What Eurocult films have you been watching?, Yeah, it's that thread again...

Indeed, this is the one. The guy dubbing Mayans is absolutely hysterical, sounding like a guy doing a really bad Southern Belle impersonation. Here is the scene if anyone wants to check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbLY7j0SVW4

"Wait a minute, let me take a pill."

The Last Glory of Troy (1962) after the fall of Troy or (depending on your perspective) the commercial success of the previous Steve Reeves movie Aeneas (Reeves) and the remnants of the Trojans travel to Italy in search of sanctuary.

Not a bad movie but nothing special. It has a good cast with Reeves as the hero, Gianni Garko as the bad guy and Giacomo Rossi Stuart as the assistant good guy. It also has some good resources, plenty of extras and nice Yugoslavian locations. Probably it's most appealing element is that it doesn't last too long and has a nice touch of tragedy.

I can't quiet figure out the career of Giacomo Rossi Stuart it seems like he was just about a star in his own right or a co- star in the early '60s but quickly slipped down the ranks into a supporting player.

FULLER REPORT (1969)—Directed by Sergio Grieco. Stars Ken Clark, Beba Loncar, Lincoln Tate, Jess Hahn. Don’t let the humdrum title turn you off. This European spy flick is an exciting actioner with a solid leading man turn by Ken Clark, a terrific Armando Trovajoli score, and engaging direction by Grieco (FANTASTIC ARGOMAN), who likes to use movement within master shots to provide a sense of scope. Womanizing American racecar driver Dick Worth (Clark), in Stockholm on a racing tour, chases a beautiful woman who stole his cigarette lighter and stumbles onto her murder. She was actually a Russian agent, and the CIA blackmails Worth into finding the Fuller Report, which the female agent stole from an American spy she murdered. The missing report contains information about a plot by an international right-wing cabal to kill the President of the United States. The gorgeous Loncar plays Svetlana Golyadkin, a defecting Russian ballerina somehow involved in the plot. Filmed in Stockholm, Zurich, and London, this widescreen adventure takes full advantage of its locations and really moves. Stelvio Massi, who later directed Fred Williamson in the BLACK COBRA movies, was the director of photography.

KILL ROMMEL (1969)

Alfonso Brescia's spaghetti war movie apparently concerns a plot to - wait for it - kill Rommel, but what unfolds is a pretty dull affair with little in the way of story at all. Characters are woefully underdeveloped, to the point where even the presence of Anton Diffring doesn't manage to lift it. What we're left with is a bunch of soldiers driving around the African desert for an hour and a half shooting at each other and grumbling a lot. The most enjoyable thing about this one was the number of chuckles I got from a truly atrocious English language dub track.

THE RUTHLESS FOUR (1968)

Van Heflin, George Hilton, Gilbert Roland and Klaus Kinski are the titular group who embark on a gold-digging expedition which, as expected, results in each of them letting greed get the better of them. I make allowances for the fact that I saw this on a washed-out old P&S screening and the dubbing was lacklustre at best (Kinski was robbed of emotion, Hilton's performance tried to have too much added to it).

Even so, this doesn't have much to it apart from lots of men arguing with each other then the finale. It's a mystery why the men embark on the mission together since they all seem to dislike each other from the start anyway. The finale is entertaining however, finishing things off with a well composed shoot-out.

Not great, but I think I'd like to see it again in a better quality presentation.

I always fancied the idea of a triple feature of this, FIND A PLACE TO DIE and GARDEN OF EVIL on the big screen of a classy theatre.

LOLA COLT (1967)—Directed by Siro Marcellini. Stars Lola Falana, Peter Martell, German Cobos. There are few movie concepts less likely than a dusty Italian western starring glamorous Las Vegas entertainer Lola Falana. She was only about 24 years old when she starred in this gimmick flick that played the bottom of U.S. double bills with the Burt Reynolds programmer SHARK. By that time, however, it was 1976—a full decade after the darned thing was made—and distributor Hallmark/Newport was taking a last stab at capturing fumes of the waning blaxploitation genre by retitling the film BLACK TIGRESS.

