International Hallucinosis Part 1: 12 Cool/Weird Italian Films Streaming Free on Amazon Prime

Amazon Prime just keeps getting better and weirder. Recently a whole plethora of great Japanese and Italian titles have come tumbling forth (just ask.... the Axis). So many it will take many posts to even detail a sliver. So let's start on the Italian side. There's giallo and sometimes Gothic, too many peplums (i.e. biceps and sandals) to count, sex, western, and cop buddy comedies, about a hundred ramshackle adventures of a big slovenly Italian named Bud Spencer and his blonde two-fisted compatriot Terence Fisher; weird Raiders of the Lost Ark action-western-sci-fi imitations, Road Warrior imitations, giallos, Eurocrime (polizetti), spy spoofs, peplum (Hercules, Maciste, Samson, etc.) spaghetti westerns, juvenile comedies, all in such vast array it's like wandering into some never-ending videophile fantasia. It might remind you of the first time you wandered into a mom and pop video rental horror section and thought you'd entered an alternate reality. So forget about Netflix and its 'originals' - Prime is in the midst of its golden age!.

That said, the golden age soon gets ennui-ridden. The best of the Italian genre imports are usually well known, while the dregs are dregs for a reason. Shot quick, cheap and crazy - the best way to consider Italian genre films are as halfway markers between the drive-in and the TV show, for Italian TV of the era was very sparse - barely two channels and two movies a week at the most. So going to the movies was what one did almost every night (I learned this watching EUROCRIME - also on Prime --see below). Many of the titles on Prime have, I'm fairly sure, never been on video in the states, and are probably transferred (incorrectly) from PAL. The widescreen look irregularly thin, or else comes cropped, with colors turned to muddy streaks. Some are in Italian don't have subtitles; some have subtitles burnt-in but are the English dub version. Some are so obscure they have to Amazon reviews at all.

But even eliminating the titles that fall victim to these issues there are still dozens of titles the average American viewer has never heard of or seen that look lovely and beg a visit from the curious traveler. So I've assembled one such dozen, as if donuts - there's around three or four of each genre -- three westerns, three giallos, three weird horror films, one Polizetti, one peplum and one sci-fi action. The juvenile comedies and Bud Spencer/Terence Hill joints I leave to God or whatever devil will have them.

NOTA: Each post details the story as much as can be revealed without undoing the precious WTF? element so key to Italian cinema. The musical scores are so key for Italian cinema, for they use ironic counterpoint, groovy jazz, and layered humor so deftly they put our 'telegraph' composers like John Williams and Howard Shore to deserved shame. I've assembled Spotify playlist with most of the film's scores embedded at end. I don't recommend listening to it while reading this post, I INSIST on it. You belong to us, Faustine! If you don't have Prime or Spotify, well, when some of these a trackable elsewhere I'm sure. Bon fortuna, Jack!

A parallel program to the Argento-Bava-Soavi school, this unofficial sequel to Argento's SUSPIRIA (and semi-sequel six in the catch-all DEMONS series), Cozzi rings in the third mother, or maybe the first, with a face and hands that are all grotesque pustules, who begins to take over the minds and events of all working on the horror film about her. Screenwriter Marc (Urbano Barberini) conjures up a treatment for a horror film about an evil witch named Lavania. His wife, Anne (Florence Guérin) is keen to play her. A local psychic busts out her original copy of Suspiria de Profundis - mentioning that this unfinished Thomas de Quincey tale was based on fact (Argento is name-checked and there's even some familiar Goblin cues); the psychic cautions about changing the name for there really was a witch named Lavania who can come back from beyond if her name continues to be bandied about so lightly. Yikes. Meanwhile, without even knowing the story, Marc's wife--busy with their newborn baby--starts to demand to play the role, saying she "is" Lavania. But what about sexy Caroline Munro, luring Marc into the sack for the Lavania part, and Michele Soavi himself as the director! The quality of the stream is dependent on the source which is pretty good for full screen, probably direct to video entry which, in 1990 the drive-ins were  all but dead and Blockbuster was still a thriving industry. By then, too, the whole 'fiction intrudes on reality' self-reflexive angle is pretentious (it needs to like dormant for six years, until Scream, but the colors are nice - when she falls into dream worlds the windows glow bright yellows, blues, green, and reds. The end goes the sci-fi route ala THE MANITOU! Crazy pops!


If it's not Goblin level, Vince Tempera's 'shoot for bodacious; settle for bemusing' score is certainly better than Rick Wakeman's clueless melange in INFERNO. Still, it begs a question: why the hell the name of all that's unholy was this film's title changed to THE BLACK CAT? There is a cat it barely figures! This same year also saw the release Argento's own adaptation of Poe's story in TWO EVIL EYES, and then Fulci did a BLACK CAT in 1981. I know Italians love to wall people up, but their obsession with all covering the same text under the same name is pretty stupid, and explains why it took me so long to catch up to this. Considering it has the great Caroline Munroe (never wasting a chance to display her knockout gams) and doesn't have Marjoe Gortner, I'd say pounce it up. (English dub - in full screen but looks fine.)

