The Final Executioner (1984)

**POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHOY!**

Over a mix of black-and-white and color archival scenes featuring atomic bomb test footage, volcanos erupting, and cities in ruins, we are told that the world has now been divided into two groups: the rich and the contaminated masses (so, not too far off what it was before the nuclear holocaust), and that the contaminated people are regularly hunted and killed to stop the spread of their sickness.  However, we’re also told that one day someone realized that the contamination was finished; all the people were now clean.  Cut to Alan (William Mang) and his wife (Cinzia Bonfantini, and the only reason we know she’s Alan’s wife is because she is credited as such) as they are ousted from the city and reclassified as “hunting material.”  Soon enough (though it doesn’t feel like it), lone hunter Erasmus (Harrison Muller, Jr.) is in competition with Edra (Marina Costa) and her band of scummy hunters to see who can take down the most contaminated people in one day.  Including Alan and his spouse.

Romolo Guerrieri’s The Final Executioner (aka L’ultimo Guerriero, aka The Last Warrior) is yet another in the lengthy heritage of Pasta-pocalypse films that sprang up from Italy in the wake of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York.  For as much as it clings to certain motifs of the subgenre, though, it also strays pretty far afield in other, significant ways.  As is customary, there is the critique of society along class lines.  The rich control everything, and the poor are victims forced to behave brutally in order to survive.  By that same token, the elite rich (here embodied by the hunters [since we never see an actual bourgeois rich person outside the hunting reserve], even though they live in the wastelands in rundown manses that look like they could have been used as sets in one of Meatloaf’s music videos) are savages by nature.  They are callous in their disregard for human life, and they think nothing of killing in order to maintain the status quo that they have manufactured (although any context as to why this serves their needs is left shrouded in mystery for the viewer, and it makes no logical sense, so we’re left only with the generality that all rich people are evil people).  Of course, this means that we have to assume that Alan was at one time one of the rich elite (he is a cybernetics specialist), so he should be hardhearted and vicious before he is sent to the hunting reserve, but he’s not (or we’re heavily encouraged to assume he’s not).  It’s only after his encounters with Erasmus and Edra that his bloodlust grows.

As seen in multitudinous films of this ilk (Endgame, Turkey Shoot, The Running Man, et cetera), there is also the recycling of a variation on The Most Dangerous Game afoot herein.  Most succinctly summed up in the scene where Edra’s gang and Erasmus lurk near a pond waiting for the contaminated people to crest the hill like a herd of gazelle approaching a watering hole, they pick the people off one at a time.  They later tally who killed whom like they’re comparing points on stags’ racks.  What’s interesting here is that the prey isn’t really the focus (outside of our man Alan and his wife).  They are literally nothing more than faceless game at a reserve.  It’s odd that our attention should be on the hunters as anything other than antagonists, but it’s their relationship that drives a large portion of the narrative, not Alan’s struggle against them as might be assumed.  The competition angle of the film, normally set up between hunter and prey is instead here predominantly between hunter and hunter.  The tension between these people is strong.  

Even among Edra’s group, which we can surmise are together because they have some kind of bond, there is a wealth of animosity.  Melvin (Stefano Davanzati) is absolutely reprehensible (and that’s saying something).  The first scene he’s in, he points a gun at fellow hunter Louis (himself a decrepit junkie and played by Renato Miracco) and pulls the trigger (it’s empty, of course; and unfortunately).  He soon after remarks about Erasmus’ special rifle, “whoever painted it didn’t know the color of bullshit.”  He spends his downtime admiring his own body in a mirror.  Sex fiend Diane (Margit Evelyn Newton), when not shooting people or doing it with boy toy Phil (Luca Giordana) is spying on her associates and just being generally creepy.  The one hunter character we would expect to sympathize with, Edra’s little brother Evan (Karl Zinny), is arguably the worst of the bunch.  Youth usually comes with a modicum of innocence in cinema (Bad Seed-esque stories excepted), but there is none to be found in this young man.  He carries out one of the worst acts in the film, and later he gleefully relives it via some kind of memory projection (and possibly sexual stimulation) machine.  Was he born bad?  Is this Edra’s influence on him?  We’re never told.  We only know that he’s irredeemable (yet still not moreso than any of the others).

The film diverges from its subgenre in its last third, and I think that this is also where it finally collapses as an entertainment.  It essentially becomes a Revenge film as Alan picks off the hunters one by one at Edra’s compound (come on, you didn’t see this coming?).  The satisfaction in watching these pieces of garbage get their comeuppance is delicious; I won’t deny that.  However, it is completely dissociated from Post-Apocalyptic (not to mention Pasta-pocalyptic) films past, present, and future.  The film’s climactic moment is a total deus ex machina that rings hollow, because it suddenly reminds us that there was supposed to be a theme going on underneath all this action and the filmmakers just didn’t feel like exploring it, but it still needed to have some lip service paid to it in a desperate attempt to try and trick the audience into thinking there was more going on in the film than there actually was.  This irked me quite a bit, because the story is set up with a Science Fiction premise.  Nevertheless, it then unspools itself as a straight ahead Action/Revenge film, and only in its final moments are we reminded that this is all supposed to be set in a post-nuke future (costumes and “fancy” guns, notwithstanding).  Harlan Ellison once said (and I’m paraphrasing; also, it may not have been he who said it, but this is the way I remember it, I think it holds true, regardless) that a good Science Fiction story must have its fantastic ideas be integral to the story itself.  And this is not the case with The Final Executioner.  This film’s Science Fiction elements are little more than window dressing (which I suppose is fine and dandy if you’d rather stare at the curtains that the view through the window).  Now, is that a fair criticism for a film that is purposely trying to cash in on a prevailing trend from a country known for putting out genre material that is imitative at best?  I think in this case, it is.  I felt cheated by this movie.  The film takes the long way around to get to the same point a more direct film could have reached in a more satisfying fashion.  It doesn’t help any that there is almost no life to any of the action scenes, and the whole affair reeks of rote regurgitation from start to end.  If someone who actually gave a shit about the end product had a hand in this film, it could have been a nice little gem.  Unfortunately, such is not the case.

