Season for Assassins (1975)

Within the Italian poliziottesco genre, there was a sub-genre of “youth gone wild” films.  These films would typically portray the Italian youth as entitled, violent sociopaths who committed crimes out of sheer boredom.  Savage Three, Like Rabid Dogs, and Young, Violent, Dangerous are all examples of this sub-genre.  Season for Assassins is another such film, but in this film’s case there’s more focus on the loved ones of the young criminals and how their lives are impacted by the selfish acts of said criminals.

Season for Assassins focuses on the life of a young petty-thief named Pierro, played by Joe Dallessandro.  Pierro has aspirations of becoming a criminal kingpin by working his way up from the bottom of the underworld.  He and his hooligan friends are shown pulling off burglaries for small sums of money, when of course they’re not riding around Rome terrorizing those who get in their path.  The opening plays out much like the opening of A Clockwork Orange, but that’s as far as the comparisons go.  Gradually, different characters in Pierro’s life are introduced.  We learn that Pierro is a father to a newborn and that he has a wife named Rossana.  Rossana is a former prostitute who is now committed to being a mother, even though Pierro is neglecting both her and the child.  We are also introduced to Pierro’s family priest, Father Eugenio, who has faith in the young man and attempts to help Pierro stay on the straight and narrow, despite Pierro constantly brushing him off.  Finally, a third significant character enters Pierro’s personal life, a naïve, young girl named Sandra, who Pierro strikes up a romantic relationship with.  These three characters will all eventually be negatively impacted by Pierro’s selfish and destructive lifestyle.  In one particular case, the impact is fatal.

While Pierro is going around wreaking havoc, a very jaded and disgruntled police captain, played by screen legend Martin Balsam, is nipping at the heels of Pierro and hoping to finally set the right trap that catches the hoodlum.  Balsam’s character is supposed to act as the counterpoint to Father Eugenio.  Where Eugenio sees hope for the young man, Balsam sees a thug and lost cause who will inevitably hurt and/or kill several people before he gets himself killed or caught.  I suppose another parallel could be drawn from this and A Clockwork Orange in terms of the debate over whether or not criminals can truly be reformed.  Unfortunately, this question is handled rather clumsily in Season for Assassins.

It’s commendable that director Marcello Andrei attempts to construct emotional depth within the characters of his piece, but most of them still come off as one dimensional.  With the Pierro character, specifically, there’s a scene where he’s shown to be physically ill by the violent actions that he allows to occur against one of his loved ones.  However, this is the only moment in the movie where the character seems to show any remorse or humanity.  We are never given Pierro’s backstory to have a better understanding of how he got to this point in his life and potentially feel some empathy for the character.  Another problematic aspect to the film is that Andrei can’t seem to decide if he’s making a melodrama or an exploitation film.  The scenes between Pierro and his young mistress, Sandra, bounce from being honest and genuinely dramatic one minute to being sleazy and exploitative the next.  It makes for a very uneven viewing experience.

Despite these flaws, Season for Assassins is certainly worth seeking out for the hardcore Eurocrime fans.  Joe Dallessandro brings a sadistic charm to the Pierro character, which is entertaining to watch.  The character may be one note but Dallessandro plays that note well here.  Balsam’s portrayal of the grizzled, old police captain brings some class and legitimacy to the picture.  And Andrei peppers in enough violence and action to keep things interesting throughout the runtime, even if it is 10 to 15 minutes too long.  Season for Assassins isn’t going to show you something you haven’t seen before from the crime drama, but you could definitely do much worse from this ever broad genre of film.