The 80s marked a drive-in gold mine of sources for the Italians to cull from, cross-pollinating genres to match presumably both the current styles and the props on hand. We all loved RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, THE ROAD WARRIOR, BLADE RUNNER, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THE WARRIORS, STAR WARS and CONAN, so why not swirl them all together, reconfiguring the previous decade's peplum, western and WW2 props, sets and wardrobe with some silver spraypaint and football pads and leather studs? A few little adjustments and you're ready to get blown up by Fred Williamson all over again. We super 8mm kid filmmakers repurposed our dad's suits, army surplus, and outgrown sporting equipment the same way, so my eyes perked right up seeing Rugger Deodato's 1983 masterpiece, RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS. I don't know what possessed me to start watching it, but once I did it was so good it almost made me miss my AA meeting. Christopher Connolly stars as a mercenary Mike, who-- along with his fellow badass Washington (Tony King)--open the film by abducting (rescuing?) some well-protected hombre in a sequestered beach mansion, the fee for which is $50,000, which they plan to spend wildly after they take their boat down to Trinidad. Meanwhile, Gioai Scola is an ancient symbology expert flown over from Machu Picchu to decode a strange rosetta stone-style relic uncovered by a team (led by a nicely laid-back George Hilton), raising a downed Russian sub from a rickety mid-ocean platform. They raise it all right, but also cause Atlantis, in its protective bubble, to rise as well, creating a tidal displacement that smashes the platform, knocks Washington and Mike's ship off course, freaks everyone out with weird clouds, and activates some trigger in the minds of certain members of the populace, letting them know it's time to put down their knitting, put on their crystal skull masks, get on their tricked-out bikes and jeeps and kill everyone in sight.  And that's all just the first reel!


Say what you will about the idiocy and incoherence, the action is nonstop in the grand mix of crazy stuntmen, jungle scenery; Michele Soavi is one of the luckless survivors. There's fights on top of speeding busses, dangling from helicopters and endless molotov cocktail tosses. Underlings run around on fire, still blazing machine guns, survivors are picked up along the way and die as well. All sorts of great little moments just keep coming, and there's even alcohol and cigarettes.

As with all the best cross-genre Italian films of the 70s-80s, there's the sense they wanted to do more than the budget allowed so the big climax feels kind of undercooked but so what? It's still a thrill a minute and if you love JC's GHOSTS OF MARS (2001) you should know this has a strangely similar plot, right down to the archaeologist chick, the big daddy Mars type Crystal skull-led planet-reclaiming marauders, and nonstop stuntmen flying in the air form big explosions. One imdb user review (Celluloid Rehab) calls RAIDERS, Assault on Drug Store 13 - letting you know genius Carpenter fans know the score.

Guido and Morizi de Angelis did the 80s synth score, done in the hilarious style of the time. The Amazon image is a little faded and blurry but is probably as good as it ever looked outside of whatever theater would have it. It's never been on DVD but people clearly have seen it and embraced its lovely badness. 3.. I still won't see Deodato's cannibal movies, but in this one I can report that no animals appear either harmed or at all, but man you can bet some stuntmen got a little scorched.

Mario Bava's BLACK SUNDAY (AKA MASK OF SATAN) made a huge impact in 1960, and never more so, clearly, than with the Barbara Steele-starring Gothics of Antonio Margherita, and this is--now that there's a good print available for streaming--his best, clearly. Full of skulking camera movements as devious players weave in and out secret passages, crypts, and tapestry-bedecked boudoirs, there's never a dull moment even when you don't know what the hell's going on. I started watching halfway through (as I like the Bazin-y amnesia effect), then watched the beginning, which made Steele's enigmatic character that much more ambiguous. I recommend this approach to all of life!

Curiously, Amazon's version actually has burnt-in English subtitles but is dubbed in English and sometimes the words onscreen and dubbed vary in weirdly abstract frisson kind of ways, as if being translated by a nervous diplomat. But Carlo Rusticelli's memorable score (with its eerie theremin, slow ominous bass notes and slow-moving orchestral swells) perfectly situates the onscreen Gothic events. A spoiled baron, Kurt (George Ardisson) poisons all those standing in the way to the title and lugs corpses down masterfully-lit secret passages in order to be with ethereal (and long-haired) strange Barbara Steele. But the wife (Halina Zalewska) he thought poisoned and entombed disappears; does she remember her mother was burnt at the stake by Kurt's father for a crime Kurt himself committed? There's also an outbreak of (offscreen) plague and a WICKER MAN-esque final moment to center it all as a classic of its genre. Above all, both the girls have super long hair and super pale skin, long bare arms and hair down to their waist, wafting in and out of eeerily-lit tombs and corridors -- it's everything you'd want in a movie called LONG HAIR OF DEATH. As a Barbara Steele vehicle it's second only to Bava's BLACK SUNDAY. The label on Prime is the usually unwatchable label Synergy, but seems to have been updated by some secret fan.

