The Curator of Schlock #277 by Jeff Shuster

Caliber 9

Crime doesn’t pay!

We’re on week two of Poliziottesca Month. I have it on good authority from a friend that the correct pronunciation of poliziottesca sounds like police tes tickles. In future conversations with strangers, I’ll be sure to I’ll be sure to profess my love of poliziottesca with the correct pronunciation. Today, I’ve decided to revisit director Fernando Di Leo, the man behind Kidnap Syndicate. We’ll see if he can scar me this time around.

1972’s Caliber 9 is a movie about violent men doing violent things to each other. The movie starts out with a secret exchange of packages. One of these packages has $300,000 dollars in it. The other package has drugs or some other contraband. Or maybe there wasn’t another package. I remember a flock of pigeons flying in this one mobster’s face.

Where was I?

The mobsters pick up the package with the money in it only to find stacks of scrap paper. They’ve been duped!

The mobsters go after everyone involved with the tradeoff. They find this one guy getting a shave in a barber shop and start slicing his face with the razor. All the people they find insist they have no idea what happened to the money. The mobsters tie up the suspected thieves in a cave, set some sticks of dynamite around them, light the fuse and, well, that’s the end of the thieves. Don’t rob the mafia. The mafia will torture you and kill you.

One member of the suspected thieves ring was arrested and sent to prison not long after the money went missing. His name is Ugo Piazza (Gastone Mosvhin) and he manages to get a pardon. Upon release from prison, the mob gives him a lift into town and start asking him where he hid the money. I guess they figured since the suspected thieves they blew up with dynamite didn’t cough up the location in a last ditch effort to save their lives, maybe they weren’t the thieves after all. That leaves Ugo, but he insists he didn’t steal the $300,000.

The mob beats Ugo, steal his identification, and tell him that they’ve set up a meeting for Ugo to meet their boss, the Americano. I guess that means the head the head of this Mafia is American.

USA! USA!

Ugo goes down to the police station to get a temporary ID so he can stay in a hotel. The police ask him where he hid the $300,000. Ugo says he didn’t steal the money. Ugo finds a seedy hotel to stay at and skips the meeting with the Americano. The mobsters show up at the hotel, trash Ugo’s hotel room, and tell him he’d better make it to the next meeting they set up with the Americano.

So: Ugo meets with the Americano. The Americano tells Ugo that he works for him now as a way to pay off the $300,000 he owes him. Ugo meets up with his old girlfriend, a go-go dancer named Nelly Bordon (Barbara Bouchet). She asks him where he hid the money. Ugo tells her he didn’t steal the money, but plans to find out who did so he can clear his name. There’s more violence, more death, plus a shocking reveal. I’ll give you a hint about the shocking twist: it involves who stole the money.

This one wasn’t bad. No scarring of my psyche.

Until next week.

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #276 by Jeff Shuster

Contraband

Fulci! Fulci! Fulci!

About two years ago, I ventured forth into an unknown film genre known as poliziotteschi. I can’t pronounce it. I can’t remember how to spell. In conversation, I refer to these movies as polatzee because it rolls off the tongue easier and it’s not like the person I’m talking to is really listening to me prattle on about Italian crime movies of the 1970s. I ended the last run of these with Kidnap Syndicate, a movie that made me seek therapy because I’d never seen anything as evil as the Kidnap Syndicate in a movie. But I’m better now and ready to brave the polatzee waters yet again.

Tonight’s movie is 1980’s Contraband from director Lucio Fulci. I decided to give Fulci another go after Manhattan Baby. That was a good call because this is a sublime one. The movie centers on a man named Luca Di Angelo (Fabio Testi), who smuggles contraband such as illegal cigarettes and hard liquor with a team of other smugglers. When the police are tipped off to the smuggling, Luca and his brother, Mickey, suspect the head of a rival smuggling ring ratted them out. That man’s name is Scherino. Mickey and Luca go to see the head of their smuggling ring, a handsome playboy named Perlante (Saverio Marconi) and ask him to retaliate. Meanwhile, someone sets Mickey’s racing horse on fire.

On the way to the stables, they get pulled over by men in police uniforms. One of the men riddles Mickey full of bullets and sends him flying into the sea. Luca survives and vows revenge. And from here on out, the film delivers on the violence. Luca’s wife pleads with him to let this go, to think about their young son. Of course, we in the audience are rooting for bloody vengeance.