Lola plays Lola, one of four showgirls stranded in Santa Ana when one of them falls ill. She sings for her supper in skimpy outfits, slinking and shimmering across a saloon stage and singing to an invisible orchestra blaring Vegas-style showtunes in a style that wouldn’t be invented for another century. Santa Ana is run roughshod by a villain in black named El Diablo (Cobos), and only Lola and med student Rod (Martell) are bad enough to stand up to him.

I wonder what American audiences would have thought of seeing a beautiful black woman playing cowboy and kissing and killing white men at a time when blacks and whites were just beginning to drink from the same water fountains in all fifty states. It’s like Lester Maddox’s worst nightmares. Maybe that’s why it didn’t play U.S. drive-ins at the time—it was too far ahead of its time in that regard.

LOLA COLT is a crude and clunky exercise that certainly takes advantage of Falana’s immense physical charms (what legs!), but mostly wastes them with an unimaginative script and direction. Falana appeared more than fifty times on THE TONIGHT SHOW. I wonder if she and Johnny ever talked about LOLA COLT.

I agree about Lola Colt's shortcomings, but was won over by the star's va-va-va-voom, and the unique Las Vegas vibe she and her troupe brought to this spaghetti western. I felt as if I were watching a weird hybrid hatched in SCTV's laboratory: remember 'Lola Heatherton'? Some of that inane showbiz glitz sparkles here...and sexy Lola and her man problems and her showstoppers added up to something I just had to watch...once, anyhow.

FWIW, Falana was a big, big star in Italy when this came out, headlining her own TV variety show and ubiquitous in all media. Italian racial attitudes weren't exactly enlightened (tending to the French love of exotic Josephine Baker types), but they were relatively benign: Lola, as you say, couldn't have had the same kind of exposure back home at the time.

The film should be classified with the other femme pistolero flicks released contemporaneously: LITTLE RITA OF THE WEST (androgynous boy-woman- songstress-with-Brenda Lee-pipes Rita Pavone as the toughest but cutest gun in the west, a bizarre film), GARTER COLT (an enjoyably amateur vanity film with Nicoletta Machiavelli, and Fellini's costume designer outfitting everybody), and the fitfully entertaining Il mio corpo per un poker/BELLE STARR STORY (by Lina Wertmuller -who coincidentally had launched forementioned star Rita Pavone in music, TV, and movies- with a great cast at her command (Elsa Martinelli, George Eastman, Robert Woods) who alternate betwen being in a Corman-style western and being in a trademark Wertmuller sex farce).

This post has been edited by James Cheney on Oct 17 2009, 08:10 PM

FROM THE ORIENT WITH FURY (1965)—Directed by Sergio Grieco. Stars Ken Clark, Margaret Lee, Fabienne Dali, Evi Merandi, Ennio Balbo. American leading man Ken Clark returns as spy Dick Malloy in the second of three Agent 077 adventures. Armed with a belt camera, a car that fires twin machine guns, and ready-made quips for all situations, Dick goes hunting for a missing scientist, Professor Kurtz (Balbo), who has invented a disintegrating ray gun. The trail leads him first to Paris, where he beats up a bunch of guys, then to Madrid, where he beats up a bunch of guys, and finally to Istanbul, where he beats up a bunch of guys. Some real slugfests in this one; in fact, the first time we see Malloy, it’s in the middle of a bar fight. And of course, any time there’s a kidnapped scientist, there’s a beautiful daughter involved, and here it’s the delectable Romy (Dali). Not among the finest Eurospy flicks, but the fisticuffs and the silly prop ray gun are worth some attention.

