Tag: Italy

The Queen of the Pirates

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★★½
“Court in the act.”

queenofthepiratesSandra (Canale)  and her father fall foul of the local tyrannical Duke (Muller) after they refuse to pay his excise duty. Arrested, the arrival of the poor but noble Count of Santa Croce, Cesare (Serato), saves them from death – or a fate worse than in Sandra’s case, as the Duke has a profitable sideline, shipping local girls off to the Middle East. After escaping, they join up with a local pirate band, who agree to help target the Duke after Sandra bests their leader in sword-play. To gain the hand of the duke’s daughter, Isabella (Gabel), Cesare agrees to hunt down the “Queen of the Pirates” who has brought trade to a standstill, not knowing that his target is the same woman he helped save, and since then has had a secret longing.

Its storyline is more than slightly similar to the other Italian piratess movie we also covered here, Queen of the Seas, from the following year. This is slightly weaker, mostly because Sandra ends up taking a back seat to the heroic Cesare in the second half, though it benefits from a solid supporting performance by Gabel, who brings a genuine nastiness to her role as the spoiled heiress, who is perfectly happy to endorse Daddy’s white slavery operation, as long as it keeps her in jewels and pretty dresses. The shift in focus from Sandra is disappointing, not least because she can handle a sword pretty well – that’s clear right from the fight against the Duke’s excise-men, and reached its peak during the friendly duel against the pirate king. Really, given the era (1960) and Canale’s provenance as a former runner-up in Miss Italy, it’s genuinely impressive.

queenofthepirates2

From about the midpoint on, it is entirely predictable, and becomes much less interesting as a result, despite some efforts to suggest that Cesare might not really be smitten by the heroine – just pretending to be, in order to lure her in. There’s also some desperately unfunny attempts at comedy, courtesy of his squire, and the English dub appears to have been written by someone practicing for International Talk Like a Pirate Day, spattering every other sentence with gratuitous nautical vernacular. I can’t call it disastrous, and at 75 minutes, doesn’t outstay its welcome; there’s just too much queening and not enough pirating in this for me.

Dir: Mario Costa
Star: Gianna Maria Canale, Massimo Serato, Paul Muller, Scilla Gabel
a.k.a. La Venere dei Pirati

Le Avventure di Mary Read

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mary read

★★★
“Graded as a solid sea-plus.”

While best known for notorious horror film, Cannibal Ferox, director Lenzi’s career covered almost the entire gamut of genres, from spaghetti Westerns through Eurospy films and giallo, to war movies. He also did historical adventure films like this, starring Gastoni as Mary Read, a highwaywoman who takes a spot on a corsair ship run by the unfortunately-named Captain Poof (Barnes). After his demise in a sea-battle, Mary takes over the ship, leading daring raids on any and all who cross her path, on sea or land. Given Poof was working with the approval of the British crown, and supposed to be targeting only its enemies, this provokes a reaction, in the shape of Captain Peter Goodwin (Courtland), who is ordered to take care of Poof, unaware he has been replaced by Mary. However, complicating matters, he also knows her personally, having been locked up in prison with her back in England, and had a brief fling with Read at the time. Can he bring his former love to justice?

queen of the seasDespite its age – this was made in 1961 – it has stood the test of time fairly well, except for a romantic ending which is both predictable and unfortunate. This turns the heroine into exactly the subservient woman she spent the first 80 minutes not being. Up until then, it plays well ahead of its time, with Read taking no crap from anyone, and proving to be skilled both with a pistol and a sword, as well as her words. [And perhaps a needle, some of her costumes, particularly the red one, being quite spectacular] The production values are generally pretty impressive, especially in the naval sequences; they clearly had a couple of full-scale boats to work with, rather than miniatures. However, its recreation of what is supposedly “17th-century England” leaves a lot to be desired, unless the landscape and costumes of that era were a lot more, ah, Mediterranean than I was aware! I’m also rather hard pushed to swallow Read’s intermittent efforts to pass as a man: I guess eyesight was not as sharp back in the day.