MVT: Joe Dallessandro

Make or Break Scene: Bumper car scene – Attack on the young couple

Score: 6.5/10

Nothing Underneath (1985)

One of the more interesting things that the Giallo genre has going for it is its dalliances with the supernatural.  Many times, there will be a psychic or some spectrally focused aspect to the story, and these are often uncovered as being totally banal.  Just look at the opening to Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso, where noted psychic Macha Meril foresees death as water slops out of her mouth, and a raven flies over the audience.  Or look at Emilio Miraglia’s The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, where a dead woman makes appearances as characters are knocked off, one by one.  The thing of it is, yes, typically these elements are nothing more than red herrings, but sometimes they remain unexplained.  This shifts the atmosphere of a film, because the audience knows that the killer has to be a human while simultaneously harboring a tiny mote of doubt that maybe, just maybe, they’re not.  It positions a conflict between the rational and the fantastic, generating a level of tension in its uncertainty.  So, we have siblings Bob (Tom Schanley) and Jessica (Nicola Perring) in Carlo Vanzina’s Nothing Underneath (aka Sotto il Vestito Niente) who share a mild psychic connection.  When Jessica is assaulted in Milan, her brother physically reacts in Wyoming, like Dumas’ Corsican brothers.  But Vanzina cheats this aspect in order to give us a few Killer’s POV shots.  Why would Bob be able to see what the killer sees if his rapport is with his sister, unless his sister is the killer, which she couldn’t be since she’s being stalked by the killer, right?  It’s the kind of superfluous, sloppy construction that marks this film as a low rung on the Giallo ladder.

Anyway, Bob abandons his job as a park ranger to fly to Milan in search of his sister who went missing after his vision of her being menaced.  There, he meets a bunch of fashion models and teams up with Commissioner Danesi (Donald Pleasance) to get to the bottom of things.  Meanwhile, people are being stabbed with a very large pair of scissors (I guess at this point, they should just call them shears).

Bob is a dullard hero.  He has no real personality to speak of.  At the local general store, he gets all excited because his sister finally made the cover of a fashion magazine.  Sure, we might all get excited when a family member succeeds, but Bob takes it to another level of gee-whiz-ness.  He’s not so much a fish out of water as a fish who’s never seen the stuff before.  It’s as if his job out in the wilderness has left him completely oblivious to the civilized world.  Bob is intended as an everyman, an entry into the world of high fashion as an identifier for the audience.  Unfortunately, all he winds up being is a sort of gormless yokel.  This might not have stood out so egregiously if the audience didn’t already know more about the world (fashion and otherwise) than Bob does.  The movie gives no insight, makes no revelations, about fashion, models, or anything else.  Vanzina and company portray the models and their lifestyle exactly the way it’s expected to be.  The interesting thing, if it can be called interesting, is that the film is adapted from a novel by the pseudonymous Marco Parma (actually Paolo Pietroni, editor of Amica magazine; you can guess what the mag’s focus is), and, from what I’ve read about it, is far more complex and, probably, more satisfying than the film version.  The filmmakers appear to have stripped away any of the depth or commentary present in the book to fashion (pardon the pun) a standard-as-they-come mystery.  Bob is a reflection of this, as an underwhelming protagonist in every possible way.

The world of fashion in the film is possibly meant as a cynical analogy for the apathetic carnality of people in general and the “elite” in particular.  Scumbag diamond merchant George wants cocaine and sex, and he takes these things whenever he wants them.  Women are nothing but holes for him to fill.  Money is meaningless to him, since he has so much of it.  He draws models into his web with the promise of wealth or at least a passing brush with it.  They do what he wants because he can give them what they want, and the superficiality of it all is standard fare for stories about models.  Naturally, Jessica stands out as the one who resists George and his advances.  Certainly, she’ll do coke with him, but she won’t have sex with him, and this only brings out the even bigger asshole in George.  George is the price to be paid to breathe in the rarefied air of model-dom.  Resistance is met with retaliation and abandonment.  Further, when models start getting stabbed, it can be seen as a comeuppance for their shallow venality.  Their willingness, nay enthusiasm, to debase themselves for a glamorous lifestyle is unforgivable in the eyes of the film.  It’s a moral we see constantly in stories centering on this universe, and Nothing Underneath is no different.

I think that the title Nothing Underneath is appropriate.  There is nothing underneath this film’s surface that we haven’t seen before.  To be fair, the film is slick as all get out (kind of like a fashion magazine, no?), though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it stylish.  The characters are uninteresting, and even Pleasance’s presence is not enough to elevate this material.  The central mystery of the piece is blatantly obvious (that is to say, nonexistent), and the killer’s identity is evident from the second time we meet the person.  The only aspect that does remain outside the audience’s grasp until the end is the motivation, and while it is mildly intriguing, the filmmakers still don’t do anything to make it stand out (aside from a quick sexual tease, reminiscent of the film in total).  Vanzina and his cohorts took something that screams out for an overdose of Eighties excess and gave us vapid vacuousness.  Maybe this was intentional as commentary on the meaninglessness of lives spent looking fantastic.  But the end result is as shallow as the subject is skin deep.