What if Luca did decide to put his family first, become the manager of Italy’s first Hardee’s? Is this a movie you’d want to watch?

Get revenge for your brother, Luca. Then get revenge for your brother’s horse.

Luca investigates who gunned down his brother. He winds up at some combination hot springs/tar pit. I know that description isn’t good enough for you and I’m demonstrating my ignorance of the geological world. The place looks sandy with bubbling pits of salt water spread throughout. Anyway, this old guy hands Luca a slip of paper containing the address of the men who shot his brother. Luca turns around to go to his car, hears the old man scream, and turns around to see some nameless goon slitting the old guy’s throat. Luca tosses the goon into one of the boiling saltwater pits, and the goon gets boiled like a lobster.

Naturally, there are more inventive bloody deaths coming. One guy gets his Adam’s apple shot off his throat by a machine gun. I’ve never seen that in a movie before! As the bodies pile up, a criminal conspiracy gets revealed. Friends are revealed to be enemies, and former rivals turn into allies. There’s also a disco scene in this movie featuring the song, “You Are Not the Same.”

Check it out. It will give you boogie fever!

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #275 by Jeff Shuster

Commando

I ain’t watching another Van Damme movie!

I’m sorry. I had Black Water with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren all cued for my next viewing.

And then I thought, “No.”

We’re going to take a breather from Van Damme movies for a bit. I need to remind myself why I was ever a fan of action movies to begin with. Time to dust off the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic, Commando.

1985’s Commando from director Mark Lester is the quintessential 80s action movie.

What’s the movie about? Arnold Schwarzenegger kills the bad guys. That’s it.

Okay. Schwarzenegger plays John Matrix, a retired Colonel from the Special Forces who lives a secluded life in the mountains of California with his young daughter, Jenny (Alyssa Milano). His idyllic life comes to a halt when Major General Franklin Kirby shows up at his place to warn Matrix that former members of his team have been assassinated. Kirby leaves a couple of soldiers behind to protect Matrix while he goes off to investigate who’s behind the assassinations.

It doesn’t take long for the mysterious bad guys to show up on John Matrix’s doorstep. They kill the soldiers Kirby left behind, kidnap his daughter, and threaten her life if Matrix doesn’t cooperate. Now, if was a thriller starring Harrison Ford or John Travolta, they’d say something like “If you harm one hair on my daughter’s head, I’ll kill you.” Not Arnold Schwarzenegger. The first bad guy that tries using Matrix’s daughter against him get a bullet in his skull.

This is the first death of many.

Eventually, it’s revealed that a former member of Matrix’s team, Bennett (Vernon Wells) is working for a former South American dictator that Matrix helped remove from power. He wants Matrix to get close to the democratically elected President of Val Verde and assassinate him. If Matrix doesn’t do this, Jenny will be returned to him in pieces.

One of the dictator’s goons boards an airliner with Matrix to ensure his arrival in Val Verde and make sure Matrix doesn’t try any funny stuff, funny stuff like snapping the goon’s neck while the stewardess is informing passengers about dinner and the in-flight movie. During takeoff, Matrix jumps from the plane into a swamp. From there, he follows an impish goon named Sully played by David Patrick Kelly, the dude who played the snake-man in Dreamscape. After seeing Sully harass a stewardess named Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong), Matrix decides to coerce Cindy into helping him lure Sully to him in local shopping mall.

And then more violence happens. Cindy informs mall security about this crazy guy with bulging biceps and Matrix starts tossing security guards around like rag dolls. Sully notices Matrix never got on the plane, runs to a telephone booth to inform his boss, but Matrix rips the phone booth from the floor and throws it with Sully still inside.

Sully escapes, a car chase ensues, and Matrix drops Sully off a cliff once he gets the information he needs. Cindy decides to keep helping him rather running away for dear life. Eventually, through a series of misadventures, they make their way to the former dictator’s island stronghold, and Matrix manages to take out an army all by himself with the use of machine guns, rocket launchers, and garden tools he finds in a lawn shed.

Matrix shoots the dictator, throws a water pipe into Bennett’s chest, rescues his daughter, and flies off into the sunset with the sexy stewardess. I just spoiled the movie for you, but trust me, Commando is about the journey more than the destination.

I feel better know.

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #273 by Jeff Shuster

Wake of Death

Death, death, and more death. 

