’m not exactly about to call the lawyers in over that one, y’know what I mean.