MVT:  The women in the film are attractive enough, though some of their clothing choices are tragic.

Make or Break:  Following suit with the film’s two-dimensionality, I’ll go with any scene where we see a little female skin.

Score:  3/10    

Rat Man (1988)

I was not a huge fan of the show Friends, even when it was at its most popular.  Maybe it’s because I was severely inebriated much of the time it was first being shown.  Maybe it’s because these characters and their lifestyle were so alien to me.  Maybe it’s because the show isn’t very good.  Maybe it’s a combination of a multiplicity of factors.  Regardless, there was one bit they did on the show that has always stuck with me, and I still refer to it to this day.  Ditzy blonde Phoebe is talking with smarmy Chandler, and she inquires why Spider-Man isn’t pronounced like Goldman, Silverman, etcetera.  Chandler, astonished by this (more or less his permanent state of being throughout the series), explains that it’s “because it isn’t his last name, like Phil Spiderman.  He’s a Spider…Man.”  I catch myself far too often pronouncing the names of superheroes like Phoebe would, and, even though it’s not laugh out loud funny, I do find it endlessly amusing.  This is possibly the elitist comic book fan in me taking a poke at people who “aren’t in the know” or maybe just taking a poke at elitist comic book fans themselves.  That said, even though Peter Parker is not, in fact, part spider (I’m not as up on the character as I once was, so this may have changed), the little fella dubbed Mousey (Nelson de la Rosa, whom most people know, ironically enough, from the John Frankenheimer/Richard Stanley version of The Island of Dr. Moreau) in Giuliano Carnimeo’s (under the genius pseudonym Anthony Ascot) Rat Man (aka Quella Villa in fondo al Parco, which translates roughly to That Villa at the Bottom of the Park, which may very well be a better title or may simply be the film’s producers desperately trying to cash in on The Last House on the Left sixteen years later; leave it to the Italians to beat a dead horse into glue) most definitely is part rat.  The problem is, he’s also part monkey, so, if anything, the film should have been called Rat Monkey, but I guess that just sounded more like a nature documentary than a horror film.  I would rather watch that fictional documentary than either Friends or Rat Man ever again.

Crusty, sweaty Dr. Olman (Pepito Guerra) is set to unveil Mousey to the world at the next scientician conference when the little rascal makes good his escape.  Next thing you know, bikini models like Marilyn (Eva Grimaldi) are being spied on and chased around, and her sister Terry (the divine Janet Agren) has to team up with perpetually-open-shirted crime writer Fred (David Warbeck) to track her down and save her.  

Rat Man owes the entirety of its existence to two sources.  One is the Slasher film.  On top of Mousey’s natural predilection for murdering people thither and yon accompanied by copious amounts of blood, Carnimeo delights in two types of Slasher-esque shot whenever Mousey is around (which is constantly; this little fucker is more ubiquitous than air).  The first is the classic point of view shot, and, of course, it’s from Mousey’s perspective.  The thing of it is, these POV shots are overused, so they are not nearly as effective as they could be.  Every now and then, it might be nice to build a little tension by not signaling to the audience that the tiny terror is lurking just out of sight.  The second type of shot which is repeated early and often is the extreme closeup.  There are multiple cutaways to a detail of Mousey’s dark, little eyeball.  Later, there are closeups of his fangs and claws as he attacks.  These shots, in my opinion, work better than the flood of POV shots, but even these wear out their welcome and detract from what the audience wants to see, namely, the “critter from the shitter” (that’s part of one of the film’s taglines, and he does, indeed, crawl out of a toilet at one point in the movie) gnawing away at young, pink flesh and innards for minutes on end.

