Free Hand for a Tough Cop (1976)

Notorious hood Brescianelli (Henry Silva) kidnaps a young girl with a kidney problem, and the eponymous tough cop, Antonio (Claudio Cassinelli), is given the titular free hand to track him down.  To that end, he busts former Brescianelli associate Sergio Marazzi (Tomas Milian), also known as Garbage Can/Monnezza, out of prison.  In turn, the duo enlists the help of three other hardened criminals, Calabrese (Biagio Pelligra), Vallelunga (Giuseppe Castellano), and Mario (Claudio Undari).  Time is running out.

Uneasy allies are nothing new in cinema, especially in the realm of Poliziotteschi.  Having them be cops and criminals is perhaps the clearest way of juxtaposing their differences and generating instant tension.  Likewise, it’s also the most expedient way of emphasizing their similarities.  Antonio is a cop in the Dirty Harry mold.  He was transferred to Sardinia because he’s so rough in performing his duties.  He’s brought back to Rome specifically for this case because he’s such a hardass.  The police can’t handle the situation playing strictly by the book.  In his first meeting with Monnezza, Antonio knocks the man out and kidnaps him.  Antonio is quick with his gun and his fists.  Procedure does not suit him.  He cajoles the trio of train robbers into helping him (he doesn’t tell them he’s a cop at first, and when he does, their commonalities make it almost a non-issue).  He allows a couple of jerks to rob a movie theater, with Vallelunga stating they’re “just kids having fun” (don’t worry, Antonio catches up to them later).  He also has no misgivings about letting Calabrese and his boys tote guns around Rome, shooting the place up and brutalizing everyone in their path.  At one point, Antonio leaves the sleazy Mario alone with a housekeeper, and the baddie is knee deep in raping her before Antonio stops him (and even this is practically accidental).  Further, he’s angrier with Mario for killing a person of interest than for attempting to rape an innocent woman.  Antonio is, in effect, the same as the crooks with whom he aligns himself.  Both sets are doing what they do, and they do it without hesitation, and what they do is basically the same (earn a living being thugs).  The only separation between guys like Antonio and worse criminals like Brescianelli is that Brescianelli is completely heartless.  Yes, all of them are willing to kill to get what they want, but only Brescianelli and his crew would stoop to endangering a child.  Everything else is fair game.

Monnezza is the outlier in the group.  He wants nothing to do with any of them, constantly complaining about the situation in which he finds himself.  Nevertheless, he’s also the hero of the piece, moreso than Antonio.  It’s Monnezza who finally finds the girl and prevents her death at Brescianelli’s hands.  Monnezza is a trickster character, a performer who lulls everyone around him into a state of ease.  His role as an actor is accentuated by his appearance or, I should say, appearances.  His hair is a massive afro, in combination with his scraggly beard, making him look like a bum.  He wears guy liner (or Milian just has incredibly dark, lush eyelashes), giving him a flamboyant air.  Monnezza also loves to appear in costume to deceive his enemies.  He dresses up like a telegram delivery boy, a priest, and a shepherd, to name just three, so he can either gain entry or information from people.  But underneath this, Monnezza is most assuredly a schemer and a man to be taken seriously.  After his brother is unsuccessfully targeted by Brescianelli, Monnezza pays a late night visit to the man who fingered him.  He plays a game with the guy, offering him two glasses of milk, one regular, one poisoned.  Yet even this is a pretense by Monnezza.  Outwardly playing the boisterous clown, he is shrewder than all the other characters in the film put together.

