Contraband                 

Dubbed

Director Lucio Fulci comes late to the Italian Poliziotteschi party, but he comes with a sledgehammer smashing everything in sight. Extremely violent with blown off faces, melted bodies, beatings, stunts, sleaze, full nudity and rape. Fulci takes the film to the limit of bad taste and then happily steps over it. The violence to some degree covers up a narrative that doesn't make much sense really and a slow trudge in the first third that gave no hint of what was to follow. The graphic violence is what everyone will talk about afterwards with an otherwise pedestrian plot of gang war fare. The dubbing was not great which definitely hurt the non-action scenes - in particular those between the main character and his wife which felt like two strangers talking to each other. The ambush at the end - as ridiculous as it may have been - was the cherry on top of the pastry. The elderly Don who liked watching Spaghetti Westerns is my hero.


Luca (Fabio Testi) and his brother Michelle (Enrico Miasto) are top smugglers in a loose gang of independent individuals - all with their own speedboats. They are smuggling cigarettes from ships offshore. Ok - cigarettes cause lung cancer but basically a service to people who can't afford the tax the government puts on them. Much of the town of Naples is involved in the business either as a smuggler or a consumer. Luca has a wife (Ivana Monti) and son who want him to get out of the business, but what else can he do. Luca and the brother are stopped on the highway by two men dressed as police and they gun down the brother - who then takes an astonishing tumble down the cliff into the sea below. I need to go back and watch that in slow-mo. Was it a dummy or just a crazy stunt but the person looked to be real.


No one has a clue who was behind the killing. Why gun down a simple cigarette smuggler. Others begin getting murdered in graphic ways. It turns out to be the new guy in town, Il Marsigliese played by Marcel Bozzuffi of the French Connection fame. He doesn't care about cigarettes - he wants to sell drugs and wants the smugglers to become his distribution arm. It gets rougher and rougher - a woman's face is burnt slowly with smoke coming off her skin, a gun stuck in a mouth and a hole in the back of his head, a rape so vile that I had to turn away and fast-forward. Interestingly, I read that the film ran out of money after two weeks of filming in a planned eight-week shoot. Not great planning. But real smugglers came forward to help financially and as extras. The cigarette smugglers I would guess. By the way, the black woman in the disco scene is Ajita Wilson, a very famous transsexual at the time. The score is composed by Fabio Frizzi.

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