1976, Italy. Starring Stuart Whitman, John Saxon, Martin Landau, Tisa Farrow, Carol Laurre. Directed by Alberto de Martino.

There's this funny thing about the heroes in a film: you are supposed to like them. Oh sure, you might like him or her at first. They may be cocky, arrogant, and abrasive. Any number of negative personality traits may mar their character. But at some point in the movie something will happen that allows the hero to either show their true colors or causes a revelation that results in a character about-face and process of redemption. It's not important that we don't like the hero at the beginning of the film, so long as we like -- or at least admire them -- by the end.

All things considered, it's pretty easy to churn out a likeable, if stereotypical and one-dimensional -- hero. The cliches are all time-tested, and audiences never seem to get tired of them. A catatonic chimp can write a screenplay that, if nothing else, at least gives you a generically likable hero. A few snappy come-backs, some sassing of stuffy superiors, possibly some self-sacrifice or tragic loss. Piece of cake.

It is impressive then, that the Italian cop drama Blazing Magnum has managed to create a "hero" who is so unlikeable, so amazingly repugnant, that you can't help but cheer for even the most vile of criminals to get the better of this obnoxious asshole.

The main cop in a poliziotteschi film is supposed to be a hard-ass. He's supposed to be tough as nails, and he isn't supposed to take shit from anyone. He doesn't let niceties stand in the way of his single-minded quest for truth, and he doesn't let the law get in the way of his pursuit of justice. At the same time, he has to be a remarkably human character -- prone to violence, anger, and indignation, yes, but also prone to sadness and melancholy. He does what he does because he so believes in humanity, that we are, despite all evidence to the contrary, worth defending. No one played this part better than the incredible Maurizio Merli, who could convey sadness -- the warrior with a broken heart -- with his eyes while he delivered beatdowns of the bad guys with his fists.

Stuart Whitman, on the other hand, conveys all the depth of character and world-weary street smarts as a very small chunk of curb concrete that somehow got broken off from the rest of the curb. His character in this misanthropic but still entertaining actioner is, as I said, one of the most disgusting "heroes" ever to stumble onto the screen. He's not even an anti-hero. An anti-hero is usually hero by default because, while he may be evil, everyone else around him is even more evil. Witness Clint Eastwood in any of his spaghetti westerns, or witness Sonny Chiba in Streetfighter. But Stuart Whitman's driven cop out for revenge is so much more brutal, idiotic, and evil than even the baddest of the bad guys in this film that he becomes nearly impossible to bear.

As you have no doubt surmised, Whitman is a cop on the edge who don't take no shit from no one and who rubs his superiors the wrong ways on account of his "questionable methods." You know the score with these guys. The big difference here is that you actually have to agree with the superiors on this one. The cop on the edge can always defend his action with the ol' "My methods get results!" zinger, but that doesn't even apply here, because all this cop's methods do is result in a lot of brutalized and violated innocent people.

When his daughter turns up dead, Tony (Whitman) is determined to find the murderer. His first suspect is one of his daughter's college professors, played by Space: 1999's Martin Landau. It doesn't take long for Tony (Stuart Whitman) to uncover the fact that his daughter and the professor were engaged in a variety of extracurricular activities in the fields of biology and human anatomy. In order to keep a scandal from ruining his reputation, Tony figured, the professor just killed the gal. It's a pretty tenuous line of thinking, and in fact Tony has no evidence whatsoever beyond the fact that some jealous guy saw them in a mild quarrel. That doesn't stop him from breaking into Landau's house, roughing him up, shouting at him, accusing him in public, and generally taking the harassment to a level never before seen. The guy is, pure and simple, a grade-A prick.

Making it all the sweeter is the fact that Landau is completely and totally innocent. Even after this revelation, even after learning that Landau never treated the girl with anything other than the utmost respect and tenderness, Tony still acts like an asshole and tries to beat the shit out of the professor before just settling on calling him a perverted asshole or something. I understand Tony's upset and all, but come on. I bet he kicked two puppies and tripped an old lady on the way home.