MVT:  I give Erasmus points for having one of the more interesting costumes in Pasta-pocalyptic cinema history.

Make or Break:  The film’s prologue is weak, lazy, and dull.  It bluntly lets us know that there is nothing coming in the next ninety minutes we haven’t seen done before and done better.

Score:  5/10       

Covert Action

Between the release of Goldfinger in 1964 to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1969, the James Bond films inspired hundreds upon hundreds of spirited, colorful, often nonsensical European spy films about smarmy super-agents trotting the globe to foil the dreams of assorted madmen megalomaniacs. These films took the Bond template and ran with it, and thanks to the inexpensive access to glamorous locations that Europe offers, even the films that couldn’t afford a proper office set could still afford to pop down to the Amalfi Coast or Monte Carlo or Paris for a couple days of filming. By the end of the 1960s, however, even though the Bond franchise was still going strong, the Eurospy films inspired by 007 all but vanished from screens, much in the same way as the sword and sandal films of the early 1960s.

It was no mystery where they went. Part of it was simply a case of over-saturation, the gluttonous overkill European cult cinema (usually led by the Italians) always bring to the table when a genre becomes popular. But even more so, the social and political climate of the 1960s rendered these frothy, goofball spy fantasies not just anachronistic, but even insulting to a generation that was now in the midst of civil unrest, warfare, and terrorism. When Red Brigades and Baader-Meinhof are running through the streets, it’s hard to work up much interest in some smirking spy in a sharkskin suit chasing after a dude who invented a spore gun. In 1972, against the backdrop of Black September terrorists massacring Israeli athletes at the Olympic games in Munich, the breezy fun of the Eurospy era gave way to the grim, nihilistic vision of the poliziotteschi film.

Still, much of the crime in Europe was politically motivated -- or at least so the criminals claimed -- and although tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union had relaxed a little, there was still a Cold War on. The spy films of the 1970s were a very different beast than those spy fantasies of the previous decade (even though that previous decade had seen the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis). More paranoid, more realistic, reflective of a world in which authority figures were no longer trusted or given the benefit of the doubt. Given the cross-over potential, it’s surprising how few times poliziotteschi and espionage met. Covert Action (Sono stato un agente C.I.A.) is one of the higher profile examples, if not one of the better ones, because it stars Maurizio Merli, the poster boy of the entire poliziotteschi genre.

American David Janssen (The Green Berets, O’Hara: U.S. Treasury) stars as retired CIA man Lester Horton, who spends his disgruntled retirement as a failed fiction writer and occasional author of scandalous tell-alls about the CIA (the character was allegedly based on real life CIA dirty laundry airer Philip Agee, who even sued the production company). When he pops up in Greece, for vacation he says, the CIA gets nervous, and before too long Horton is caught up in a convoluted plot revolving around murder and a taped confession that would be particularly damaging to the CIA.

Despite coming from two action-packed genres, and having “action” in its title, Covert Action isn’t an action film. It’s more of a brooding espionage thriller, paced slowly but not boring. Director Romolo Guerrieri was fairly low-key in the world of Eurocrime, compared to the big names like Lenzi, Massi, and Castellari, but he directed a few really good crime films in the 1970s (The Police Serve the Citizens?, City Under Siege, and Young, Violent, Dangerous), and Covert Action is similarly low-key. It’s about the paranoia and hopelessness one faces when trying to get out from under an organization that basically has carte blanche to do anything, anywhere in the world. When the action does heat up, it’s pretty damn good, including a good car chase, a harrowing interrogation scene, and a fight between co-star Maurizio Merli and a gang of hired killers. Merli co-stars as Lester’s friend, a man who is finding himself pushed out of the CIA and targeted for permanent retirement. Merli brings the intensity for which he’s known from cop movies, but this a more complex and vulnerable role than what’s he’s known for.

Covert Action isn’t essential viewing except for Maurizio Merli completists, and unless you’re predisposed toward appreciated slow burn spy films and character studies, it might try the patience a little. But if a measured pace doesn’t stick in your craw, then Covert Action is a deceptively intense thriller with some great performances, a few good stunt sequences, and a relentlessly bleak and exhausted mood. If you enjoy films like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or Three Days of the Condor, Covert Action will slide in nicely as a lesser but still plenty enjoyable example of the genre.

MVT: Although I’d love to give it to Merli for getting to do something other than grimace and box ears, it has to go to David Janssen. “Understated” is sometimes used when people don’t want to say “dull,” but it truly applies here. Despite maintaining his cool as best he can, Janssen’s performance bristles with a mix of intensity, frustration, and weariness. If James Bond was the spy who made people want to go out and have adventures, Janssen’s Lester Horton is the one that makes you want go home, collapse on the couch, and stare pensively at a tumbler of J&B.

Make or Break: Merli slaps some fools in a Greek amphitheatre. We all love watching Merli smack around criminals in his many cop films, but when he finally gets to bust out the backhand in Covert Action, it’s an entirely different sort of experience. Instead of the aggressor, he is the defender, and there is a savage desperation and sense of “the good man’s final stand” doom that lends the scene a melancholy air.