Clocking in at a brisk 85 minutes, there’s not much chance to pause for breath. This helps paper over holes in the plot, such as the Governor of Florida apparently not bothering to mention to anyone, that his party was raided by a woman pirate. But I like the way Read is portrayed as smart, for example, out-thinking Goodwin and getting him to fire on a supporting ship – she wants to destroy his reputation as much as anything else. However, this makes the final resolution all the more implausible, and I’d far rather have seen her sail off into the sunset, perhaps with Ivan (Longo), the crew-mate who seems to carry a torch for her. I guess this wasn’t quite far enough ahead in its thinking.

Dir: Umberto Lenzi
Star: Lisa Gastoni, Jerome Courtland, Walter Barnes, Germano Longo
a.k.a. Queen of the Seas

Nikita – Sexy Killer

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★★
“French kissing… And rather more…”

[Note. This is a XXX-rated film, so while I’m being very restrained, the discussion of it is, of necessity, still for mature readers.]

nikita sexy killerI don’t have any problem with pornography, but the concept of porn with a storyline leaves me somewhat baffled: it’s a combination that doesn’t seem to make sense. Personally, I either want to watch people having sex or a movie with actual characters and a storyline; I don’t think I’ve ever been in the mood where I’ve thought, “I want 2 1/2 hours that combine hardcore pornography with more traditional elements of cinema,” but that’s what you have here. Actually, 2 1/2 hours of hardcore pornography alone, seems like serious overkill, by a factor of somewhere between five and ten. I certainly didn’t get through this in one sitting.

But I was intrigued by the concept. The porn parody has a long, disreputable history, from Skinemax fluff like Lord of the G-Strings through to hardcore entries like – and, I swear, I’m not making this up – Naporneon Dynamite. But this, dating from somewhere between 1996 and 1999, depending on which source you believe, is the first I’m aware of which was based on an action heroine. [Subsequent investigation turned up what appear to be multiple entries involving Lara Croft-alikes. I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for reviews here] The star here, Sarah Young, got her start doing Page 3 shoots at the age of 14 (!), and transitioned to hardcore later, under the care of her future ex-husband, Hans Moser. Last I could find out, she had quit the adult industry, and was studying to be a lawyer.

Anyway. This film may simply be titled “Sexy Killer”, going by the print – this would make more sense from a “not having Luc Besson sue your ass off” front, but the IMDb begs to differ, so I’m going with that. It certainly does follow the basic storyline of Nikita, particularly early on, though the crime which gets the heroine, Sarah Lester (Young) on her journey into Nikita, is a home invasion – albeit one which turns into a group sex scene between the actual invading of the home and the cops showing up. Then, as in the original, she shoots a cop while high, but is bailed out of the resulting life sentence, by Serge (Clark), who offers her an alternative: wet work and other operations for the organization in which he works. There’s a restaurant scene where she has to assassinate another diner, and another mission involves sniping from a window, both of which will be familiar to fans. But the film does divert at the end, where – and I trust I’m not spoiling this for anyone – Nikita lifts some incriminating documents she’s supposed to be recovering, and uses this as leverage to break free from her employers. Which is actually a kinda cool idea, I have to admit. I also appreciated the cat-fight between Nikita and her mentor/colleague, Jeanette (Sartori). Besson missed a trick there, I feel. And the subsequent lesbian canoodling.

Mostly, though, it’s about the sex. Lots and lots of sex, with the ratio of that to plot being approximately 3:1. And, since the running time is 152 minutes, that is an awful lot of multiple aardvarking, as Joe Bob Briggs used to call it. As for what happens in the remaining 38 minutes (approx), you have to cut the performances some slack, given dubbing where the voice actors are far more enthusiastic with regard to moaning and groaning, than the actual dialogue. But, actually, the actors aren’t bad: in particular, Clark is spot-on, as the world-weary agent tasked with keeping his rebellious underlings in line, and a good equivalent to Tchéky Karyo (or Gabriel Byrne, if you prefer the remake). But the action scenes are perfunctory, and little more than a token gesture – admittedly, it’s an entirely different kind of action in which the makers are interested, so criticizing them for this seems irrelevant. It is possible to make films that mesh hardcore sex with narrative in an interesting way: Caligula is perhaps the best-known example, and Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, by reports, also does so. Here? Not so much, and it’s probably of interest only to Nikita completists.

