1974, Italy. Starring Tomas Milian, Laura Belli, Henry Silva, Gino Santercole, Anita Strindberg, Guido Alberti, Ray Lovelock. Directed by Umberto Lenzi.

You know, you think you've seen it all, and then along comes something like this to make you realize the world still has so much to offer you, so much worth living for. After Violent Rome, I thought I'd seen the paramount in cinematic cynicism and poliziotteschi brutality. Ha! I was just being primed for this little baby, which like most poliziotteschi films, actually caused me to howl with wild abandon and run around the living room. I was even tempted to climb up through the skylight and do a suggestive dance on the snowy rooftop, but then I figured my Hasidic neighbors would not be as happy about that as I was.

For starters, reviewing The Executioner allows us to right a fairly heinous wrong. Frankly, I'm a bit astonished that we got this far at Teleport City without ever reviewing a film featuring Henry Silva. It's something of a miracle, really, to review so many 1970s B-movie actioners and not run across Henry Silva. It's like reviewing 1970s/1980s made-for-tv movies and not mentioning Clu Gulager, or doing a website that reviews only films made for the Lifetime Network, yet never reviewing a film that either stars Meredith Baxter Berney or is about a woman who is pursued by an abusive ex-husband but no one believes her (and that woman would probably be played by Meredith Baxter Berney).

Silva is one of those guys few people can name, but everyone can recognize, sort of like Al Leong and Eddie Deezen. Maybe those three should make a movie together. Boy, that sure would be something. So get this -- if Teleport City ever becomes one of those internet sensations you read about in the papers, and I become fabulously wealthy, I will take my first several million and make a movie starring Henry Silva, Al Leong, and Eddie Deezen. And you know, since I'm a relatively nice guy, I'll throw Tim Thomerson and Antonio Fargas in as well!

Silva was in hundreds of films, usually playing a crazy-ass (not just crazy, but crazy-ass) villain or henchman. This is probably because, much like Christopher Walken, Henry Silva looks absolutely psycho when he does the angry face, and he looks even more psycho when he tries to look happy or sane. He's also a character who, like Tim Thomerson or even Vincent Price, can usually deliver a performance that is far better than the movie around it. With a good publicist or agent, Silva could have probably been a big star. Instead, he took damn near every role that came his way and became one of the most beloved and respected character actors in the vast realm of B-movies, which is where we want him, and where we ourselves would all be happiest. I mean, would you rather hang out with Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis, or would you rather hit the town with Henry Silva and Eddie Deezen?

Whoa, there is something infinitely bizarre about the thought of a night on the town with Henry Silva and Eddie Deezen. I want that. I want that. If you want to ever get me a present, buy me a night on the town with those two. I promise I'll bring a camera.

So finally, with this review, the glorious Henry Silva can take his rightful place alongside other B-grade (and lower) staples like John Saxon. Now all we have to do is get a Tim Thomerson film done, and we'll have most of the bases covered. Normally, when a recognizable American star shows up in an Italian film, it's to make a quick buck and is what we like to call "slumming." But given Silva's body of work, which include such spectacles as the mega-expensive mega-flop Mega Force, you can hardly call his career in Italy slumming.

Weirdly enough, some time in the 1970s or early 1980s, this film was released theatrically in the United States and sold as a horror/monster movie! I guess if you look at murderers and thugs as monsters, then yeah, that's correct, but I don't think anyone is trying to sell The Godfather as a horror film, or Goodfellas as a monster movie. Yet this film was retitled Almost Human and sold to audiences as a scary monster movie. That's even weirder than adding the word "ninja" to kungfu movies that have no ninjas on them, just so you can cash in on the early 1980s ninja craze.

Eventually, they just pissed everyone off, gave up, and the film was called The Executioner, which actually fits the bill (the original Italian title was Milano odia: la polizia non puo sparare).

I knew from the credits this was going to be a good one. A violent Italian cop film starring Henry Silva and Tomas Milian (Hit Squad) and directed by my man Umberto Lenzi (Violent Napoli, Cannibal Ferox). And hey, a kick-ass score by Ennio Morricone to boot! Lenzi sure as hell knows how to make an action-packed cop film, and he didn't let me down here. Milian, clean-shaven for once, plays Guilio, a three-time loser with a vicious psycho streak. During a bank robbery, he blows away a cop for no reason in particular, which sort of pisses off his cohorts. They kick his ass and severe their ties with the nutcase. Actually, they kick his ass twice, I think, because in a poliziotteschi film, you never kick anyone's ass just once.

