O, CAROLINE 1

 

More Starcrash. These artfully decaying shots are taken from a pre-production Special Effects reel created by Armando Valcauda. As a six year old coming home from school, I saw Caroline Munro on an advertising hoarding promoting Lambs Navy Rum, and the sight of her gave me tummy ache. When I told my wife this, many years later, she paraphrased Woody Allen in her exasperated response: 'for God's sake, Paul, even Freud speaks of a latency period'.

FROM A VAST AND DISTANT GALAXY...

 

Starcrash, d. Luigi Cozzi (1978)

Often described as a shameless Star Wars rip off, Starcrash was actually developed prior to the global success of George Lucas' movie, although, during production, some obvious references to the phenomenon were added to trivial but often amusing effect.

In fact, Cozzi's space opera has more in common with Jason Of The Argonauts cinematically, and is very much indebted to the Italian fumeti tradition. A rip-roaring adventure across time and space, Starcrash has an excellent cast (Caroline Munro, Marjoe Gortner, Joe Spinnell and Christopher Plummer) AND David Hasselhoff.

Full of flashing lights and optical effects (always a favourite), Starcrash is not by any means a great film but it is a supremely entertaining one, made with imagination and brio, low in budget but high in ambition. 

I was in Rome last month, a city my wife and I visit as often as we can. During the trip I was able to get to Profondo Rosso, a small shop in the Parti region of the city. It was set up by the director of Starcrash, Luigi Cozzi, and his pal, Dario Argento. For five Euros, you can visit a small museum in the basement that has props from some of Argento's movies. If you like that sort of thing, it's well worth the investment (I was overjoyed). Later that afternoon, still buzzing with excitement, it belatedly occurred to me that the pleasant man behind the counter was Luigi Cozzi. I don't have many regrets in life, but I wish I'd realised in time to shake his hand and say grazie mille for Starcrash. Hopefully, I'll get to do it next year.

COMING SOON...STARCRASH!

 

BAZOOKA FOR DUMMIES

 

In Italian crime thriller Killer Versus Killers (1985), hard-bitten hired assassin Henry Silva's weapon of choice is a rocket propelled grenade launcher. No hastily substituted mannequin is safe, no matter how nattily dressed.

JOG ON

You want entertainment and excitement, yeah? The old bread and circuses? You got it, courtesy of hyperactive Italian Ms Raffaella Carra. Now do one.

BROKEN MINDS BRING BAD LUCK

Suspiria, d. Dario Argento (1977)

A ghost train of a film. It also looks gorgeous, even when it’s showing us extremely ugly things. The plot can be summarised in one short line ('young woman discovers witches'), but the pleasure of the film is in its atmosphere and its design and it’s full on, balls out, bonkers bombast, a surreal nightmare in Technicolor with a deafening soundtrack. It’s the sort of film where a young woman frantically crawls through a tiny window to escape a killer, only to fall into a room full of razor wire. It’s a wonder, and a hell of a ride.     

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTE OF THE DAY

From Evil Eye, d. Mario Sicilano (1975).

REBELS = GARBAGE

Year Of The Cannibals, d. Liliana Cavali (1970)

'I Cannibali' is a film loosely based on a two thousand year old Greek text: ‘Antigone’ by Sophocles. The action takes place in a faceless but fascistic modern city state, a place where the bodies of executed ‘rebels’ block the pavements and roads, are left strewn across fields and piled up on waste ground. It is strictly forbidden to touch the bodies, let alone bury them, so the oppressed people have learned to step over them as if they were bags of rubbish. Indeed, government propaganda describes the bodies as ‘garbage’, and their decaying remains are linked to immorality, to corruption. As the slogan says: ‘rebels make you vomit’ - figuratively, literally.

Antigone (Britt Ekland, very serious) is haunted by her murdered brother’s unburied body, and teams up with a sympathetic foreigner to defy the law and move her brother’s corpse (and others) to a place of sanctity. The foreigner is called Tiresias, and is played by Pierre Clementi, an extraordinary presence in a number of outstanding films of the period. Tiresias’ symbol is the sign of the fish, a clear allusion to one of the first organised attempts to subvert an oppressive regime. With his bright eyes and scruffy little beard, Clementi played both Jesus and Satan in his career, the latter most notably in Bunuel’s ‘The Milky Way’ (1969).

Antigone and Tiresias’ rebellion is short lived, as they are quickly arrested, separated, interrogated, beaten and shuffled around various Brutalist buildings. Eventually, they are murdered and dumped on the street, but they will not stay unburied for long.

SET YOUR LIFE ON FIRE

Ruins were formed in 1978 in Mestre, a small town just outside of Venice where I once stayed for a few days in the late eighties. In the long, warm Summer evenings, the people of the town would gather in the main square and drink wine and socialise and dance to angry electronic music about how horribly bourgeois they all were, something that growing up in rural Essex had not prepared me for. I genuinely miss the place.

THE PRESENCE OF PLEASENCE

Warrior of The Lost World isn't much  of a film, and Donald Pleasence, as evil overlord Prossor, doesn't give much of a performance. He seems very tired, and his characterisation mainly consists of him wearing a light blue Blofeld type suit and having an artificial hand. 

Towards the end, he gets shot repeatedly, including twice in the head. Curiously, his eyes won't stop moving about, as if nobody has told him that head shots like that are usually fatal. Later on, it is revealed that the rebels actually killed a cyborg, so the extraneous eye rolling makes perfect sense. That's Donald, always at least one step ahead.