Dir: Mario Bianchi (as “Nicholas Moore”)
Star: Sarah Young, Christoph Clark, Stefania Sartori

Lady Dynamite

  By

★★
“La donna è mobile”

la padrinaThe tenth wedding anniversary of Donna Costanza (Alfonsi) in New Jersey is rudely interrupted when her husband is gunned down during the party. For he was a Mafia boss who, it appears, had crossed the wrong person. Before dying, he whispers to his wife, “Giarratana from Palermo,” apparently fingering the man behind the hit. Seeking revenge, Madam Costanza flies to Sicily, and meets up with a loyal family employee, soliciting his help to plan the death of the local boss fingered by her husband’s last words. But things are considerably more murky than they seem, as Costanza has wandered into the middle of some shenanigans involving a corrupt local official, a police investigation and an arms deal, which are all leaving a trail of corpses in their wake. And someone wants Donna to join the dead bodies, first trying to blow up her plane, then sabotaging the brakes on her car. When a supposedly blind man guns down her contact in the street, it’s getting too warm for comfort.

I can see where this is aiming, coming out the year after The Godfather, and aiming to add an extra layer of Italian authenticity – while, of course, keeping a canny eye on the American market. However, by trying to cram everything into little more than 90 minutes, the net result is more confusing mess than epic drama, and particularly in the middle third, poor Donna is left little more than a minor supporting actress in her own movie. Things are not helped by a soundtrack and costumes which appear not so much stuck in the seventies, as repeatedly nail-gunned to the floor of the decade. Things get a bit more interesting when Donna finally meets the man responsible – he actually pays her a visit, doesn’t deny his role in proceedings, calmly explains he was basically doing what was best for business, and then invites her to join him, as the only way to keep the Costanza name at the top of the food chain. It’s a neat twist, further muddying the lines between organized crime and (semi-)legitimate business which have been blurred by the movie, almost since she arrived in Sicily.

So, will Donna take a pragmatic approach and bury the hatchet for the sake of her family’s future? Or will she follow through with vengeance on behalf of her husband? It’s somewhat diverting, while the ending is both decisive, and offers a nice commentary on life in 70’s Sicily, where Death apparently was an everyday occurrence. But getting there involves sitting through an awful lot of mobsters sitting around doing mob things, and Vari is definitely not Coppola.

Dir: Giuseppe Vari.
Star: Lidia Alfonsi, Venantino Venantini, Mario Danieli, Orchidea de Santis
a.k.a. La Padrina

Nina: Crazy Suicide Girl

  By

★★
“Well, it’s certainly different. Note: different, not necessarily good”

NinaPosterThis micro-budget Italian offering seems to go about things almost entirely in reverse. Rather than establishing the characters, then dropping them into a scenario, this starts with Nina investigating a missing girl, Anna. The disappearee seems to have some connection to the dodgy “Xstasy” video company, fronted by Cesare Mazza (Guerra), and behind that, an apparent Satanic cult under the leadership of Marcus (Visconti), who is actually a woman. Apparently, they take the offcasts of illegal Eastern Europeans from the porn shoots, and sacrifice them to their demonic master.

But what’s never really addressed in any real detail is Nina. Is she a cop? A private detective? An assassin for hire? And what exactly did she do to merit the title of, and I quote, “Crazy suicide girl.” Must have been something pretty cool and interesting, right? We never learn. She does point a revolver at her temple and pull the trigger, but since we have no clue if it’s loaded or not, I’m finding myself underwhelmed there. She does torture someone with a blowtorch to extract information from them. But I had just finished watching 24: Live Another Day, and let’s be honest, that isn’t enough to turn Nina into Jack Bauer in a dress.