The other major influence on this movie, as you may have guessed, is H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau.  To be more precise, Carnimeo and company ignored the anti-vivisection angle of the novel, focusing on the juicier aspects.  For example, Mousey is a combination of animals in humanoid form.  Dr. Olman walks around in a Panama suit, was shunned by the scientific community for his activities, and cares more about proving the value of his work (the purpose of his experiments is never explained to us) than he does for any living thing.  Olman has a loyal assistant, Tonio, who fills the Montgomery role, though far more incompetently.  Marilyn and skanky photographer Mark (Werner Pochath) come to be at Olman’s villa because of a car wreck instead of a shipwreck, but the effect is the same.  Mousey revolts against Olman and causes havoc on the villa and its occupants, and this is the heart of what the film is in its entirety.  It’s little more than a drawn out, constant stream of “animal” attacks, none of which are suspenseful, and none of which are all that satisfying in the gore department, either.  Why Fred and Terry are in the film at all is mindboggling, since all they do is tool around looking vaguely inquisitive, are flat as a pancake character-wise, and serve no narrative function whatsoever other than to facilitate the indifferently obvious “twist” ending (though, I’ll be honest, I could stare at Agren all day, every day).

I’ve read in several places how this film is supposed to be a sleazy piece of trash.  I can verify the latter half of that statement, but the sleazy part has me confused.  There’s some nudity from Grimaldi, there’s some shitty gore (including a skull sitting in a puddle of what looks like Ragu spaghetti sauce), and Mousey himself certainly appears greasy as all hell.  But outside of that, Rat Man is tame stuff.  Worse than that, it is hardly a movie, as it doesn’t attempt to develop a story in any way.  It’s a very simple idea that, instead of doing anything interesting with, the filmmakers simply padded out with somnolent sequences that don’t go anywhere.  Mousey may be a critter, but perhaps he and this film would have been better off left in the shitter.            

MVT:  I want to give it to Janet Agren, just for being Janet Agren, but I’m going to have to go full-pig and give it to Grimaldi for stripping down and showing off her appreciable assets.

Make or Break:  Probably around the third or fourth time Carnimeo cut back to Terry and Fred driving around in the dark, as if they’re going to find anything remotely interesting in what is the ultimate in cinematic blue balls.

Score:  4.5/10

Sodoma's Ghost (1988)

Nazis make the perfect monsters.  Steven Spielberg has often said this is the reason why he used them more than once in his Indiana Jones films.  They are the embodiment of cruelty, of hatred, of everything that normal, decent people are against.  Further, they allow for a higher (or lower, perspective depending) level of transgression in narratives.  After all, these are people who tortured and murdered millions of human beings for nothing more than the circumstance of their birth.  Depicting the fictitious shenanigans they can get up to feels somehow grimier while also being far easier to believe because of this.  

Sure, there are films which gave their Nazi characters some nuance, tried to make them, if not sympathetic, then at least more well-rounded.  But Nazis function best when they are pure villains.  Pairing them together with attributes of actual monsters just makes them more intriguing.  This is why films like Shock Waves or Hellboy or Outpost work as well as they do (to whatever degree).  This is not to say that they always work.  There are enough Nazi Monster movies that fall flat to make this sub-genre a truly mixed bag (See Oasis of the Zombies, if you doubt).  It’s rather surprising, considering Italy’s rich tradition of Nazisploitation films that they didn’t churn out more of them that added in supernatural components.  But if Lucio Fulci’s Sodoma’s Ghost (aka The Ghosts of Sodom aka Il Fantasma di Sodoma) is any stick by which to measure, maybe that’s for the best.

Six teen jerks (let’s assume they’re American for the sake of convenience) dick around in the French countryside until they wind up at an old villa.  Holing up there for the night, they soon find more than a few surprises waiting for them, not least of which is the fact that the manse played host to an ill-fated Nazi orgy forty-five years earlier.  And the revelers still want to party.