What I think marks Umberto Lenzi’s Free Hand for a Tough Cop (aka Il Trucido e lo Sbirro) as a superior Poliziotteschi is its self-consciousness.  People who don’t know better will think they have accidentally sat down for a Spaghetti Western, as the film opens with scenes from one (to the best of my knowledge, neither directed by Lenzi nor starring Milian, funny enough).  The film’s soundtrack even blares out a Spaghetti Western theme, and the title credits font is pure Spaghetti Western.  Only after a little over a minute of cowboys blazing hellbent for leather through Monument Valley are we shown that this is actually a film being shown to a bunch of convicts.  There is a shot of the film projector itself which holds for several seconds.  What Lenzi is saying, in other words, is that the crime story you’re about to watch is as much of a fantasy as the romantic, mythologized Old West of the cinema.  To that end, the characters and plot are generic (with the exception of Monnezza, the only one who understands that this is all a story, all bullshit, and unimportant except for his role to play in it).  By this time, audiences had seen enough Clint Eastwoods and Charles Bronsons and Maurizio Merlis to get the shoot first, ask questions later method of street justice with which this film is saturated.  This is also the reason why Silva’s Brescianelli is such a rattlesnake-mean son of a bitch.  The very act of casting Silva, having appeared in plenty of Eurocrime films by this point, is sufficient to flesh out anything and everything an audience needs to understand the character.  Free Hand for a Tough Cop is a puppet show, its genre being the stage, its characters the puppets.  But it’s Monnezza who pulls their strings, and it’s Lenzi who pulls Monnezza’s.

MVT:  The film’s self-awareness is its distinguishing factor.

Make or Break:  The full flavor of the film is captured within its opening minutes.  It is equal parts disorienting and engaging.

Score:  7.5/10

Aenigma (1987)

Escargot, that French delicacy that everyone wishes they could afford, but no one actually wants to eat.  Even if it’s slathered in garlic and butter, like in Lucio Fulci’s Aenigma, the prospect of eating some chewy gastropod with the consistency of snot holds little appeal.  In fairness, I’m sure there are, in fact, people who genuinely like escargot, but I don’t know any of them, thus no sane person craves them (this is a stone fact and totally not confirmation bias or somesuch).  But let’s be honest, if it weren’t for the continental air and the sheer status symbolism of their expense, snails would rarely be consumed in this country (outside of people stuck in the wilderness who have no other option).  I stand by this opinion.  Let’s not forget that these little bastards can be deadly, too.  They cover a victim in this film, smothering her, including one “I bought this from a gumball machine” slug that works its way into the girl’s mouth (surely, not a metaphor for anything).  Clearly, Fulci understood that snails are more horrific than savory to the vast majority of his audience (I ponder how this sequence played in France).  Considering the film’s director, I’m kind of surprised that the snails didn’t rip this girl apart with their tiny, fang-festooned maws (they don’t actually have teeth, but there is no way this scene cannot be compared to the pipe-cleaner spider scene from The Beyond).

Kathy (Milijana Zirojevic) gets all dolled up to go on a big date with Fred (Riccardo Acerbi), the gym instructor at St. Mary’s College in Boston, which she attends.  The two-faced, prick friends of hers, however, have set her up for humiliation, and, after being chased into traffic and put in a coma, Kathy finds her mind free to exact revenge through the body of new student Eva (Lara Lamberti).  The more I think of it, the more this plot follows that of Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2 (and, I’m sure, many others, but Prom Night 2 was a recent watch for me, so…).  Ah, well.

Fulci, it would seem, is something of a critic-proof director (at least in genre circles).  The worst thing I ever saw of his was Manhattan Baby, yet even that turkey couldn’t dissuade my rather high opinion of the filmmaker.  I think this allowance the man is given stems from two aspects of his filmography.  First, you’re guaranteed to see at least one thing in each of his films that you won’t see almost anywhere else.  Witness: the zombie versus shark scene from Zombie, if you have any doubt.  There is imagination at work in his films, despite the fact that sometimes he’s able to pull off the effect he desires and sometimes he isn’t (see the aforementioned spider scene).  But his films try so hard, one can’t help but be charmed both by their earnest ambition and their lunatic grotesqueries.  Second, the man and his movies unashamedly play to the peanut gallery.  Despite the themes that his films may or may not have (largely that the world is shit, and the people in it are shitheels), they are pulp entertainment, first and foremost, grand guignol for the spaghetti set.  Consequently, Fulci curries favor that other splatter meisters don’t/can’t, flying in the face of all sense, and it’s glorious.