His grating brutality directed at the innocent continues throughout the movie as he traces some clues to the posh apartment of a bunch of transvestites. These transvestites are not suspects. What Tony has uncovered is that they might have run into the killer when he might have been a customer at their hair salon at some point in their careers. Armed with this righteous truth, he blatantly violates every civil right he can think of.

First he breaks into their apartment. When they show up decked out in full drag queen regalia, all they know is that some disheveled maniac with full-bodied Tim Thomerson hair has just broken into their house. When they demand he identify himself, he calls them a bunch of perverts or faggots or something and tries to kick their asses. What he doesn't realize is that these are no ordinary drag queens. These are drag queens who possess kick-ass kungfu. Even while wearing giant platform boots and tight skirts, the girls kick the shit out of Tony, who only gets the upper hand on them when he grabs a hot curling iron and rapes one of them up the bum with it. Yep, that's your hero, folks. I guess he watched Black Shampoo but failed to realize the guys who employ the same violation on poor Artie in that film were actually vile criminals, not the heroes of the film!

At this point, all I could do was shake my head in amazement at the level of hatred this film spewed forth. I'm used to crummy characters, but Tony blew my mind. I'm supposed to root for this guy? Instead, as most people no doubt did, I was cheering for the drag queens to kick his ass and shut him the hell up. Come on! What the hell kind of hero rapes people in the rear with hot curling irons? People who have committed absolutely no crime and, in fact, have had crimes committed against them by some insane cop? It'd be different if the movie depicted Tony as an increasingly unstable man driven over the edge by his daughter's murder, but it's not that clever. Instead, it just expects us to think Tony's unbridled violence toward the innocent is admirable.

Not one to stop there, Tony also bullies the blind girl who was his daughter's roommate, and then goes out to beat up some other guy, leading to what is easily one of the most insane, well paced, and energetic car chase sequences I've ever seen. It's truly a sight to behold, even though it ends with the guy finally crashing and then going, "Oh, that's all you wanted? Okay, sure," and giving Tony the information he wants.

Right wing tendencies, even fascist undertones, are a staple of the poliziotteschi genre. In the better films, like Violent Naploi, they are handled well and a balance is struck between freedom and the desire to not be a prisoner in your own home while criminals run wild and free. Many of the films even spoof to some degree these attitudes, giving us take-no-shit cop heroes who, at the same time, are friends with prostitutes and freaks and other undesirables. It's only in more pedestrian films like Blazing Magnum that the fascism becomes annoying.

I don't think, however, that this sort of film actually sets out to promote fascism. I don't think it sets out to do anything but make a fast buck. They're just painting by numbers and following the formula. Without the talent of a director like Umberto Lenzi or an actor like Maurizio Merli, the film seems a lot meaner and reactionary. But like I said, that has a whole lot more to do with simply being derivative and unimaginative than it has with wanting to promote any sort of political agenda. When confronted with a low-budget, low-intelligence poliziotteschi film like this, it's best not to read too much into the events. It's likely there is no political statement whatsoever behind the actions. They probably just wanted to make a movie with a lot of ass kicking and tough guys in it.

Eventually, Tony uncovers the horrible truth about his daughter, which won't be much a shock to anyone other than Tony and John Saxon, who stars in this movie as Tony's underling. Tony's daughter was, in fact, quite insane. A murderer and aspiring urban terrorist and thief. I'm willing to bet she picked up those traits from her dear old dad. Of course, Tony still gets to kill some people, so at least that makes him feel better. Sure the guy who is eventually revealed to be the murderer is kind of a jerk, but even he can't hold a candle to Tony. After all the killing is over and done with, I think Tony stops by and calls Martin Landau an asshole one more time just to round out his dickishness, or there is some scene where Landau says, "Can I get an apology now?" and Tony says, "Yeah, I'm sorry you're such a perverted Poindexter. I'm gonna kick your testicles now!"

And that's pretty much that. This is a straight-forward cop film that only strays from the tried and true formula in order to make its hero the most vile individual on the planet. Even the crazy-ass would-be criminal who runs wild and murderous with the daughter is a lot easier to like than Tony. Stuart Whitman brings to his fascist character all the charisma of a drunk, abusive uncle who corners you at Christmas and won't stop talking about skinning animals while he pounds down a bottle of Old Crow. He's not the funny uncle, or the quirky uncle, or the uncle who just comes over and watches a lot of football. He's the uncle who is most likely to actually take a swing at grandpa and stumble out of the room calling your mother a "goddamn whore." This is not a guy for whom you want to cheer.

