Killer Imperium

How do you catch a criminal who is so far removed from the action he doesn't provide any evidence at all? This is the conundrum cop Antonio Sabato faces when up against Mob Boss Luciano Rossi, who surprisingly doesn't rape anyone in this film! Good to see you stretching your skills out a bit there, Luciano!

Luciano has a load of underlings operating a racket in Rome but just lately these poor defenceless armed robbers have been getting their asses kicked by Antonio Sabato and his special squad of deadly cop men. This includes Giampiero Albertini, a single dad who loves his son and has hopes for the future. Bet you can guess where that one's heading

Antonio also puts the pressure on local drug dealer Luciano Pigozzi to get the names of three robbers killed during a heist gone wrong, and it's here he meets Dagmar Lassander, who provides some mumbo jumbo stuff about horoscopes before jumping into bed with Antonio and not really doing much of anything else. I guess it was a quick strip job for the camera.

The first half of the film kind meanders a bit around Antonio working his way to the top of the gangster food chain before finding indirectly that Luciano Rossi is holding the monopoly on protection rackets in tow. Luciano of course gets caught in stupid way (should have picked more nondescript car to drive about in Luciano) which leads to a tense stand of at a school with child hostages and such like.

I actually burst out laughing at the start of this one as the first scene features a stripper doing a dance for the crowd and then randomly dipping her boobs into a glass of wine for now reason whatsoever.

Let me start off by stating that this is a name-only sequel to COLT 38 SPECIAL SQUAD. None of the same characters appear... plus I don't think I remember there even being a colt 38 anywhere in the movie. Early-career Antonio Sabato certainly lacks the charm of his "unhinged" comedic later roles in action movies like FUGA DAL BRONX. In this film he plays a really by-the-numbers police inspector devoid of any charisma.

I don't know who wrote the plot synopsis here but I doubt they watched the same movie I watched. The plot vaguely follows Sabato as the usual trenchcoat-clad angry cop in charge of the anti-racket with a loose-cannon single-dad sidekick Giampiero Albertini. He's also aided by a pair of trigger-happy motorcycle plainclothes cops, one of whom played by Max Delys from YOUNG VIOLENT DESPERATE. The bad guys this time around are a shady but overall unthreatening protection gang led by reclusive millionaire Luciano Rossi. The last third of the film follows a neat (but brief) car chase and a tense hostage standoff in a boarding school.

While this film has standard performances and creative photography, it suffers from an awfully slow pace through its first half and an overly familiar-feeling second half. There's practically no character development and the action scenes are few-and-far-between. However, the film is sharply written, directed, and feels a lot classier and more fun than most other non-Castellari/Lenzi 70's Italian crime films.

The main reason to watch is to see Luciano Rossi in a rare turn as the lead antagonist. He puts in a real authentic-feeling greasy slimeball performance, especially toward the end where he gets some decent screen time to steadily go more and more nuts (though the English dubbing saddles him with Michael Forest's voice, which doesn't fit him). Ted Rusoff dubs Antonio Sabato, with his wife Carolyn de Fonseca dubbing Dagmar Lassander (who seems to be in the movie purely to take her clothes off).