Stunt Squad was released on Blu-ray by Raro on Sept 30.
With 1977’s Stunt Squad (Italian title: La Polizia è Sconfitta, literally “The Police Are Defeated”), Raro brings yet another solid Italian release to our attention. It’s great to have a company specialize in these hard-edged genre films which might otherwise languish in obscurity.
The film’s villain, Valli, is a ruthless and deranged extortionist who terrorizes local businesses with a protection racket. When a couple of shops refuse to cooperate, they are subsequently bombed, killing and wounding many innocents.
His most heinous crime, though, is his refusal to wear a shirt.
Faced with this criminal crisis and a panicky populace, the police commissioner authorizes drastic action. Bold Inspector Grifi (Marcel Bozzuffi) is granted permission to form a special task force to deal with the threat. He gathers up his best cops for special training and briefing. Their first order of business is a grisly slideshow of the bomber’s aftermath — sobering if you know, as Malloy explains, that these are in fact real world photographs, not mere art props created for the film.
“Hey guys, it’s easier if you squat. …
We should call ourselves the S.Q.U.A.T. TEAM! No, wait, STUNT SQUAT!”
The cops’ special training regimen involves hand-to-hand combat, pistol target practice, and the movie’s most unique selling point: motorcycles. While the film isn’t intentionally comedic or cheesy, the training montage features an epically ridiculous shot depicting mid-wheelie marksmanship practice.
Despite the creation of this special task force, the English title Stunt Squad is perhaps something of a misnomer. As with Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, I wish the titular team were a bigger part of their own movie. In fact, it’s difficult to see the film’s cover/poster art and not feel a bit disappointed by the actual product. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good movie, but it just wasn’t, to me at least, the action-packed motorcycle mayhem that the title and artwork seem to promise. While some of this does take place, it’s far from the center. In fact, most of the squad remains anonymous throughout the picture, never getting any character development or differentiation beyond the barest plot requirements.
This character ambiguity is further blurred during the film’s chase scenes, in which the riders wear face-obscuring helmets, making them virtually unidentifiable beyond their “good guys” affiliation. With no investment in the characters, the impact to the audience is blunted — even when some of our heroes are shot or killed. Only Inspector Grifi gets any sort of meaningful character arc.
What chase scenes and action beats there are, though, are fun to watch. Our motorcycle cops zoom around, sometimes with a unique first-person perspective, whizzing between cars and taking shortcuts down steps and alleyways to get the better of their 4-wheeled opponents. In one particularly inventive scene, the gangsters give chase to a cycle speeding up a parallel tunnel walkway, trying to get a clean shot as pillars whiz by.
It’s not an Italian crime film without some exploitation pedigree, and Stunt Squad certainly delivers this, albeit in jarringly wacky form. Besides some action-oriented violence and awesome vehicular carnage, the film also features some nasty Eurocrime staples: a jazzy club where the ladies casually take their tops off, a cartoonishly gay drug dealer confronted by our burly heroes with some uncomfortably dated anti-homosexual slurs, and the off-camera castration of this unfortunate guy.
If it seems like this assessment is fairly unremarkable, that’s somewhat true until the rather shocking climax which took me by surprise and boosts the film comfortably into the “recommend” category. I don’t know what urban Italian life was like in the late 70s, but it feels to me like Stunt Squad finishes with a tough-as-nails ending that somehow captures something profound about the seething zeitgeist.
THE PACKAGE
Stunt Squad was released on Blu-ray on Sept 30 by RaroVideo, the premier distributor of Italian genre films. It features a nice packaging including an 8-page booklet written by Eurocrime expert Mike Malloy.
The disc includes both original Italian and English dubbed audio tracks, as well as English subtitles. Note the subtitles feature an independent translation which does not match the English dubbed audio. Presumably the subtitles were translated for more literal accuracy while the dubs were designed to flow and lip-synch more naturally.
Special Features
Video Introduction by Mike Malloy (5:51)
Mike Malloy, writer-director of the documentary Eurocrime!, returns for another Raro collaboration. Besides the text of aforementioned pack-in booklet, he also provides this video intro, which includes background on the film and its place in genre history.
A/V Out.
Get it at Amazon:
Stunt Squad — [Blu-Ray] | [DVD]
Originally published at cinapse.co on October 21, 2014.