I did quite like the heroine, who has an off-center attitude to her and a look which is not conventionally pretty. But the film probably needs to decide what it wants to be, and stick with it, rather than trying to combine aspects of the hard-boiled detective thriller, Dennis Wheatley adaptation, soft-porn and action heroine genres. Because, the scripts doesn’t handle any of them particularly well. For instance, the “detecting” aspects are so conveniently simplistic as to be an embarrassment, right from when Nina discovers a porn DVD in Anna’s bedroom. Another problem is an almost total lack of motivation for anyone involved here, from Nina through Cesare and up to ‘Marcus’: they seem to exist purely because the plot demands they do.

There’s no shortage of nudity and the gore effects are fairly plentiful, if characterized more by enthusiasm than quality. But it’s only at the very end, which hints at a sequel with the potential to be more interesting than this film, that you get some idea of what this was trying to accomplish. It’s a shame there wasn’t less of a gap between intent and execution, pun not intended.

Dir: Christian Arioli
Star: Irene Giordano, Mauro Cipriani, Gabriele Guerra, Stefania Visconti

Blonde in Black Leather

  By

★★★½
“Girls on a Motorcycle”

“What if we free everyone? Everyone who wants to come with us, not just children.  We could make a gang that even Butch would be proud of.  Stop by all the laundrettes, tell them all to come with us. And if they don’t want to come, it’s their loss.”

blondeinblackleatherClaudia (Cardinale) has a humdrum life working in a laundrette, with a sleazy husband and no hope of anything more exciting in her future. Into the laundrette storms the titular woman, Miele (Vitti), whose devil-may-care attitude enthralls Claudia, and gives her the courage to throw away her staid existence and follow the blonde on the road. Miele is initially resistant to the idea of a travelling companion, but rides to the rescue, driving her bike through the railway station where Claudia is being harassed. Miele must make a mysterious appointment in Northern Italy with her lover, but that’s okay, as Claudia has a cousin, on the way, in Naples. However, as the two make their way, it gradually becomes clear that Miele could give Baron Munchausen a run for his money, when it comes to spinning tall tales, and both her mouth and impetuous actions, are as likely to get the pair into trouble as out if it.

It plays kinda like a pre-make (since it came out in 1975) of Thelma and Louise, directed by Stephen Chow, because it has the same mo lei tau (or “makes no sense”) approach. For instance, at one point, while Miele is re-enacting one of her alleged escapades. the bike careers off the road, with Miele left dangling from a tree. Several minutes later, after Claudia helps her down, in the background, you see the motor-cycle, still going, driving itself into the sea. Or later on, after they mistake a policeman for a criminal, they’re chased out the back of a train, and the film switches into b&w slapstick mode, with deliberately bad rear-projection, etc. No-one bats an eyelid at any of this. While the plot is flimsy, to say the least, it relies heavily on the charm of its leading ladies, and that aspect is a roaring success, right from the moment Vitti strides into the laundrette. Co-writers Barbara Alberti & Amedeo Pagani, who penned the script along with Di Palma, had just come off the similarly fetishistic The Night Porter, and Di Palma shoots proceedings with the eye of someone who was a cinematographer first (he was a frequent DP for Woody Allen in the eighties and nineties).

It’s a generally frothy confection, light in aim and intent, though has occasionally surprising moments of poignancy, and the reason behind Miele’s fantasies is impeccable. There is also a surprisingly impressive brawl (below), after the pair clean out a casino, in which Cardinale kicks ass thanks to some rather good staging. Considering Italy in the seventies was hardly a bastion of feminism, this is particularly impressive, and providing you aren’t looking for anything particularly meaningful – or even logical – has survived the forty years which have passed, much better than many of its era.

Dir: Carlo Di Palma
Star: Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale
a.k.a. Qui Comincia l’Avventura [“Here Begins the Adventure”]

War Goddess

  By

★★★
“Should have paid more attention in history class.”

