I know, I know. You probably saw the title Death Rage and thought "Oh dip! You're telling me there was a Ju-on precursor made in 1976?" I thought the same thing! But no, this movie has nothing to do with Ju-on or people dying in the grip of rage and becoming curses. And quite frankly, we were both idiots, you and I, for thinking that it might! Yes, definitely the both of us. Yes.
The worst thing of all is that Death Rage has nothing to do with horror at all. It's another Bloody Brood--a public domain crime flick that must have had Mill Creek Entertainment execs (I use that term very loosely) (very) saying "Eh, who's gonna know it's not a "chilling" "classic"? It's not like anyone's gonna watch all fifty of the movies anyway, throw her in the box!"
It's disappointing, but on the bright side Death Rage isn't gouge-your-eyes-out disappointing. It's...fine. Although maybe that's worse? I don't know. It's muggy out there today, and it's got my brain feeling all ten kinds of gauzy!
Yul Brynner (!) is retired hitman Peter Marciani, who heads to Naples for a little revenge when he gets a hot tip about the mafioso who killed his brother years prior. Marciani was so notorious, apparently, that his rumored presence in Italy has the mafia scrambling and the polizia (headed up by Martin "Arbogast" Balsam) (!) trying to stave off a bloodbath in the streets.
Marciani kills and avoids getting killed as he searches for his target, taking some time to indulge the admiring gangster-wannabe Angelo (Massimo Ranieri) and have a little romance with nudie dancer Anny (giallo queen Barbara Bouchet).
Again, this is a largely serviceable film: a by-the-numbers spaghetti crime thriller that doesn't particularly deliver any thrills, no matter how much its score (courtesy of Guido and Maurizio De Angelis, aka "Oliver Onions") tries to liven things up. We get a lot of men--mostly mustachioed--looking at each other across long distances, sometimes imparting "I am going to kill you" and sometimes imparting "Let's go kill that other guy." We get shootouts and foot chases, and we get the kind of car chases you've seen a hundred times before: overlong and accompanied by the distinct wailing of a European police siren; speeding through a street market and crashing into stalls, sending boxes and vegetables flying; boop-boop-booping down the wide staircases of a palazzo.
If Death Rage is interesting at all, it's thanks to the cast. This is Brynner's last film before he returned to the stage as King Mongkut for endless revivals of The King and I, a performance he would give literally thousands of times over the course of his career. Marciani is tough guy-cool, always clad in black and looking like he was crafted from leather. They sure don't make 'em like ol' Yul any more.
Balsam, who appeared in a number of these sorts of poliziotteschi flicks throughout the 70s, is of course always welcome. There's the glimmer of one of those "cop and bad guy have a mutual respect" relationships hinted at between the commissario and the hitman, but unfortunately Death Rage devotes more time to Marciani's relationship with two-bit up-and-comer Angelo...not to mention the inexplicable romance between Marciani and Anny. Bouchet is charming and lights up the screen (as you'd expect if you've seen, say, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times), but the "love story" here feels as formulaic as those vegetable-busting car chases.
But hey, like I said, you won't want to gouge your eyes out over this one. But there are surely better ways to spend your time with each of the stars of this cast than watching Death Blah.
> This is Brynner's last film before he returned to the stage as King Mongkut for endless revivals of The King and I, a performance he would give literally thousands of times over the course of his career.
ReplyDeleteNot that I'm fact-checking you or anything, but I had to look that up and it's 4,625 performances, to be exact -- with the last 600+ after being diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, and dying less than four months after his final performance which ended his third Broadway revival of the role.
Stage actors really are a different breed of human.
When it came to LA in the early 1980s there was a commercial that played *constantly* where he wore a brilliant red costume and they cut to a clip of a woman leaving the theater saying "I really love to see him in his red."
Like you said, it must be a stage actor thing, I don't know. And clearly there was insane demand for him in the role! But it's wild to me just the same. Surely he last discovered something that made it feel fresh like...3500+ performances ago??
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