Roger Ebert’s film glossary defines the Dead Teenager Movie as “a generic term for any film primarily concerned with killing teenagers, without regard for logic, plot, performance, humor, etcetera.”  Part of the genius of the Dead Teenager Movie is that (when done right) it makes us want these kids dead.  We watch for the kills.  This is why the virginal female character is typically the Final Girl.  She is virtuous, nice, even bland, but she is worth more to the human race than the remainder of the characters surrounding her.  The rule of thumb with this sort of film is that, if characters do drugs or have sex, they are marked for death.  I could see going one step further (or maybe just putting a little shading on it).  The reason these kids are lined up for death stems from their sense of entitlement.  The majority of times, these are people who behave like the world owes them something, and, goddammit, they’re gonna take it all.  This is why they indulge their every whim like they do.  They don’t care, because they deserve to be allowed to be reckless (the converse argument can be made that this recklessness is from the natural maturation process, and their slaughter is a stymieing of this, a way for youth to be kept in check, but I like my theory more).  With this in mind, the Ugly Americans of this film break into a house they were not invited into, because they are due a roof over their heads rather than having to rough it for their bad decisions.  They eat food and drink wine that doesn’t belong to them, because it’s available, not because they earned it or even plan to pay for it.  They make themselves at home and snoop through the entirety of the estate, because they have no regard for other people’s stuff.  They are takers.  This is much like the Nazis and their orgy.  The Nazis took advantage of every vice they could get their grubby, little dick-beaters on because they were “The Master Race.”  They were entitled to it.  Both the Nazis and the teenagers in the film are punished for hubristic narcissism far more than for acting on their baser impulses.

It’s well-known that the Nazis had a penchant for documenting, in gruesome detail, all of their atrocities.  This translates into Fulci’s film in two ways.  During the prologue, young, rat-stache-having Nazi, Willy (Robert Egon), stumbles around the party with a film camera, gleefully recording everything around him.  At several points, he aims his camera in direct address to the audience, as if he were filming us.  We are partakers in the orgy.  We are enjoying the flesh, sweat, and depravity as much as the Germans, because this is a part of why we are watching this movie in the first place.  Willy’s film is (magically?) developed and screened for the participants (I assumed that same evening, since there’s no separation of time, direct or indirect).  They watch the things we also watched, while we were also being watched.  Moreover, the teenagers that infest the house also engage in this act of looking and self-reflexivity.  As they are separated and “attacked,” each is shown a mirror through which they see their innermost desires and/or selves revealed while being watched by what’s on the other side (the fact that this is done via mirror goes to my point about narcissism, though far more overtly in this case).  Mark (Joseph Alan Johnson) is horny and inebriated, so he sees a naked woman enticing him to the point that he plays Russian Roulette to get her.  Anne (Teresa Razzaudi) sees Willy and is seduced by the promise of rough sex she would never tell anyone she secretly wants.  Predatory lesbian Maria (Luciana Ottaviani aka Jessica Moore) sees her heart’s desire, Anne, getting hot and heavy with Celine (Maria Concetta Salieri), causing a fit of jealous rage.  Everyone in Sodoma’s Ghost, including the viewer is watching and being watched, partaker and partaken.  

Anyone who hears the name Lucio Fulci in association with this movie might get a little excited to check out one of his lesser known works.  Don’t be.  This film is a mess from front to back, technically, stylistically, and logically (I realize few people watch Fulci’s films for their logic, but the best of them have some internal sense of it that they follow to some extent or another).  The use of handheld camera is out of control and sloppy, even when it’s motivated.  The editing is disjointed (the best example of this is a sexual rendezvous between two characters that ends abruptly and is followed by a scene where one of the characters despairs that his sex partner turned into a monster, which we are deprived of seeing entirely; I get that there was no budget for this thing, but come on).  Outside of the grating characters, the shit dialogue, the turgid melodrama, the plank-like acting, is the ultimate discovery that there is absolutely nothing threatening about anything that happens (with one exception), and these grabassers just spent eighty-four very long minutes of YOUR life learning diddly-shit other than that they should just continue with their tour of France as if all of this never happened.  I guarantee you, if you watch Sodoma’s Ghost, you’ll wish you could continue with your life as if it never happened, as well.

MVT:  It’s the obvious co-winners of the copious female nudity and some decent gross-out effects.

Make or Break:  The finale and denouement are just infuriatingly unsatisfying.

Score:  2/10