With the snarling lioness subdued, I helped Waldo down from the fake tree in the Sheena: Queen of the Jungle exhibit. He was shaking as crouched down. Waldo covered his head with his hands and looked up at me with pleading eyes.

“I’m sorry I messed up the statue of Carl Weathers,” he said. “The Goose Lord and his gang made me.”

“Carl Weathers is an American treasure,” I said with contempt for this punk I thought I had killed when in reality I had only beaten within an inch of his life. 

“Curator, you don’t understand,” Waldo said as tears streamed down his cheeks. “I’ve got a family! I’ve got kids!”

— To be continued.

Tonight’s movie is 1974’s Emergency Squad from director Stelvio Massi. I’m not going to mince words. There are some hideous men in this movie. One guy has a combover that isn’t even a combiner. It’s just a few strands forming into a makeshift rat tail that dangles from his bald scalp to his nose. There’s one scene where the camera focuses on the pockmarked face of a scuzzy criminal while the topless dancer remains out of focus. Fire the cinematographer!

What’s the plot? A gang of thieves robs a car transporting money for a bank or a foreign diplomat. Tomas Milan stars as Tomas Ravelli, a cop with a chip on his shoulder due to a gang of robbers shooting his wife to death. Yeah, she was just walking down the street with a baby carriage one day and took some bullets to the chest and the thieves made their getaway. I half expected the baby carriage to roll out into the street and get hit by a Mack truck. Ravelli’s baby boy survived, but Ravelli and the other police never caught the thieves.

It’s these very same thieves that robbed that transport car of hundreds of thousands in unmarked bills. Their leader is a man known as The Marseilles (Gastone Moschin), a portly blond man with a hacking cough. He’s got a sultry girlfriend named Marta (Stefania Casini) who spends her spare time dressing up as Marilyn Monroe. He and the gang plan to split the money six ways, but an argument erupts when one of the gang members wants to skip town. Somehow he manages to get his head cracked open when falls back onto a raised floor. Oh well. More for the rest of them.

Later in the movie, four of them drive around town dressed as priests figuring it’s the perfect disguise for getting through those pesky police stops without any questions asked. Rino (Ray Lovelock), the youngest of the gang, insists on stopping for cigarettes, but gets his cover blown when he accidentally drops his gun in the convenience store. It’s not long before the clerk calls the cops and they’re on their tail. A shootout commences with The Marseilles and Rino opening fire on the chasing police. The chasing cops get shot up and run off the road, but Rino takes one in the head. Oh well. More for the rest of them.

The gang isn’t out of the woods yet. Ravelli is chasing them down by helicopter, shooting at the vehicle whenever he can. Even when they lose Ravelli, the gang falls apart when it’s revealed The Marseilles planned to kill all of them so he and Marta could make off with the money. I guess there’s no honor among thieves and revenge is a dish best served with hot lead.. You can check out Emergency Squad on TUBI.

 Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.