War_goddessThe Amazons are a tribe of women, who have seceded from the rest of the world, and set up a state purely composed of their own sex. For reproductive purposes, there’s an annual get-together with men – preceded by exercises to prevent any feelings except for abhorrence – and every four years, contests (javelin throwing, running, archery, etc.) to choose the queen. Which is where we come in, with blonde Antiope (Johnston) defeating brunette Oreitheia (Sun). The new ruler believes the tribe have gone soft, and also wants a return to a more egalitarian society; this doesn’t sit well with Oreitheia, or a lot of the other high Amazons, and a coup d’etat is soon being planned. Meanwhile, the annual Bonkapalooza poses problems of its own, as Antiope finds herself with feelings for Greek king Theseus (Infanti), who in turn feels guilty about having inadvertently sent the tribe into a Scythian ambush.

I don’t think I’ve often been so confused by a film’s approach, but this is so uneven in tone, I had to watch twice to get any kind of handle on it. For example, it starts with a jokey set of captions about how this maybe didn’t really happen, then swings in to the competition to be queen, peaking in seriousness with Antiope’s “pipe bomb” speech post-inauguration, which is radical to the point of almost revolutionary. But before you know it, you’re back to sub-Benny Hill antics involving bawdy comedy, or interpretive dance. This roller-coaster ride has Antiope apparently going from conception to birth in what feels like three days, without ever passing through pregnancy. It ends in a massive disappointment, which sees Antiope transformed from a warrior queen into little more than a simpering underling to Theseus, concerned that she might have to ask him for money to buy new sandals. Guess the sex war is over, guys – and we won. Woo-hoo!

Not to say there isn’t plenty here to enjoy, because it’s clear a lot of work went into this, and there’s no shortage of spectacle. Okay, some of it was work you might not have minded. According to Raw Panic, “Director Terence Young and colleagues reviewed 14,000 photographs and conducted “Miss Amazon” contests in Trieste, Paris, Hamburg, Munich, Rome and Nice to come up with the 100 women who are the Amazons.” Hey, it’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it… Those selected, “then endured a six-week training regimen that included riding, calisthenics and running from early in the morning until lights out. They did mostly their own stunts too; several girls had broken legs and one lost a finger under a chariot wheel.” If the results are somewhat uneven – some still look unsure about which end of a sword is which – most of the featured actresses are competent enough. Young is probably best known for his role in kick-starting the 007 franchise, directing both Dr. No and From Russia With Love – I was certainly reminded of the classic “gypsy camp catfight” sequence from the latter by a couple of moments here.

Yeah, if there are two scenes you’ll remember, it’s the brawls between Antiope and Oreitheia. The first is to decide who wears the crown, and involves the pre-fight application of “holy oil,” one suspects more for aesthetic than ecclesiastical considerations. The second is when Oreitheia’s midnight assassination attempt is uncovered, and appears to exist in two versions: one bikini-clad, the other entirely nude, depending on the market. You can catch a glimpse of the former in the trailer below; the less-encumbered, NSFW version can be seen in the Italian promo. Go ahead. We’ll wait for you here. :)  There. Wasn’t that fun? Credit is due to both Johnston and Sun, who take on material that often strays to questionable or even laughable, with a straight-faced intensity which is rather more than it deserves. It’s a shame that some of the others involved, on the other side of the camera, weren’t apparently willing to take this as seriously.

Dir: Terence Young
Star: Alena Johnston, Angelo Infanti, Sabine Sun, Rosanna Yanni
a.k.a. Le guerriere dal seno nudo
a.k.a. The Amazons

Little Rita of the West

  By

★★½
“Killing off the Western musical, almost a decade before Paint Your Wagon.”

I came into this almost entirely blind, watching it based on the title and the first three minutes off YouTube. You can understand my surprise, after Rita (Pavone) and her German sidekick (Dalla) take out a gang of stagecoach robbers, finishing off by gunning one down in the back, as he lies dazed on the ground, when they… burst into song? Yep, what I didn’t know was, this is actually a musical, designed around the talents of Ms. Pavone, who was apparently a huge pop-star in Italy in the sixties. Hence the songs. Okay, that makes a bit more sense. But it’s still an extremely odd beast, swinging from obvious spoof to apparent seriousness at the drop of a catchy tune.

