Review by Coventry

In the wonderful world of Italian Poliziotteschi (a cult/exploitation sub-genre) movies from the 1970s, Stelvio Massi was a director/cinematographer whose name and reputation were rather insignificant compared to some of his more talented and infamous colleagues, most notably Umberto Lenzi or Enzo G. Castellari or Fernando Di Leo, but he did deliver a handful of undemanding & fun films. This "Emergency Squad" is arguably his best work; a rudimentary and derivative but nevertheless blood-soaked (literally) story about an unorthodox copper on a personal quest for raw vengeance against the bastard criminals that killed his wife during their escape from a bank robbery. During his prolific in these euro- crime movies, cult actor Tomas Milian alternately played borderline coppers and psychotic criminals, and this time he depicts the cop. Inspector Ravelli from Interpol is called to the holdup scene where a quintet of criminals inventively pretended to be a film crew and gunned down an unfortunate policeman. Ravelli immediately spots that the bullet shelves on the ground come from the same weapon that killed his wife five years earlier and begins his obsessive hunt. Meanwhile, there's severe distrust and hostility between the crooks. Particularly their leader Marsigliese clearly doesn't intend to share the loot and prefers to get away with his mistress Martha. "Emergency Squad" is memorable to me for three main reasons: the performances of the two lead actors, the extremely violent nature of the gunfights and the fact that approximately 1/3 of the DVD that I own is spoken in its original Italian language without English dubbing subtitles. The latter point is rather bizarre, since the DVD is an official release (yellow box with a drawn picture of Tomas Milian's character in front of a bullseye) and actually quite expensive! Milian's opponent in the film is none other than Gastone Mochin (immortal thanks to the brilliant "Milano Calibro 9) and he portrays a marvelously complex and atypical gangster. Marsigliese is a ruthless thug, but also struggling with his health due to chain- smoking. Last but not least, "Emergency Squad" contains numerous of vile gunfights and executions for which I honestly wonder whether the human blood spillage is anatomically correct or not… Whenever someone is shot, admittedly always with heavy artillery and at extremely close range, his/her clothes are immediately drenched in blood. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen bigger bullet wounds or more massive bloodshed in any other movie in my life. Of course I never witnessed an execution in real life, but I do suspect that director Stelvio Massi exaggerated a tad bit with the blood spillage in order to make his film more sensational and more appealing to fans of the Poliziotteschi genre … And it worked, too!