Only now does it occur to me... THE BIG RACKET (1976)

Only now does it occur to me... that it's been way too long since I've watched an Enzo G. Castellari film. It's a certain, unique strand of plagiaristic Italo-madness inflected with the pure joy of visual storytelling, á la Sam Raimi or Richard Rush. About fifteen years ago, I first watched a spate of his classicks: 1990: BRONX WARRIORS, THE LAST SHARK, THE HEROIN BUSTERS, KEOMA, TUAREG: THE DESERT WARRIOR, INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, et al., a series of films which rip off and then reinvent everything from JAWS to THE WARRIORS to LAWRENCE OF ARABIA to THE DIRTY DOZEN.

After all these years, I finally took a stab at THE BIG RACKET, which is a reinvention of the original DEATH WISH with enough Roman derangement so as to prophesy the swirly-eyed Cannon Films sequels.

The plot is thus: a gang full of models and character actors destroy bowling shirts and flowers with ball bats. This represents Italian crime in the 1970s.

 

What do they want? Protection money from local business owners.



They're part of a huge operation that goes all the way to the top––a smarmy mobster played by Joshua Sinclair's "Rudy." (He's a member of Castellari's acting troupe who almost always plays a gleefully pompous baddie, and––no joke––he's also a medical doctor and expert in tropical diseases who worked with Mother Teresa.)

But there's one man who will not allow this to happen. A likable man who wears a lot of denim and looks disapprovingly upon property destruction

and spilt sugar.

That's right, it's one tuff cop played by the one and only Fabio Testi. I've referred to him in the past as "Italo-Rock Hudson" and "Eurotrash Hugh Jackman." When he fires his weapon in top-to-bottom, skintight, cinched denim, you had best believe that he's doing a back-strengthening Superman extension as he does it. That's just standard Testi operating procedure.

Most of this movie is glass being broken in slow motion or Peckinpah-style bullet ballet featuring folks in close-fitting bell bottoms set to the wacka wacka beats of De Angelis, basically a nonstop bassline cribbed from In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and some random psychedelic guitar tinkering. Or else it's criminal organizations meeting up and sitting around and flashing their eyes at each other and posing while jazz drum solos riff unto infinity (just like in 1990: BRONX WARRIORS). There's a fair amount of ickiness, too, like the comically fascist pro-police agenda and "fridging" tropes and multiple gang rapes, which mainly seem to be in here because Castellari genuinely believes he is making a contribution to the same contemporary ultraviolent subgenre as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, DELIVERANCE, STRAW DOGS, DIRTY HARRY, and DEATH WISH. In fact, he's making a live action cartoon with some of the best-worst dialogue in his entire canon.

"Holy jumpin' jackrabbits, somebody took a strong dislike to the decor in here!"

 

 "Well look at that, we've got a plainclothes peeping pig in our window!"

"There we were having a couple of quiet beers and these guys arrive and just start beating the bean bags out of us!"

 

"I think I better warn you, if I find one bedbug, you will see me for dust."

"We can't offer them protection 24 hours out of 24."

There's excessive use of the word "diddly." Sometimes it's used to mean "diddly shit/squat," and sometimes the uses are, shall we say, even more imaginative.

"Yeah, you're right, but, uh, but if they cooperate with us, they'll be up diddly creek."

"Pull yourself together before you drop us both into the diddly."

–"If we're gonna get into the diddly, I'm gonna make sure it's because we really earned the right to be in it."

There are moments of the sublime, like when a gang member is pouring kerosene on a small restauranteur's dining room and says, flatly,

"Pity we ain't got some chestnuts to put on this."

"Ya mucker" is a common insult in the world of THE BIG RACKET, and sometimes gang members make spirited and hilariously weird commentary on the beatings they're administering:

"Ah sure, a sizzling face stinger... topped off with a rear-over-headlight turnover!"

All of this is too much for Good Cop Pushed Too Far™ Fabio Testi, who must break the law in order to enforce it.

"Criminal methods, in this case, were necessary. I know my methods are, let's say, somewhat illegal, but if the results are right, don't they justify the means?"

Because Castellari loves a "men on a mission" movie more than anything else, a now suspended-from-the-force Testi recruits a band of avengers to take out the mob, PUNISHER style. He enlists a thief-buddy (Vincent Gardenia––two-time Oscar nominee, DEATH WISH and MOONSTRUCK cast member, and "Mushnik" in LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS)

and other roughnecks to join his "let's say, somewhat illegal" crusade. Along the way, there are darkly comic and socially dangerous vigilante fantasies, like an Olympic skeet shooter being present (by happenstance!) when hero cops are pinned down by a literal army of mobsters. He proceeds to take out half the army while never being mistaken by the cops as a gang member. Holy jumpin' jackrabbits.

Anyway, the film's politics (described by Morando Morandini in Il Giorno as "a fascist film, a vile film, an idiot film"––and he's not wrong!) somehow can't fully drop this film "into the diddly," so to speak, and distract from its glorious, era-defining kitsch and denim-related achievements.

R.I.P., Tom Noonan

 

R.I.P. to Tom Noonan, one of the all-time great character actors, who sometimes played a gentle giant, but mostly a series of unspeakably frightening/whispering menaces, whose performances in THE MONSTER SQUAD, COLLISION COURSE, EIGHT-LEGGED FREAKS, GLORIA, HEAVEN'S GATE, and MANHUNTER have been much discussed on this site. I never publicly reviewed his amazing directorial debut, WHAT HAPPENED WAS, or his seminal roles in LAST ACTION HERO, HEAT, ANOMALISA, or ROBOCOP 2. I occasionally saw him as an audience member at performances of downtown NYC theater, trying not to draw attention to himself (his lanky and iconic 6'6'' frame made that difficult!) as he supported local and underground theater artists. I have no other choice than to deem him one of the coolest to ever do it.