The plot has Rita “liberating” gold from various bad guys, in conjunction with her Indian chief partner (Mitchell), with the intention of destroying it, believing it’s the root of all evil. That brings her into conflict with “Ringo” – sharing the same of a popular spaghetti Western character, but really a thinly-disguised Man With No Name – and “Django,” a not-at-all disguised copy of that iconic character, down to him dragging a coffin containing a machine-gun, and possessing broken hands. But she then meets and falls for another outlaw, Black Stan (Hill), who ends up sentenced to death after he tries to run off with Rita’s stash of gold awaiting destruction.

Much of this clearly isn’t intended to be serious, such as Rita’s rocket-propelled grenades which clip on to her gun, the local sheriff (Pavone’s husband and manager Teddy Reno) who’d rather be a lumberjack hairdresser, and the frequent references to “frontier humour,” whenever anyone makes a bad joke. But the confrontations with Ringo and Django are played more or less straight, and Little Rita (who is indeed little, at barely 4’10”) is actually made to look something of a bad-ass, punching above her weight. There are actually some genuinely impressive bits of satire, too, such as one victim asking to die “American style,” which means he gets to tell his life-story before the final breath, unlike “Indians and Japs.” The finale, too, needs to be seen to be believed, and is an absurdist breaking of the fourth wall.

However, for every smart and witty moment, there are probably two really stupid ones, while most of the performances would get their actors fired from Benny Hill for excessive comedic mugging. And the songs don’t help: I’m not averse to the concept (I’m a big My Fair Lady fan, and we’ve also seen enough Bollywood films to be able to cope with sudden jumps into musical numbers), but these are damn near irredeemably-awful. The result often finds its way into lists of the worst spaghetti Westerns ever made: if I can certainly see why, I’ll confess I was generally entertained, if only by the sheer “WTF?”-ness of proceedings. It’s more or less unlike any other GWG film you will ever see, and I’ve not seen any other spaghetti Westerns with a female lead either: for such originality alone, I can’t condemn it entirely.

Dir: Ferdinando Baldi
Star: Rita Pavone, Lucio Dalla, Terence Hill, Gordon Mitchell

Satanik

  By

★★★
“The beauty is a beast, in lurid yet chaste 1960’s European comic adaptation.”

Originally, Satanik was the villain in a series of Italian photonovels/comics. But in 1964, writer Max Bunker changed the sex and this 1968 movie – set in Spain, made by Italians – followed, though Satanik isn’t mentioned by name (I guess, a little like Heavy Metal). The central character here is a disfigured scientist, temporarily turned beautiful by a potion which also removes all her morals and inhibitions. The body count mounts, and to escape the cops, she takes another woman’s identity; unfortunately, her victim was a police stoolpigeon, and those she grassed up are also very keen to find her. Plus, her medication is wearing off…

The comics had a broad range of supernatural themes, featuring vampires, etc. but the only extra-real element in the film is the potion. What delights here, is a villainess totally lacking in scruples, reliant only on herself, making the film years ahead of its time in this aspect. Less appealing are some truly horrible fashions, proving the 60’s match the 70’s for wardrobe atrocities.

Still, the soundtrack grooves, and some thought went into this, even if the ending leaves much to be desired, almost as if it was tacked on to appease the censors. Konopka was obviously cast for looks, as her (kinda tame) stripteases prove – in one, a homage to another comic-book character, Diabolik, the last item removed is a balaclava – yet doesn’t disgrace herself. Neither does anyone else, save perhaps the costume designer, though you won’t mistake this for less than 30 years old.

Spooky coincidence time: we finished watching it about 11pm, and went to sleep. Woke up next morning, turned the TV on…and the first thing we saw? Konopka’s only other film of note: When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Does this mean anything? No, not at all. But it was kinda cool. :-)

Dir: Piero Vivarelli
Star: Magda Konopka, Julio Pain, Umberto Raho, Luigi Montini