I try to avoid the movies that get too misogynist or cruel to animals (the suffocated kitten in SHOOT FIRST, DIE LATER) so have to applaud the genial bear of a pimp played by German Fassbinder regular Mario Adorf (LOLA) being nice to the junkyard cat in Fernando de Leo's propulsive minor masterwork, THE ITALIAN CONNECTION. Fingered by the local mob boss as the fall guy for their ripping off the New York family's heroin delivery, he finds himself hunted on all sides as two slick American hit men are sent over to make an example of him and rattle the cages of the Milano chapter. Woody Strode and Henry Silva are pretty badass as the New York 'tourists' shepherded through all the seedy pimp haunts by Luciana Paluzzi. She was the hottie SPECTRE agent who got Bond in bed and then chased him through the Nassau parade in THUNDERBALL, that movie's main villain, Largo, Adolfo Celli is also here as the Milan don. Considering he's just one lowly pimp, silencing Luca shouldn't pose such a problem but they don't bet on just what a hard-headed toughass he turns out be, or maybe the local mafia is only good at tormenting women. It's pretty thrilling watching Adorf, this bulky monster of ugly-sexiness, bash his way up the chain, all while being fairly nice and good-natured with his women, even making non-business friendships with girls he's helped out of bad situations, like the sexy Maoist who lets him crash over when he needs to, and whose walls denote the key difference between hippies in Rome and Paris vs. San Francisco, the unrepentant Maoism; jer walls are covered with slogans painted on posters and it all seems to exist mainly for the trailer or for Fernando's Marxist signature ideological interjections;

Highlights include a great long chase scene when he goes after the schmuck who runs down his wife and kid. He chases him from truck to street, to truck to pool to street again, climaxing with Luca using his head as a windshield battering ram to get at the culprit. Eurocrime movies modeled after THE FRENCH CONNECTION were required to have super long furious intense chase sequences, but there's nothing quite like this. There is some unsettling misogynist violence as when the mob roughs up Luca's live-in prostitute girlfriend (Femi Benussi), pinching her and smacking her around, etc. but at least Luca's wife and child are run over cleanly and not tortured. And there's no 'learning curve' by whihc Luca becomes more of a badass. He is one, he'd just rather hang out with his broads, and what's wrong with that if he treats them right? the saddest part is the tawdry club with its low basement roof - and not near enough cigarettes. A great pumping badass copshow funk score from Armando Trovajoli helps it all along, and of course, the requisite auto wrecking yard climax, replete with death by claw machine.

this is a real man - nice-a to animals

Also Recommended: SHOOT FIRST DIE LATER; THE BOSS and for an informative and fun (albeit burdened by a lurid section on misogyny) documentary, EUROCRIME: The Italian Cop and Gangster Films the Ruled the 70s




One look at the image above of sexy Claudia Gravy, wining up a game of swing-set pit-and-the- pendulum with a tied-up preacher's son (Lou Castel) and you know that this movie came out in 1970, i.e. shortly after the Manson murders made the world realize cute hippie chicks could be more sadistic and violent than even Russ Meyer dared hope. BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967) and BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) were still huge on the Italia 'spaghetti western' influence-horizon, guiding it towards all sorts of free-love women's lib and psychedelic influences even as the horses, six-shooters and stagecoaches were being replaces by rain coats, razors in black-gloved hands, and chases through auto graveyards.

Looking/acting like a rabid Michele Carey (Joey in EL DORADO), and Tiffany Bolling (in BONNIE'S KIDS), Claudia Gravy as outlaw moll Mary is the best part of MATALO--bringing a feral quality . one of those post-spaghetti tripper westerns mixing the 'home invasion' amok Manson girl framework with the peyote western ala EL TOPO (which came out the same year). Fans of Seijun Suzuki abstractions like BRANDED TO KILL, or existential 'between life and death is better than either life or death' meditations of Boorman (POINT BLANK), Aldrich (KISS ME DEADLY) will find much to love. These movies reflect a time when everyone went out to the cinema so regularly, and films circulated longer in fewer prints, so that brave directors could use the conventions of the genre like a palette with which to paint wild new visions, the way cubists might use our familiarity with a flower pot or Mingus might use Duke Ellington. Here if it doesn't really add up to much, Canavare's use of slow-mo puts us ably in the distorted minds of his crook trio or the dying-of-thirst boomerang guy they torture. Weird close-ups, freeze frames,a swing set in bad need of some WD-40, and a harp too close to a billowing curtain rod, wryly tweak the Sergio Leone style while Mario Milgardi's Hendrix-style electric guitar score (the second best part of MATALO) throws caution to the wind. We've exited Ennio Morricone wah-wah land and entered the post-Manson / Altamont LSD youth scene, where hippie chicks are no longer just peace-and-love, they're high on acid and will carve the baby right out of your womb while singing "Look at Your Game Girl."