I’m not going to abbreviate his name. I know that seems to be the thing to abbreviate Jean-Claude Van Damme to J.C.V.D. or JCVD, but I refuse to do it. Jean-Claude Van Damme is human being, not an abbreviation. Is this jealousy, jealousy over the fact that you do not have as awesome a name as Jean-Claude Van Damme so you have to abbreviate it? Show some respect!

Or not.

Tonight’s nonsense is 2004’s Wake of Death from director Philippe Martinez. Okay. It’s not that bad. If you like tales of violence and revenge, you’ll feel right at home. Jean-Claude Van Damme seemingly plays a bouncer named Ben Archer who is done working for the mob, making me think he did more for the mob than beating up unruly guests at fancy night clubs. Oh, and Ben Archer is from Marseille. That’s a town in France. This explains why Ben Archer has a French accent. He’s married to an American social worker named Cynthia (Lisa King). Together, they have a son named Nicholas (Pierre Marais).

INS intercepts a boat of Chinese migrants. Among them is a young Chinese girl named Kim (Valerie Tian) whose father murdered her mother and is also the head of the Triads. His name is Sun Quan (Simon Yam). Cynthia, the social worker, convinces Mac Hoggins (Danny Keoh), a high-ranking INS agent, to let her take Kim home with her. Archer gives Kim the chocolate mousse he was eating. It looks really good, but he had his mouth all over the spoon. That’s really gross. Get me a fresh spoon if you’re going to share your chocolate mousse with me.

What else happens in this motion picture? Oh, yeah. Sun Quan slits Cynthia’s throat in a Chinese restaurant. His gang also shoots the owner, his wife, the cook, and the wait staff because…why not. It turns out Agent Hoggins, the INS agent, is crooked and helps Sun Quan sneak drugs over to the United States. Hoggins told him Cynthia was housing his daughter so he killed her. Archer shows up at the restaurant, shoots a bunch of gangsters, sees his dead wife, cradles her dead body in his arms, and weeps and weeps and weeps. I bet there wasn’t a dry eye in the theater during this scene.

Naturally, it’s time for sweet revenge. Turns out Cynthia’s Uncle Max is a French mobster so Archer reaches out for his help. There’s a scene where Max and his goons have Hoggins tied up and proceed to drill him for information by using an actual drill. Even when they get the information they need, they keep drilling and drilling and drilling. Is this a Saw movie? This is not family friendly entertainment. Just shoot the guy when you’re done with him. Don’t go crazy with a drill.

Let’s see.

We’ve got some car chases. A gas tanker explodes. There’s a shootout at the docks. The bad guy threatens the good guy’s son. Killing, killing, and more killing. Van Damme ends up on top.

And I’m at my word count.

Good night!

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The  Curator of Schlock #271 by Jeff Shuster

Death Warrant

Bring me a dream, Burke! Bring me a dream!

It’s May and that means it’s Jean-Claude Van Damme Month here at the Museum of Schlock. We’ll be taking a tour of his career from his early classics to his modern marvels. I remember covering Pound of Flesh last year, the one where Van Damme gets one of his kidneys stolen and goes on a mad spree to get it back. Let’s just say I have it on good authority that you’re not going to be getting up and running right after you’ve had a kidney removed. In fact, I’m pretty certain you’ll be laid up in bed, unable to walk for 24 hours. And don’t get me started on that catheter. Do you know what that is and where it’s inserted?

Tonight’s movie is 1990’s Death Warrant from director Deran Sarafian. Also of note is the screenwriter, David S. Goyer. He would later go on to direct the Dark Knight trilogy. Goyer also directed the brilliant Blade Trinity. I’m kidding, of course. Interesting that this motion picture cost only 6 million to make wake, but made 48 million. Ah, the quaint 1990s before cinematic universes and 200 million dollar budgets. Back when a young man could look at that silver screen and imagine himself in that director’s chair one day. And then we got the pop culture abyss that gave us the  trailer for the Sonic the Hedgehog movie and said young man realized he was better off living in the past.

Death Warrant begins with a Royal Canadian Mounted Police detective named Louis Burke (Jean-Claude Van Damme) tracking down a serial killer who goes by the nom de plume, The Sandman (Patrick Kilpatrick).  After confronting The Sandman in an abandoned warehouse, Burke plugs him full of holes. In other words, he gives The Sandman a lead shower. In other words, Burke pulls his gun out shoots the psycho serial killer many, many times. Burke did such a good job taking out The Sandman that he’s recruited into the Governor of California’s task force and asked to go undercover in Harrison State Prison, posing as an inmate to discover the reason behind a recent epidemic of murders in the prison.

