Contraband (Italy, 1980) 97 min color DIR: Lucio Fulci. SCR: Ettore Sanzò, Gianni De Chiara, Lucio Fulci, Giorgio Mariuzzo. PROD: Sandro Infascelli. MUSIC: Fabio Frizzi. DOP: Sergio Salvati. CAST: Fabio Testi, Ivana Monti, Marcel Bozzuffi. (Blue Underground)
Every couple of years I rent a Lucio Fulci movie to see if I will ever change my mind about his work. This time around, the answer is still “nope”, although this mob movie is much better made than a lot of the gory horror films for which he is best known (and which I find to be sledgehammer bores). But still, before long, this Eurocrime effort (released to DVD by Blue Underground, in its full European version previously unseen in North America) becomes enough of a bloodbath to please his fans.
Fabio Testi is a gang lord whose turf is systemically being taken over by a rival gangster, however he can’t tell who is attempting to overthrow his and others’ operations. After one of his drug cartels gets invaded in the opening, and dead bodies pile up, the film becomes more rooted in a revenge melodrama.
Even so, before all the carnage, this film has a great deal to say for itself. Throughout there is an eerie sense of honour that pervades the actions of these people, where they bump someone off, and then shed tears at their funeral! Intermittently, we cut to a scene where an old man (whom we later learn to be one of the old Sicilian mobsters) watches television. In one creative moment, he changes the channel from a porn flick to watch a spaghetti western instead! Now that’s a moral code!
Before long, because this is a Lucio Fulci movie, this devolves into a non-stop bloodbath, as interestingly enough, the old guard takes back the streets from the skinny tie-and-sunglasses young gangsters, who still squabble between themselves. As one bystander mentions, at least there was some order when the old guard still ran the streets. But that’s about it for complexity in this picture. Mayhem is the chief interest here, as evidenced by the insertion of a totally unnecessary rape scene.
Contraband may not be essential viewing, but it holds that peculiar fascination one expects with the hybrid world of Eurojunk. Be it the derivative cop show funk music, or the unpredictable casting of famous players who have no trouble in shedding a little decency for some work (in this case, Marcel Bozzuffi, the man whom Gene Hackman was chasing in the subway scene of The French Connection), or the overlong disco sequence, these pictures now seem like mournful documents of another time.
Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #16.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.