Aenigma follows in line with this assessment.  To wit: Kathy is pursued by what, in any other movie, could be termed a lynch mob, and the revelers cackle and bray at the tops of their lungs.  It reminds me of a rib-tickler that the Joker tells in Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum graphic novel.  Basically, the punchline illustrates (with a moment of people screaming in a new dad’s face) that people are vicious, life is cruel, and it’s all a massive joke on us.  Kathy’s physician, Doctor Anderson (Jared Martin), not only can’t figure out why a braindead vegetable can “experience a violent emotion” but also can, apparently, read her mind in order to come up with this diagnosis in the first place.  He’s also completely not above chasing after girls half his age and all but fucking them in open view of anyone with eyes in their head (I’m including blind people in this statement, he’s that brazen).  A marble statue “comes to life” and chokes someone to death.  The beauty here is that the statue is actually an extremely obvious rubber suit.  Doctor Anderson wears a sweatshirt that simply states “University” (shades of John Blutarsky from Animal House).  Kathy’s mom, Crazy Mary (Dusica Zegarac), is the most pale, pasty-faced, pasta-haired nutso you can envision.  Her eyes turn red for no reason (is Kathy possessing her mother?  Is her mother the power behind Kathy?  Is the college’s faculty populated with witches/Satanists/bad apples?  Who knows?  Who cares?).  That’s just a smattering of the gonzo goings on at work here.

The intriguing thing is not so much the supernatural revenge idea as the classism taking place within this context.  Kathy is, of course, the Carrie White character (or Patrick, if you like that movie more), and she is as innocently gormless as they come.  She’s Melvin the Mop Boy from The Toxic Avenger, just a girl and slightly more restrained.  Furthermore, she is dirt poor, her mother’s job at the college providing the gateway for her to attend the exclusive institution for free.  This, in conjunction with her working class origin, places her beneath the other girls at the school and beneath contempt.  She is a thing to be mocked and tormented.  Consequently, Kathy’s vengeance is a strike back at the upper classes, and I would suggest that the forms of her vengeance imply a turning of the markers of high society back on their partakers.  Hence, we get things like a work of fine art dripping blood on a girl.  There are the previously noted marble statue and snail deaths.  An egoist of the fitness variety is strangled by a doppelganger.  The things the upper crust champion are the same things which enable their ends (mostly).     

Nonetheless, this wouldn’t be a Fulci film without a fetishization of the human eye.  The very first shot of the movie is a closeup on Kathy’s eyes as she puts on her makeup (while somebody croons, “put on your makeup”).  After the possession begins, there are a great many extreme closeups of eyes, sometimes with quick zooms, sometimes without.  Eyes in Aenigma are symbols of hatred, burrowing into the souls of others while simultaneously revealing the soul of the gazer.  It’s interesting to note, then, that there is no actual eyeball trauma in the film, which may upset some Fulci fanatics.  I can’t say I wasn’t expecting some ocular carnage, and the denial of this desire presents a subversion of this expectation from the man.  While the film does stand on its own well enough, a little eye pokery would, however, have made for a comfier watch (like waiting for Henny Youngman to deliver his “Take my wife.  Please” zinger).

MVT:  Lamberti is very easy on the eye, and she plays possessively bitchy as well as she does passionately vindictive.

Make or Break: The credits/opening sequence is as quintessentially Eighties Eurohorror as anything could be, for better and worse. 

Score:  6.25/10

The Pit (1981)

Young Jamie Benjamin (Sammy Snyders) isn’t very well-liked around town.  Marge Livingstone (Laura Hollingsworth), the local librarian, is leery of him.  Her niece Abigail (Andrea Swartz) delights in tormenting him a la Lucy Van Pelt and her classic football gag.  Freddie Phelps bullies him and won’t let Jamie join his “club” (we’re never told what kind of club it is).  But Jamie sees a ray of sunshine through the grey clouds when Sandra (Jeannie Elias) shows up to watch him while his parents are away.  If only it weren’t for that pesky pit out in the middle of the woods that is filled with monsters (dubbed “Tralalogs” by Jamie).  

Lew Lehman’s The Pit is the oddest of odd ducks.  It is a pubescent boy’s wish fulfillment/power fantasy, yet the script by Ian A Stuart is weirdly structured, giving the audience what it wants a bit too early and then changing the film into a different film for about the last third.  Jamie is picked on by absolutely everyone who comes across him, and his mother (Laura Press) seems to dote on him too much to his detriment.  Meeting Sandra, Jamie has something to aspire to, even though there’s never a chance for romance with her, and this impossible love is what fuels some of Jamie’s actions.  Being left alone with a nubile co-ed day and night is enough to put any adolescent boy into a tailspin of emotions, all of them focused on sex.  Jamie watches Sandra while she’s sleeping, staring at her bare nipple.  He writes “I love you” on the bathroom mirror for her while she showers.  Clearly, the boy has boundary issues.  And Sandra is nice but not overly accommodating to Jamie, the first person (we can assume) to try to connect with him rather than reject him out of hand.  