Only now does it occur to me... MR. WRONG (1996)

Only now does it occur to me... could MR. WRONG, a screwball anti-romantic comedy and notorious box office bomb starring Ellen DeGeneres in her only live-action-feature leading role (to date), directed by longtime John Carpenter crony Nick Castle, and co-written by sci-fi/horror legend Richard Matheson's son Chris and THE MORNING SHOW's showrunner Kerry Ehrin... be as bad as they say? 

The answer: sort of!



This, a project of such aforementioned and bizarre pedigree, is ultimately a delivery system for a series of wacky situations and horrified expressions in the vein of Jerry Lewis (with a messy pixie cut).

 It begins with a Saul Bass-inspired credits sequence



 and ends with a gunfight in Mexico and a ride into the sunset.

In between, a number of events take place. 

Ellen's character Martha is a television producer for a local San Diego morning show

starring Robert Goulet (of Broadway and BEETLEJUICE fame), 

 
 

which seems to weirdly prefigure Ellen's own rise and fall as a daytime TV star as well as co-writer Kerry Ehrin's own involvement with Apple TV's THE MORNING SHOW.

Ellen's character, who is styled exactly as she appears on her own popular sitcom ELLEN (1994-1998), is struggling to find "Mr. Right." 

And that there is a reference to BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE inserted by co-writer Chris Matheson, who also wrote all three BILL AND TED films.


She is aided in her quest by a Best Friend™(the likeable Ellen Cleghorne, of ARMAGEDDON and COYOTE UGLY)

 

who, because it was the 1990s, is contractually obligated to eat Lite yogurt throughout and provide generic encouragement.

Despite her own assistant (John Livingstone, of THE NET and EDTV) clearly being the screenplay's idea of her "perfect match hiding in plain sight," 


Here he is, asking her out to go see Richard Burton in BLUEBEARD (1972), an ignominious film I have reviewed on this very site.

Ellen still goes on the prowl and has an accidental meet-cute with Bill Pullman (who would soon wipe his involvement with this project from the cultural memory with the near-immediate one-two punch of INDEPENDENCE DAY and LOST HIGHWAY).

 

Pullman is depicted as a suave, cowboy-poet who's the heir to an enormous fortune. He seems perfect, at least until she discovers that, wait... he's... Mr. Wrong!

  

The warning signs are not subtle, and the comedy is played as broad as a barn door. There are more understated Pepé le Pew-centric episodes of THE LOONEY TUNES. First, he takes her to a convenience store to shoplift Blatz beers, crushing the empties on his forehead and flinging them from his convertible at bystanders.

 
I fail to understand how this is a red flag tho

Next, he love-bombs her with a bounty of unwanted gifts and comes to her window in the night dressed, inexplicably, as a clown on stilts.

 

This is probably the closest the film comes to overtly referencing HALLOWEEN. As I'm sure you all know, MR. WRONG's director (Nick Castle) played behind-the-mask Michael Myers in 1978's HALLOWEEN. He was also the co-writer of Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.

Just when she thinks it can't get any worse, Ellen is also stalked by Pullman's ex Inga––a zany character played by two-time Oscar nominee Joan Cusack.

 

She probably gets about ten minutes of screentime, but she acquits herself with trashy élan.

This leads Ellen to hire a private eye (fellow Oscar nominee Dean Stockwell of BLUE VELVET, QUANTUM LEAP, and DUNE fame) who uncovers that Inga was involved in a plot to assassinate Stevie Nicks

 

 

which feels like a bizarrely specific detail for this screenplay to concoct. Dean Stockwell also, mostly acquits himself. He, Cusack, and Ellen Cleghorne might be the only ones who do.

Yep, this thing is a slapstick mess. It struggles with tone, and there's zero chemistry between the leads: romantic, comedic, or otherwise. Castle does a slick enough job assembling the picture (there are a few striking Hitchcock-inspired visuals and transitions), but the entire film feels like studio execs were trying force an Ellen-sized peg into a Jim Carrey-shaped hole.

Fourteen months after the release of MR. WRONG, Ellen would go on to give her iconic "Yep, I'm gay" interview to TIME magazine. One can imagine that the ham-handed attempts to mold her into a blandly heteronormative studio asset played some role in this decision. 

Only now does it occur to me... BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980)

Only now does it occur to me... that James Cameron first encountered the "TERMINATOR font" while working for Roger Corman.

What we have here is a John Sayles (!) scripted, low-ish budget sci-fi remake of Akira Kurosawa's THE SEVEN SAMURAI, starring a hodgepodge of affordable actors, from Richard Thomas (THE WALTONS) to Robert Vaughn (THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN) to John Saxon (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) to Sybil Danning (REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS) to George Peppard (THE A-TEAM). It's more enjoyable than you might expect––slightly better than STARCRASH (1978) or KRULL (1983), but pretty much playing in the same "poor man's STAR WAR" sandbox. I rate it lower than FLASH GORDON (1980), if that says anything.

According to James Cameron (credited as co-art director), he was responsible for most of the film's special effects, which are quite impressive for the budget. For comparison, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK had a $30.5 million budget, BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS had a $2 million budget, and there are several spaceships which easily look good enough to be in STAR WARS. (The same cannot be said for the sets, costumes, and makeup effects.)

Anyway, it's notable that this early Cameron effort uses the same font that Cameron would make famous in THE TERMINATOR (I cannot find any interview where this is mentioned––since he had such an outsize role in the art direction, production design, and special effects, it's possible he helped pick out the font.)

It's also where Cameron met composer James Horner,

and the two would go on to collaborate many times before Horner's death––from ALIENS to TITANIC to two AVATAR films. In all, quite a formative experience for the 25-year-old Cameron.