Milian decides to start his own little gang made up of a bunch of small-time hoods who have bought into his frequent bragging. When a cop happens by one night while Guilio is stealing money out of a vending machine, he stabs the guy to death. Jeez, that's his answer for everything. The murder brings tough Milan cop Henry Silva onto the scene to survey the aftermath, which is pretty much all he does throughout the entire movie. Milian stands in the crowd that eventually gathers around the scene.

After that is done, Milian and two buddies decide to kidnap a rich man's daughter and hold her for ransom. Milian steals his girlfriend's car for the job. I just have to mention a quick little something about Milian and the girlfriend. They have a love scene, and god damn it, Tomas Milian wears the same little cherry red bikini briefs that disturbed me so in Hit Squad! What is it with this guy and bright red underwear? Let me tell you something, whether you are straight, gay, bi, male female -- skimpy red underwear simply look better on women than they do on Tomas Milian. How many other movies feature Milian cavorting around in his red underwear? They should put a parental advisory sticker on these films: "Warning! Contains scenes of Tomas Milian prancing around in little red bikini briefs."

He also steals some machine guns from an old guy in the usual "Actually, I don't think I will pay for them" type scene. You'd think that after about a billion gun smugglers have been shot by crazy clients, they'd stop selling them the guns and the bullets at the same time. But no, every damn time, they give them loaded guns so they can get shot instead of getting paid.

A day later, Henry Silva shows up to grimly survey the scene.

Guilio's gang consists of a quiet tough guy and a nervous young guy who doesn't want things to get out of control. Pretty much your standard issue gang.

The kidnapping goes exactly as Guilio (Milian, remember) wants it to, in that they get to machine gun the girl's boyfriend, then chase her to a mansion in the woods where they get to torture, rape, and murder partygoers (male and female alike -- Guilio makes some snooty rich guy take a close-up look at those little red underwear). Then after they get done with the massacre-ing, they hang the corpses from the chandeliers. Obviously, this exceeds the whole "getting out of control" thing the young guy was worried about, so Guilio just feeds him some drugs.

Sure enough, Henry Silva shows up after the fact to go, "Looks like our man was here."

With the rich girl tied up in some old river front shack, Guilio decides to confess the multiple murders and kidnapping to his girlfriend so he can then kill her for knowing too much. He goes through friends pretty quickly. If you think that a day after her murder, Henry Silva shows up to grimly survey the scene and pronounce that it does indeed look like their man was here, well give yourself a prize. But nothing too expensive or nice, because it really wasn't that hard to figure out.

When Silva finds out she was Guilio's girlfriend, he tries to think of something to connect Guilio to the kidnapping and murders. When he remembers seeing Guilio in the crowd at that totally unrelated stabbing incident, he realizes that Guilio is indeed the murderer. Yeah. Yeah, I know. If you don't really follow the train of thought there, you're probably sane but not very in touch with the whole "cop on the edge" style of investigation.

Unfortunately, Guilio has an ironclad alibi. He blackmails his old pals from the bank robbery, telling them that if they don't cover for him, he'll rat on them about the bank job. If they play along and say he was with them all night, he'll give them a load of the ransom money. So they go along, but they still kick his ass anyway just because it's an Italian cop film.

Guilio takes enough time out from his killing to set up the whole ransom thing. Once the old rich guy agrees to pay the ransom, Guilio kills the daughter because, well, he's crazy. The young guy protests, so Guilio kills him too. And then the quiet tough guy protests Guilio killing the young guy, so, you guessed it, Guilio kills him too. He then grabs some of the ransom money and, shoots Henry Silva in the leg, and disappears into the night without anyone ever actually seeing him.

So there you go. The cops have absolutely zero evidence against Guilio. He has an alibi and absolutely nothing to connect him to the kidnapping and murders. His girlfriend was dead, but she was drowned in a car wreck (which he forced, of course), so there's not even anything to connect that death to all the murders. Silva being convinced that Guilio's being in the crowd gathered around the murdered cop makes him inarguably guilty of the other crimes is, at best, totally insane and off-the-wall. The cops have absolutely no reason at all to even have the slightest suspicion about Guilio.

So what happens? Silva limps up to Milian, who is minding his own business at a sidewalk cafe, and blows him away. The end! No, really! I swear! Every shred of common sense, not to mention evidence, screamed that Guilio was innocent, but Silva shoots his ass dead anyway. Why? Because it's a poliziotteschi film, that's why!