Corrado Pani is Bart, who begins the film grinning as he's led off to be hung in a small town about to be overrun by Mexican bandits. With his flashing blue eyes and self-adoring grin he cocks his head like he thinks he's Steve McQueen-meets-Adam Roarke, and he almost is, espcially in the nice juxtaposition of his relaxed poking around town while all around him his rescuers slaughter everyone but a confused preacher. Antonio Salines is the sullen, lovesick wingman who looks like a mix of Will Forte and John Cazale, wearing--as seems to be the trademark of the gang--a terrible blonde wig, sulking and scowling, and beating on hapless Lou Castel, due to his lovelorn longing for Claudia Gravy (who's currently in bed with the eldest in the gang, Phil [Luis Davila]). You'll want to beat up Castel too, because Gravy is so fine and so homicidally sexy, and == with his giant forehead and lack of firearms--Castel is just begging to be murdered.  Needless to say there's a gun vs. boomerang  finale, luckily the bad guys don't mind standing still and waiting for each boomerang to weave its way back around, before shooting back.


Director Dallamano got his own directorship after garnering notice as cinematographer of the first two films in Leone's big-breaking "Man with No Name" trilogy. He knows his way around a gorgeously composed shot, that's for sure, and What might be a weird-ass misogynist sex murder giallo (with a ripping Ennio Morricone score) turns out to be something quite different in this bizarro murder mystery, as a series of cute girls at a local girl's prep school are murdered with a blade to the uterys, as nasty a misogynist MO as giallo has to offer.



Sexy Fabio Testi as Enrico, the sexy (married) man teacher, as the culprit (he can't admit he saw the first killing as he was with a sexy student on a 'romantic' boat ride). The cops peg him as the main culprit. Was he set up his pissy 'androgynous-sexy' teutonic wife (Karin Baal)? It could certainly be a kinky sex thing as misogyny seems rampant in this cloistered Catholic repressive hothouse, but Testi is way too laid for that, the fox in charge of the henhouse who coughs out feathers at every lecture. Why do girls' schools even hire hot male teachers? Seems like they're asking for trouble, but it sure is fun when it happens, unless you're on the receiving end of the killer's gynophobic knife as an indirect result. If it adds up to little more than a surprising twist, at least you won't likely guess who the killer is. The melancholic Morricone score sounds in parts like a cat fell asleep on a mellotron, and maybe that's what happened; Ennio did over 20 other scores that year alone. Whatever he was on at the time, I want some, as his every note is so recognizably iconic, so perfect, even when whole passages are little more than atonal screeches. Oy, would we even appreciate any of these old pictures without him to lead the way?  The image appears sourced from the recent Arrow Blu-ray (which I have, and is recommended).

Typically complex entry in the Edgar Wallace-Italian style tradition, with the daughter of a jewel thief mixed up in a complicated web of intrigue, jealousy, mistresses, a beach house, fisherman, ice slabs, and the witness to a shooting being a blind man who heard the clickety clack of high heels right before the shots. Kind of on the macho side we alternate between the giallo favorite son, George Hilton slapping around peeping tom sailor witness/suspects as he seeks out who killed his ex-girlfriend, and the homicide detective in the white raincoat and his suspiciously effeminate young sidekick. There's cross dressing afoot and we know an ice vendor is gay because he never stops sniffing a giant flower. The print Amazon streams off is clearly the recent Arrow remastering or something and it looks divine, darling - which is 60% of what makes a great Italian film - the other being Stelvo Cipriano's swanky score --the high female vocals cooing wordlessly along amidst the jazzy drums, pipes, and electric harpsichord; the fashions all in that peel-away Diana von Furstenberg-esque zone of Euro-rotic comfort and color.

AND HERE, THE SCORES ON SPOTIFY, to accompany your deep elbow bending:

SEE ALSO ON PRIME (Vedi anche su Primo):
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10/16: Taste the Blood of Dracula's Prime: 12 Psychotronic Vampire Films on Amazon Prime
12/16: I never said it wasn't terrible: 10 Sci-Fi Curious worth streaming on Amazon Prime