The prisoners don’t take to kindly Burke upon his arrival even though he was sent there on a fake charge of armed robbery, a respectable crime amoung inmates. Cynthia Gibb plays state attorney Amanda Beckett and poses as Burke’s wife so she can feed him information she gathers on the outside. There’s a point in the movie where she employs the help of a teenage boy who keeps making innapropriate suggestions to her before asking her if she wants to watch Star Trek with him (which is also innapropriate). I think the nerd hacks into some prison database and Beckett figures out the corrupt prison warden is, naturally,  running an organ harvesting operation right out of the prison.

Things go from bad to worse when The Sandman is transferred to Harrison State Prison. He’s fully recovered from all those bullet wounds and ready to deliver some sweet revenge to Detective Burke. He lets all the prisoners know Burke is an undercover cop. They want his blood, as do the corrupt prison guards. The walls are closing in on Burke, but he’ll do some spin kicks, and that will make all the difference. Let’s just you don’t want to be standing in front of an open furnace when Van Damme delivers some sweet chin music to you.

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #270 by Jeff Shuster

Billion Dollar Brain

Michael Caine messes with Texas. 

Thumper once said, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Or was that his mother? Regardless, we need to talk about filmmakers in the 1960s. Someone or multiple people working on these productions were on dope. Haschisch,  Angel Dust, maybe a little bit of Mary Jane (the drug, not Spider-Man’s girlfriend). I’ve had a dandy of a time trying to follow these Harry Palmer films for the past couple of weeks. Tonight’s feature is Billion Dollar Brain, which has the most coherent plot of the three. And the movie isn’t a complete snooze fest, but this is a weird one.

Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) has decided to become a private investigator much to the chagrin of his former boss over at the Ministry of Defence. Harry isn’t making much of living as a P.I., surviving on Kellog’s Corn Flakes. One night, he gets a phone call, an automated message asking him to take a thermos full of eggs to Helsinki, Finland for a couple hundred pounds. There he meets an attractive woman named Anya (Françoise Dorléac) and an old friend from the United States, Leo Newbigen (Karl Malden). I guess Leo is Harry Palmer’s Felix Leiter, except he works for a mysterious organization and receives his espionage orders from a supercomputer in Texas that cost one billion dollars to build.

Yes, it’s the one billion dollar brain.

Now it’s obvious that the organization Leo is working for is nefarious since the eggs Harry was transporting are filled with deadly viruses. But to what end? Harry is drafted back into the Ministry of Defence, but told to stay with Leo and dig deeper into this mysterious organization. This organization has serious interest in Latvia.

Harry travels to Latvia to do something for this organization.

I’m not sure what. Attend a meeting?

While staying in hotel, he runs into his old Soviet friend, Colonel Stok (Oskar Homolka), who tells him to stay away from this meeting. It seems this organization Harry is involved in is interested starting an anti-Communist revolution in Latvia.

Harry and Leo end up in Texas where they run into General Winter, an oil tycoon played by Ed Begley. Hey, I bet that actor is the father of Ed Begley, Jr. Anyway, General Winter is a patriotic American and a proud Texan, but there’s something that really sticks in his craw and that’s communism. He goes on a megalomaniacal rant about how much he hates Godless communists and the chickens in Washington, D.C. who don’t want to drive it from the face of the earth. General Winters created a giant super computer to tell him how to do this. Leo was to carry out the machine’s orders, hire a bunch of men to infiltrate the military in Latvia, and unleash deadly viruses on the communist soldiers to pave the way for General Winters’ private army to invade.

Unfortunately, Leo pocketed the cash and never hired those secret agents. General Winters invades Latvia and there’s fear he may bring about World War III. General Winters’ convoy crosses a frozen Baltic Sea, but Colonel Stok is well aware the invasion plans. Stok drops bombs on the ice, cracking it and sending General Winters and his army of proud Texans into a watery grave. Harry survives to learn that the beautiful Anya was working for Stok all along.

Maybe she should have been the main character of this motion picture. How was this thing pitched? The Texans are the villains, the Soviets seem sort of reasonable, and the British spy is ineffectual. Thus closes the Harry Palmer trilogy.

Have a nice weekend!

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.