Mondo Macabro: Death Squad (1985) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Mondo Macabro

Campy sexploitation softcore French film director Max Pécas best known for the tawdry crime dramas The Slave and House of 1,000 Pleasures caught the attention of renegade boutique releasing label Mondo Macabro who recently not only put out a limited Blu-Ray box dubbed The Max Pécas Collection but a 4K UHD of what is easily his most notorious film Brigade of Death aka Death Squad.  Made in 1985 near the end of his career, this grimy scuzzy politically incorrect swan dive into filth isn’t quite as outlandish as Paul Grau’s outrageous Nazisploitation shocker Mad Foxes but it still finds ample room to be a cruel, vulgar and exploitative cop thriller with moments of sadistic transgressive violence bordering on softcore pornography.  On the one hand it’s edgy ultraviolent stuff.  On the other hand, as a film it kind of relishes in slurping up the dirt and soiled puddles of parking lots.  Almost proto-Noe at times, while it doesn’t go perhaps as far as Yves Boisset’s still extreme Dupont Lajoie it still achieves its own distinctive mean streak.

 
In the infamous Bois de Boulogne forest, a frequent Parisian congregation of transsexual prostitutes offering themselves to motorists driving through, the cruising arena turns into a crime scene of mass murder when a group of masked helmeted motorcyclists armed with shotguns and assault rifles indiscriminately guns everyone down.  Amid the victims is police informant Dolores, sparking a Paris Vice Squad investigation spearheaded by Inspector Gerard Lattuada (The Double Life of Véronique actor Thierry de Carbonnières) which leads him to a notoriously violent crime syndicate run by a mercurial boss dubbed “The Greek”.  Digging in deeper into what appears to be a vigilante crime mob being engineered by “The Greek”, his investigation leads him towards an even greater adversary in the form of the crime lord’s psychotic enforcer named Costa (a thoroughly threatening Jean-Marc Maurel) who goes rogue and starts offing his comrades right and left from the inside out.  Eventually leading to a brutal confrontation between cops, mobsters and innocent bystanders, the paths of Lattuada and Costa eventually clash together in an outlandishly violent Grand Guignol finale.

 
Dripping with scuzzy sleaze with a lot of random sexing and/or nudity with scenes that out of nowhere develop into naked body smashing orgies, rife with unrepentant uncompromising ultraviolence including scenes of naked women being blown apart by machine guns, shot guns or sucker punched either in the gut or in the face, Death Squad for all intents and purposes is incredibly mean spirited.  At once a gritty cop thriller, a prostitution ring drama and an exceptionally vicious schoolyard bully of a film, it features everything from a woman being stripped, groped, beaten and then threatened with the prospect of a broken liquor bottle being stabbed into her crotch.  Then there’s the frank depiction of transsexuality with many panning closeups of genitalia and use of off-color homophobic expletives, at once cementing realism and a queasy coexistence with transgressive shock value.

 
Visually speaking the film looks film with largely modestly lit nighttime cinematography by Jean-Claude Couty of The Night of the Hunted, illuminating an underworld both out in the open and behind carefully tucked closed doors.  The soundtrack for the film co-written by Léo Carrier and Jean-Paul Daine is suitably moody, furthering the overarching sense of danger and death lurking around every corner.  Performance wise, it’s generally good with special props going to Jean-Marc Maurel who has to act the unperformable and special mention goes to the poor cast of women tasked with being disrobed and manhandled by gangsters.  Thierry de Carbonnières makes the lone Inspector a strong figure who eventually turns to vigilante justice to set the burgeoning gang war right. 

 
Originally given an X rating in native France, this notorious grisly meanie of a cop thriller comes to 4K disc as well as Blu-Ray through Mondo Macabro in a new 4K scan from the original camera negative.  Also included in the limited release edition are new interviews with leading star Thierry de Carbonnières, cinematographer Jean-Claude Couty and actress Olivia Dutron.  Most certainly one of the wildest, most volatile acquisitions in the Mondo Macabro catalog as of recent, again this doesn’t quite cross the invisible lines laid out and torn up by Mad Foxes but it comes really very close.  With an uncompromisingly violent edge, filthy smuttiness and just an overall air of unpleasantry about itself, Death Squad is in theory a decent cop thriller that is also in practice a loogie hocked square into the eye.  For those who like their crime cinema so hard boiled you’ll get third degree burns, dig in.  The rest of you have been duly warned.

--Andrew Kotwicki