Cauldron Films: Contraband (1980) - Reviewed

Courtesy of Cauldron Films

While most American filmgoers know Italian director Lucio Fulci as the ‘Godfather of Gore’ thanks to renewed interest in Zombie and some name dropping from Quentin Tarantino, the truth of the matter is the man was really a jack-of-all-trades.  Though often veering towards horror or giallo, the ever versatile and underrated Fulci in 1980 found himself dabbling in the poliziotteschi or the Italian action-crime subgenre with the still viciously violent smuggler epic Contraband. 

 
While the good folks at Arrow Video showed the world a smattering of poliziotteschi with their Years of Lead box, boutique label Cauldron Films having recently done Sergio Martino’s American Rickshaw have turned their attention to one from Fulci, offering filmgoers a rare glimpse of the director’s far more realistic crime thriller film rather than his usual penchant for the occult and fantastically horrific.  For as nasty as some of the kills in Zombie are, including an infamous vista involving a splinter and a woman’s eye, somehow Contraband with its gritty realism and believably graphic violence winds up being probably the hardest film in the director’s oeuvre to watch.
 
In late 70s Naples, Italy, well-to-do cigarette smuggler Luca Di Angelo (Fabio Testi) finds his operation being raided by the cops followed by several chunks of expensive merchandise confiscated.  As he starts figuring out it could be the actions of a rival gang, his brother is assassinated as his wife is kidnapped and held hostage.  On the run from assassins while trying to locate his wife’s whereabouts, Luca allies himself with rival smugglers and lobal mobsters in an effort to try and take down what appears to be a sadistic and murderous gangster’s attempts at shaking up the power plays in town.  Think of it perhaps as Italy's answer to The Long Good Friday?

 
Released in the same year as the fantasy horror gross-out shocker The City of the Living Dead, for as many vomitous sequences of internal organs being regurgitated and craniums being drilled out, the brutality in Contraband winds up leaving a stronger impression between the two for being less spectacular in the bloodletting.  

Instead Fulci and his effects technicians Germano Natali and Roberto Pace show realistic scenes of abdomens being exploded, heads blown through with bullets and a particularly grisly scene of a female drug dealer’s face being melted off with a Bunsen burner.  There’s a man who falls into a vat of acid whose boiled shriveled up corpse is thrown through a glass window.  Not to mention the film’s cruel gang rape scene near the end carried out by vicious gangsters intent on trying to break the will of Luca.
 
A rough, ragged ride from top to bottom including a striking recurring vista of several smuggler boats riding the waves in unison, lensed in soft focus by longtime Fulci collaborator Sergio Salvati and aided by a magnificently sleazy jazz oriented score by Fabio Frizzi, the look and feel of the world of Contraband (restored in 4K from a damaged negative) has the same air of filthy dirtiness his erotic thriller The Devil’s Honey had, suiting the neo-noir poliziotteschi crime setting perfectly.  

Mostly the film is a showcase for Fabio Testi to carry out multiple brutal murders, wild stunts and Ivana Monti as the smuggler’s wife caught in the crossfire.  A real surprise comes in the form of Marcel Bozzuffi, known best for his role as a hitman in The French Connection.  Used to seeing him play good guys ala Colt 38 Special Squad, seeing him turn heartlessly bad is a startling sight to behold.
 
One abrasive, bumpy rollercoaster ride that tells the story of the smuggler’s life being upended by rival power plays, Contraband is not for the faint hearted.  Even Fulci fans will be taken aback just by how far this one goes compared to his others.  But fans of the poliziotteschi on the other hand are going to be delighted and enthralled by Contraband, a no-nonsense straightforward crime thriller that provides a vivid snapshot of a violent unforgiving world distinctive to Naples, Italy and one of the more genuinely vicious offerings from an already ultraviolent Italian film director.   

Despite irreparable damage to the negatives mentioned in the release statement by Cauldron Films, they’ve put together a great set for one of Fulci’s least seen films in the United States and the first-ever blu-ray release of the film anywhere in the world.  Proceed with extreme caution as even the most hardened gorehounds and Fulci disciples will find this one sneaking in past their barriers to shake up and disturb their comfort zones!  You've been warned.

--Andrew Kotwicki