Brigade spéciale

This is a dumb, but thoroughly enjoyable Italian police thriller from journey-man Italian director Umberto Lenzi. Maurizio Merli is not my favorite actor (he was kind of a cut-rate Franco Nero), but he's pretty entertaining here as an over-the-top vigilante cop who slaps around suspects, engages in dangerous high-speed chases, and has shoot-outs in busy downtown Rome. When five young punks rape a girl, he goes into their hangout BY HIMSELF and beats up ALL of them up before chasing down and eventually shooting one of them to death. Even when his superior (Arthur Kennedy) transfers him to the licenses unit, he won't stay out of the action. In one of the funnier scenes, he beats information out of a bartender, breaks into a suspect's apartment without a warrant, and chases him around the Rome rooftops (in a great cinematic scene), but after the whole thing goes awry, he blames his superiors for making him go "by the book" (if that's true I'd hate to see "the book").

This movie has a great supporting cast. Besides Arthur Kennedy (who was in movies like "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie" and "Rico, the Mean Machine"), the movie features Ivan Rassimov, perhaps somewhat wasted as a low-level thug who gives his girlfriend an overdose of heroin simply because she's a "pain in the ass". The best of all though, is the great Tomas Milian as a psychotic hunchback, who starts out as a sympatheic figure, but turns out to be a frightening heavy. In one scene Meri's detective slaps him around and makes him swallow a bullet, which he later he craps out and vows to shoot the detective in the face with face with it for revenge!

The real weakness of this movie is the loose plotting. There's a lot of action set pieces, but the whole thing doesn't really hold together, especially whenever Milian is not on screen. The movie also could have used more women. Merli does have a pretty girlfriend (who the villains at one point threaten to put through a car compactor), but her role is pretty perfunctory.Still this is definitely a fun movie and I would recommend it.

Maurizio Merli and Tomas Milian star in probably the most typical, yet completely enjoyable Italian crime movie by Umberto Lenzi. With a blazing soundtrack by Franco Micalizzi and some exciting camerawork by Federico Zanni, this film is fast-paced and furious although the narrative makes relatively little sense. This reminds me of THE RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS, a film Dardano Sacchetti also penned, which was completely fun and enjoyable although it didn't make any sense whatsoever.

The best scenes in this movie have to be the extended car chases. Milian hijacks an ambulence and kills all the people on board for no reason. When it crashes in a crowded flea market, Milian jumps out of the ambulence and just starts randomly firing his sub-machine gun into the crowd to create enough confusion to get away. Another great scene has a gang of upper-class teenagers led by the baby-faced Stefano Patrizi who get bored of nightclubbing and proceed to rape a girl and beat up her boyfriend in a vacant lot. Patrizi is wholely unsympathetic as he punches the boyfriend in the gut repeatedly and knees him in the face, then making weird gestures with a nearby piece of wood. Merli later pops by their nightclub and smashes Patrizi's face right through a pinball machine and then simultaneously beats the tar out of the six or so members of the gang!

This film comes fast and furious. Good performances all around by a veteran cast (with Arthur Kennedy, Ivan Rassimov, and Luciano Pigozzi along for the ride). It's not the most coherent of Lenzi's works, but it's definitely a genre classic. Where's the DVD?

For the most part, this is one of the better poliziotteschi I've watched with several of the virtues associated with the genre - unrelenting action, pounding score, hard-boiled dialogue, an undercurrent of sleaze - and two of its top stars in Maurizio Merli and Tomas Milian.

A measure of the film's popularity is the fact that the characters played by both leads here (Inspector Tanzi in Merli's case and Vincenzo Moretto, dubbed "The Hunchback", in Milian's) were developed into individual series: in fact, the latter appeared in two more outings, while Tanzi had only one more film to go - THE CYNIC, THE RAT AND THE FIST (1977) which, interestingly, still had Milian co-star as an odious criminal but in a totally different characterization. One other typical feature of the genre is the presence of a veteran American star - in this case, Arthur Kennedy as Merli's by-the-book superior (but who's eventually converted to our hero's iconoclastic viewpoint). The supporting cast, then, features any number of familiar faces who thrived in Italian genre movies - chief among them Ivan Rassimov and Luciano Pigozzi.