The pit becomes Jamie’s super power, in a way, as it’s the agency by which he can take care of his enemies, to have power over them (both his enemies and the Troglodytes [not Tralalogs, Jamie]; He says, “They’re looking up to me,” referring to his station as the Giver of Life and Death, a god, for these monsters and the people of his town).  The pit is concurrently a metaphor for Jamie’s puberty.  It’s dark, filled with hairy things that likely stink, and those hairy things are just chomping at the bit to do what they do best.  When the pit is finally utilized, it’s Jamie’s self-discovery of his true self, the person he was always going to become, a man.  This puberty facet is also reflected in a visual way.  There is a scene where Jamie looks at his family during dinner through an empty glass, their images warped and distorted, their world alien to him (or he an alien on their world).  This motif is mirrored by the Troglodyte Vision POV shots.  They are tinted yellow, slightly fish-eyed, and have a blurry, wavy quality to them.  Jamie and the Troglodytes are directly linked because their outlooks are similar to each other’s and different from the rest of the world’s.  In like fashion is Jamie’s teddy bear, Teddy, who talks in Jamie’s voice but with a slight echo.  Teddy is Jamie’s tempter and advisor, always pushing him to go one step further.  Teddy recognizes what Sandra means for Jamie (“She’s just what we’ve been waiting for”), and he is the rationalization Jamie uses to justify the actions he takes.  Further, Teddy is a bridge between childhood and adulthood.  He comforted Jamie when he was a child, and he counsels him as Jamie changes.

While we can understand why Jamie is the way he is, however, we also can’t stand him.  Yes, he’s a social outcast and put upon by the world, but he’s an obstinate brat.  Snyders does his level best to sell us on this, though my guess is that wasn’t necessarily his intent.  For as much shit as Jamie is given on a daily basis, he sure doesn’t shy away from dishing it out.  Take Marge Livingstone, for example.  Jamie cuts a nude photo out of an art book from the library and sends it to Marge with a picture of her head taped on it.  Later, he anonymously tells her that Abigail has been kidnapped and the only way to secure her release is for Marge to show him her naked body (while he takes polaroids from the shadows and giggles about how low he is able to bring her).  The way Marge acts around Jamie is peculiar.  Just hearing his name, she seems to tense up (this is before the false kidnapping), and she behaves as though either there may have been something which had passed between them (which would have been truly skanky) or she can read into the boy, knows what lies underneath, and is afraid of him.  When Jamie steals money from Sandra and she confronts him about it, he runs away, unsure how to deal with this (he settles on picking flowers for her).  Jamie throws a tantrum (either ignored or unnoticed by Sandra) when her beau’s football team wins a game.  He is quick to anger, irritability, and self-righteous indignation.

Aside from the randomness of the Trog pit, the film has one other distinctly bizarre touch.  Teddy is presented as Jamie having an interior dialogue with himself, but at one moment in the film, Teddy’s head turns toward Sandra all by itself.  Does Jamie have psychic abilities?  Is Teddy alive?  We’re never told, just as we’re never told how a pit full of monsters just appeared (Who dug it?  How did all the Trogs fall in at once?  How long have they been there?  How long can a Trog last without eating?).  We expect from The Pit that Jamie will get his revenge on his tormentors, and he does.  But this all happens in the span of about five minutes.  It’s what happens afterward that makes the film feel like either it wanted to go in a different direction entirely, or that the story had run its course and now there’s a new story the filmmakers had to tell to fill out the runtime, one which is more conventional and less satisfying than the one they had been building up to that point.  It throws the film’s pacing way off.  Yet, the film is intriguing because it comes across as so guileless, so matter of fact, that when the freaky elements pop up, they’re both startling and fully acceptable.

MVT:  The oddity of the premise.  It’s hard to fathom who thought this was a sane idea, but the way it’s presented makes it easy to swallow.

Make or Break:  The cold opening (which is shown again later in the film, almost shot-for shot) is creepy and blackly humorous.  But mostly creepy.  

Score:  6.75/10