Through the entire movie, all I could was hope and pray that he would fail miserably. When he discovered his daughter was actually a killer and a nutcase, it was sort of satisfying, but the only way this movie could have dealt properly with Tony would have been to kill his ass off in some horrible and torturous fashion. On that end, it fails to deliver, and the world can sleep a little more restlessly knowing Office Tony Saita is still prowling the streets making even Harvey Keitel's character from Bad Lieutenant say, "Geez, pal, maybe you should tone it down a little."

Despite the fact that this film features a main character who makes you want to take a shower, who is actually so sleazy that he'll make you want to go turn yourself in to the cops even if you didn't do anything, the film itself is actually pretty damn entertaining. The fascist leanings of the hero are so over-the-top that you can't even be offended by them after the first couple of infuriating civil rights violations. Well, maybe you can be offended by the curling iron thing, but even that is completely ludicrous. Chances are if you are the type to get offended at anything, then Italian cop films aren't your cup of tea, especially ones this totally nuts.

With that established, we can simply sit back and enjoy the carnage, and this film has carnage galore. As I already mentioned, it has ass-kicking drag queen kungfu masters. That alone warrants a positive review from me. But it's also got the amazing car chase, lots of ass-kicking and two-fisted beat-downs delivered with little or no regard to whether or not the person on the receiving end actually did anything wrong, and a good pace to the proceedings.

Alberto de Martino's direction is claustrophobic and gritty, nearly as uncomfortable to watch as the hero of the film, which makes it more interesting than it would otherwise be. de Martino was a workhorse director, like most of the Italian directors at the time, and made films in pretty much every genre there was, including Medusa Against the Son of Hercules, Secret Agent Double 007 starring Sean Connery's brother, Neil, and everyone's favorite, Puma Man.

The cast isn't bad. They're all grizzled veterans of Italian action films. Whitman is relentless grim and unlikeable as Tony, which as I said may not be what you want from a lead character. John Saxon is hilarious as his dim-witted partner who can't seem to figure anything out and is amazed when Tony makes even the most obvious of observations. I think Saxon must say "Why didn't I think of that," about eight thousand times in this movie.

Landau is more famous in retrospect, but I can't really say he was slumming it at the time. He does well enough in his role, which is to stand there and utter "Now just a minute!" as Stuart Whitman berates him endlessly. Tisa Farrow, as always, proves why she should have been the more famous of the Farrow sisters instead of ol' whats-her-name. Carol Laurre as Tony's insane killer daughter mostly just has to die, then come back in flashbacks where she screams and whirls her hair about while doing some psychedelic nude hippie dance.

Were there really that many crazy-ass killer hippies out there? I admit that, being born in the early 1970s, I perhaps missed out on some of the world's wackier events, but other than Manson and his gang, I've never heard too many stories about roving bands of murderous, drug-crazed hippies roaming the streets in search of old women to victimize and squares to freak out. I don't doubt their existence; I'm just saying there were a lot more murderous hippies in the movies than maybe there were in real life, and most of the time what the movie sold as "murderous hippies" were really just bikers. I don't think your average murderous biker would appreciate being called a hippie, and maybe that's why they started killing people in the first place. I guess it's all a moot point since the killer daughter and her killer boyfriend may have drug induced freakouts but, in the end, are really more along the lines of obnoxious prep school students than they are hippies.

This is a great movie to blow your mind as well as the minds of your friends, especially the more sensitive among them -- if you have sensitive friends. In a genre noted for mean-spirited misanthropy, it manages to take the hate to the next level. Tony Saita is the kind of cop who makes you wish for the liberal outlooks of, say, Benito Moussilini. Combine a remarkably unlikeable "hero" with a ton of gritty and fast-paced action, as well a some kungfu transvestites, and you have a sure-fire crowd pleaser.

Labels: Horror: Giallo, Poliziotteschi, Stars: John Saxon, Stars: Stuart Whitman, Year: 1976