I knew that, at some point, Silva would blow Guilio away. Poliziotteschi films are downbeat and violent, but the criminal always gets wasted in the end. There was no question that Silva was going to eventually kill Guilio, but I thought they would at least make some sort of effort to make Guilio appear guilty. But no, even though we all know he's a murdering bastard, the cops don't have any reason at all to suspect him. I mean, they could have had one of his girlfriend's friends identify him as having been in her car the day she was killed. They could have found the machine gun. Something to make them think he might be guilty. They find nothing, but Henry Silva kills him anyway because he was in the crowd at that cigarette machine incident, thus proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that he was also the mastermind of a series of brutal murders and kidnapping.

Well, unless you are a sane person possessed of taste, you can't help but love a movie with sort of cockeyed reasoning. And if you were one of the aforementioned sane people with taste, it's hardly likely you'd be patronizing a website devoted to weird personal stories, punk rock music, and films about midget spies, murderous cops, and kungfu fighters. So with your Teleport City passport firmly in hand, you are invited to partake in the relentlessly violent, totally ridiculous smorgasbord of death-dealing that is The Executioner.

It's not as good as Lenzi's Violent Napoli, but it's still a wild trip. The politics come in the form of some speeches Milian's character makes about how unfair it is that fat cats sit perched atop a mountain of wealth while the rest of us grovel in the mud for some meager scraps. Of course, that doesn't really make Guilio a likable or a sympathetic villain in the least. He's vile the whole way through, which, in this era of smarmy politically correct villains with no guts, is pretty nice. And nothing politically ever really justifies Silva's actions in the end. It's not like his investigation was sabotaged by bureaucrats or corrupt officials. I think he got to give the whole "cop on the edge" speech about how the system protects the guilty, but that's actually required by law in a film like this. Basically, his character was pissed that Milian pulled off the more or less perfect crime, even though he picks Milian out as the guilty one at more or less random.

But hey, no one ever accused the Italians of making sense, at least not by our standards (ummm, as if Armageddon made any damn sense). What they do make, or at least what Umberto Lenzi has made here, is a brutal, violent, wildly entertaining action film that is sure to offend many, and generally, if a film is offensive, it gets our seal of approval. The logic is so inane and the motivation so absurd that we can't help but approve of everything that happened with the exception of once again seeing Tomas Milian in his little red underwear.

So what lesson can we walk away from this movie having learned? Don't linger around in the crowd gathered round dead cops. If Henry Silva walks toward you with his hand inside his coat, don't wait around to see what he's going to do. That we are all equally as likely to be shot by Henry Silva? Don't be in a gang with Tomas Milian. Honestly, the political and social content of this film is so wildly skewed that it fails to really make any sense. A police state is bad but criminals are worse? You would think with all the speeches about how the rich constantly oppress the poor that they would try to make Guilio out to be more likable. Instead, he is nothing more than a murderous thug who hides behind a veil of rhetoric and ... wait a sec ... yep, I got it!

In various reviews, we've talked at some length about groups like The Red Brigade and other terrorist organizations (check out the Violent Rome review) running wild in Italy during the 1970s. For the most part, they were gangs of thugs and murderers who tried to distinguish their crime by dressing it up in the rhetoric of a Communist revolutionary group. Red Brigade, indeed. They, like most groups, were nothing but criminals. They used politics to justify their bloodlust, though they most likely would have been criminals with or without the political disguise. It's no different than when murderers cite religion as their aegis and motivation.

Milian's Guilio is just like the terror squads running rampant in Italy. He justifies his brutality with talk of a working class revolution, of the lower class rising up to fight against the rich. Guilio's rhetoric is exactly like the bullshit espoused by groups like The Red Brigade. And just like them, Guilio's speeches are total crap. He's a rapist and a murderer, and nothing else. Not a revolutionary; just a thug. He uses the class struggle, which was also at the forefront of Italian social life at the time, as a convenient excuse for his psychopathic desire to rape, kill, and hurt others.

Lenzi exposes him for what he is, stripping away the romantic notions of being a freedom fighter to expose the cold-blooded sicko beneath. Of course, that still doesn't really lend much justification or credibility to the actions of Silva's cop character. But it does make some sense of the movie anyway, which has just become that much cooler now that I've had my little epiphany about its meaning. See, all those film theory classes didn't go to waste after all! Now I'll learn your asses some shit about mais en scene!

No wait! I take that analysis back! The true lesson to be learned from The Executioner, besides the fact that Italian cop films are bad-ass through and through, is that if you are an arms dealer, you should not sell the guns and the bullets at the same time to crazy people, because they won't pay you. They'll just shoot you. And then Henry Silva will come by and stare grimly at the aftermath.

Labels: Director: Umberto Lenzi, Poliziotteschi, Stars: Tomas Milian, Year: 1974