PAYMENT IN BLOOD (1967)—Directed by Enzo G. Castellari. Stars Edd Byrnes, Guy Madison, Ennio Girolami, Luisa Baratto. Also released as BLAKE’S MARAUDERS, RENEGADE RIDERS, 7 WINCHESTERS FOR A MASSACRE, and who knows what else, this Italian western was handled by Columbia in the U.S. An unusual mix of silly humor and heavy violence, PAYMENT IN BLOOD is set in Texas two years after the end of the Civil War. Sore loser Thomas Blake (Madison), a Confederate colonel, and his boys continue raping and plundering the South in search of Confederate gold hidden by a general. Along comes a mysterious stranger named Stuart (Byrnes) who claims to know where the loot is and wants to join Blake’s boys. They’re a colorful lot, including an Indian knife-thrower, a bullwhip master, and a guy who kills using his ultra-sharp spurs, but this isn’t a gimmicky western like the Sabata or Sartana movies. It is an Enzo Castellari movie though—his first western—so it’s action-packed, entertaining, and not very deep with a nice Francisco de Masi score, some plot twists, and quite a body count. Castellari reteamed with 77 SUNSET STRIP star Byrnes on his next western, ANY GUN CAN PLAY. Madison was also a big American TV star, having played Wild Bill Hickok for several seasons on CBS.

NAKED AND VIOLENT aka AMERICA SO NAKED AND VIOLENT (1970) - Atrocious mondo offering from Sergio Martino examining the state of late 1960s America. Some interesting time capsule footage of 1969 NYC, Harlem, Las Vegas, and the deep South, but what is the point? With narration by LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD star Giorgio Albertazzi (the Mya DVD only has the Italian track; apparently Edmund Purdom narrated the English-language version), Martino jumps all over the place, starting with the moon landing and going to Harlem, examining racism in the south, then it's off to a Bears-49ers game in San Francisco, then to Vegas, then recreating the rituals allegedly used by the Manson family, then it's off to watch some hicks string up some rabbits and shoot them, then we visit the path of JFK's motorcade, followed by some guy humping a blow-up doll, then to a funnycar race, and on and on, ending with the Statue of Liberty, all set to mostly lounge music by Bruno Nicolai. Along the way, Albertazzi says things like "Las Vegas is a place for escapism." Wow! Thanks for pulling the curtain back on that one, Sergio.

Mya's awful subtitle translation doesn't help matters. It's hard telling if it's the fault of Martino or the subtitling when we see shots of Woodstock, but the narration seems to be talking about Altamont. As is the norm with Mya, there's near-constant misspellings, a mention of "42th Street," and the Staten Island Ferry is referred to as the "Staten Island Steamer," which sounds like something Giuliani would've eventually cleaned up. My favorite is at the end, when we see an aerial shot of the Statue of Liberty, Albertazzi narrating, and subs reading "Give me your tiredness, your poors..."

What is Martino's point? Damn, is this thing terrible!

re: MYA atrocious subs:

Netflixed EVIL FACE. I expected a bad transfer but the subs are atrocious. Here are some examples:

When a character tells Kinksi that it was a miracle that he rescued them after a carriage accident, Kinski replies: "A real luck"

When another character tells her husband about the unsettling things a writer researching Kinski and his mentor's - named Ivan Rassimov! - experiments, the husband replies, "Don't you know that writers have a great fantasy"

When speaking about what the writer said about their hosts, the actress says: "She thinks that our guest is responsible of her sister's and other girls' disappearance."

And a police inspector asked to look into Kinski's activities says "That is why I need evidences. More powerful is their name, more evidences I need".

Later, when the writer and her boyfriend/husband or whatever go to the police, he expresses concern that if they do not act soon, Kinski could "hide the evidences making fun of us!"

There were things on the NAKED AND VIOLENT subs that were that bad. I couldn't even keep up with all the spelling and grammatical errors. "Give me your tiredness, your poors...."?! Now that's a humdinger! Not like it's a famous quote or anything...

Sounds like translation software may be to blame. A friend who ekes out a living in Milan translating stuff often complains that his better paid, more prolific counterparts just pop the text into Babelfish or Google Translate and lightly edit the result. Their Italian (non Anglophone) employers don't know the difference and encourage the practice. These subs make me (incredibly enough) reminisce kindly about Video Search of Miami: their product may have been atrocious but their inhouse subtitling staff at least did a pretty good job on occasion...