Ricco

If you have ever seen the title "Cauldron of Death" in your horror section, and it has the same cover or close to it as what's seen on this page, you are in for a definite surprise!

This is actually a very well made crime/revenge flick starring Chris Mitchum as Ricco. Who upon release from prison delves back into the underworld to seek revenge for his Mafia Chief fathers murder.

A great soundtrack and a hell wad of violence makes this a real winner for Italo/Crime buffs

Rico Aversi(Christopher Mitchum)is the son of a murdered mafia chief,who is slowly engulfed by a world of forgery and drugs in order to avenge his father's slaying.His adversary,Don Vito(an excellent Arthur Kennedy,who never achieved the recognition he deserved),is cruel,vicious and has years of gangland experience on his side.Here is a battle of wits,blood and violence that ends in a powerful and dramatic climax."Mean Machine" is a memorable Italian crime thriller.It has wall-to-wall nudity(supplied by Malisa Longo and Barbara Bouchet),plenty of gunplay and some nasty bits of gore for example the castration scene.The film is pretty hard to find,but you should search for it.My rating:7 out of 10.

Whoo-hoo, what a film! This film is lots of fun. Of course not in the masterpiece kind of way. Tulio Demicheli's "The Mean Machine" is a pretty bad flick indeedy. But it's such a perfect example of Euro-Trash, that I felt someone had to mention it. First off, it has Christopher Mitchum (where else can an a major actor's son find work? In Italy of course!) giving such a wooden performance, that my roomate mearly rolled his eyes, snickered, and walked out of the room shaking his head (c'mon Tony, you know you did). Christopher with his Dad's droopy eyes just stares off with that same blank expression through out the entire film. Of course he must have known it was a pretty bad script, so I won't fault him too much (I haven't seen his other artistic efforts). But it really cracked me up that on the video box there was this drawing of him looking handsome and muscular, which he definately is not. He was pretty wimpy looking, and evertime he tried to give a macho pose, or flex his authority, I nearly laughed myself silly. Though I excuse all of this, because the real reason I rented this flick was because of the wonderful and beautiful Barbara Bouchet! And this film delivers! She does this great little strip dance in front of these gangsters in a car, right before Chris (Rico the "Mean Machine") throws them into a lake! It's so funny, that Italy will take any oppertunity they can to show off Barbara's attributes. Of course it gratuitous, but it's just too much fun! And of course even after the big ambush, Chris looks to Barbara and she's still has no clothes on. She's having a good time tackling gangsters in the nude! Well, at least Barbara looks to be having fun. Another Euro-babe favourite Malisa Longo (as Chris' ex-girlfriend)also likes to spend her time flirting with Bodygaurds and sitting around in the buff. But unfortunately she meets with a very grizzly end, and becomes the film's sacrificial lamb (what else was gonna come of her character? Chris Mitchum was now with Barbara Bouchet.) in a tub of Acid! This film contains all the unnecessary violence (gory stuff as well), nudity (lots of it), macho posturing (Chris' Ricco is not opposed to giving a lady a smack if she's not behaving), and crummy acting that 70's Italian cinema is so famous for. Would I recommend it? Hardly! Did I laugh my fool head off? Yep! After this review, I'll let the reader make their own call. Barbara Bouchet is amazing!

The title suggests that Cauldron of Death is going to be another Giallo-styled thriller (Italian marketing campaigns...), but it turns out that this film is actually a part of seventies Italy's other big export; the Dirty Harry-influenced cop flick! Cauldron of Death is a little more nasty than a lot of the genre, however, as it features plenty of grisly murders, including some unlucky victims that find themselves being thrown into a vat of acid, a la our featured criminals' favourite method of dealing with people that annoy them. The story doesn't actually focus on the police like a lot of these seventies Italian crime movies, and the centre of the plot is Rico; a young man recently released from jail and thirsty for revenge on the man that killed his father (which we see at the opening of the film). The guilty party is a mobster named Don Vito, and he's certainly an adversary to be reckoned with as Rico, two years since he was sentenced to jail, is forced to match wits and out everything on the line to get revenge on the vicious Don Vito.

The film benefits from a good female duo. I'll watch anything that features the lovely Barbara Bouchet, and she doesn't disappoint here as we get treated to one of the best striptease scenes in Italian cinema! The film also features Malisa Longo, who adds to the eye candy. The men aren't bad either, as while Robert Mitchum's son Christopher is a little too naive looking for my liking; he still plays his part well. Arthur Kennedy rounds off a good central cast as the vicious Don Vito. Director Tulio Demicheli succeeds at generating a fetid atmosphere for the film to take place in, and the nasty death scenes certainly don't feel out of place considering the look and nature of the movie. The main problem with the film stems from the plotting. You'd be a fool to go into a cheapo seventies Italian thriller expecting a thoroughly well thought out plot; but this one veers off course a bit too often, and it can become distracting after a while. It's not a fatal problem; however, as Cauldron of Death is an entertaining and gritty little thriller that is well worth seeing if you can find it!

A young man (Chris Mitchum) gets out of prison to find that his mafia don father has been brutally murdered, and that the man that who did it (Arthur Kennedy)has also taken his fiancée (Malisa Longo). This sounds like the perfect set-up for a revenge movie, but this is actually a very atypical one. The young man had little respect for his gangster father and after years in prison is not all that desirous of revenge, but is drawn into it by his vengeful, invalid mother, his father's crooked business associates, his promiscuous former fiancée, and, above all, the utterly ruthless paranoia of the new don. This movie also takes the saying that "if you go seeking vengeance, dig two graves" to whole new extremes. The hero should have dug many, many graves since his vendetta gets practically everybody in the cast, sympathetic or evil, killed. Of course, digging graves is largely unnecessary since the evil don gets rid of most of HIS victims by putting them in an acid bath and turning them into soap for his soap factory (hilariously, he is therefore, afraid to use soap). This movie is VERY violent including graphic scenes of castration, a guy getting his face caved in with a rifle butt, ad infinitum. It was actually first released in the US as a horror movie called "Cauldron of Death".

What's interesting though, without giving away the end, is that the final revenge is strangely unsatisfying, and the movie ends up being more a tragedy like "Hamlet" than a revenge flick. It's more violent than your average American revenge flick, but also ironically a lot less fascist. Violence is not the answer to every problem and only begets more violence that ultimately stains the "good guys" as well as the "bad". (Also, even the ruthless don is humanized a bit in that he does seem to genuinely love his faithless mistress). Although certainly not all Italian crime/revenge movies are like this, I would still maintain that Italians seem to have learned something from their dark, fascist past that has been lost on many Americans.

But if all that's too left-wing for you, here's something that should appeal to ALL crime movie fans--the women. Barbara Bouchet does a sexy striptease that'll have your tongue unspooling onto the floor, but she also has an especially meaty role for a woman in one of these films as the protagonist's partner as well as his lover. Malisa Longo (whose body, uh, of work I was previously unfamiliar with) is a more the typical piece of meat (she's naked in every one of her scenes), but she does get to do some acting in her brief screen time. Ditto with future porn star Paola Senatore playing the protagonist's sister (who spends a hilariously amount of her time in bed with her husband)--I didn't even recognize her until the credits because I've never actually seen her actually ACT before. I would definitely recommend this one.