The film has no real plot to speak of - other than to place Tanzi, at times in rather contrived fashion, in the midst of some action set-up (chasing and/or beating up petty criminals or intimidating some rich-kid suspect) - and, hence, may feel somewhat disjointed. The narrative, however, takes care to include as many social plagues as possible - underage delinquents involved in snatch-and-grab cases, a gang-rape, a drug-overdose victim, a hold-up from a post office (which our hero manages to disrupt virtually single-handed), etc. Besides, while the requisite romantic subplot does come in, it's an unusually complicated one - as Tanzi's girlfriend happens to be a magistrate whom he believes to be too lenient, and the couple eventually decide to go their separate ways. That said, I feel that the climactic showdown between Merli and Milian comes up a bit short in comparison with the action sequences throughout the rest of the film.

Still, the film is quite often hilarious: my favorite moment is when Merli blows his top in front of an elderly colleague - but whose meek interjection eventually leads Tanzi to crack the case! For genre addicts, however, the absolute cult scene in the film is the one in which Milian is made to swallow a bullet by the incensed Merli - but whose tough exterior isn't quite broken in the way the latter had expected, as The Hunchback proceeds to give out a loud hearty burp in defiance!

In the end, I ought to say that I'll be getting to another of Milian's poliziotteschi - EMERGENCY SQUAD (1974), where he's actually the cop hero - soon. Also, if my Unwatched DVD backlog hadn't taken a serious beating of late (I haven't gone through much but DVD-Rs and rentals for some time!), I would have been inclined to schedule a second viewing of the film (also directed by Lenzi) which contains perhaps his most important role in the genre, i.e. ALMOST HUMAN (1974) - via the "Special Edition" Italian DVD, which comes with an accompanying Audio Commentary (not included on the R1 "No Shame" release) and a second feature (Sergio Martino's VIOLENT PROFESSIONALS [1973]) to boot!!

Terry Levine done it again! He picked up a 1975 italian cop film, edited it down to 79 min, and open it wide in New York in 1982 (or was it 1981). People Magazine even reviewed this film!! Levine failed to mention the stars Arthur Kennedy, Tomas Milian, and little known (in the U.S.) the late action star Maurizio Merli doing the franco Nero role of a cop hellbend on going after the hunchback psycho (Milian). Levine tacked in the movie poster as the begining credit (!) (similar to what he did in MEAN FRANK AND CRAZY TONY, which he failed to mention Tony LoBianco) Kennedy is the only actor not dubbed, and the film just look standard with A to Z script. Milian, who use to get lead good guy roles in Italian film slowly became supporting player playing bad guys. Kennedy looks like he shot this film back to back with KILLER COP. Not recommended, unless the un-cut print runs better.

Sometimes I think that what really takes you into this movies is... the tune. At the beginning you see an "Alfetta" driven by a guy wearing a red and black scarf, some creepy skyscrapers in the background while the credits appear on the bottom right of the screen. You feel just surrounded by a massive soundtrack and you smile. I wonder if it used to feel the same in the seventies. I've seen only another Lenzi's movie. "Milano odia. La polizia non puo' sparare" has got a similar plot (Same subject, to be honest) but the director chose to put the criminal as the protagonist. In "Roma a mano armata" the policeman is violent and aggressive, in "Milano odia" the outlaw is a sort of victim of the system. It looks like the fight against criminality gets tougher day after day. The cinematographic relevance of these movies is their success in celebrating the action. But I found in Lenzi's a strong attention in the sociological issues related to his stories. His characters have got a good inner nature, they seem like gotten worse because bred in a hard environment. Finally, it is just amazing how a 31 years old film is still perfectly enjoyable and that is probably due to a neat and careful direction.