Lucio Fulci is widely renowned as the 'Godfather Of Gore', and "Contraband" is a movie that is certainly not going to deprive him of this well-deserved reputation. There are also trailers and an image gallery.Although no highlight of the Italian Crime genre, Lucio Fulci's "Luca Il Contrabbandiere" aka "Contraband" is a rough, tough-minded and ultra-violent Gangster flick that certainly delivers, especially for a Fulci fan. Video extras include several interviews: new ones with Giorgio Mariuzzo (13 min), Ivana Monti (22 min), Saverio Marconi (20 min), Sergio Salvati (18 min) and archival interviews: Fabrizio Jovine (6 min), Venantino Venantini (5 min), Cinematographer Sergio Salvati (6 min), Composer Fabio Frizzi (2 min). Special Features include a commentary by Bruce Holecheck, Troy Howarth, and Nathaniel Thompson. And that Contraband absolutely is.Ĭontraband has been released by Cauldron films on Blu-ray. Contraband shows a director willing to go to the wall, taste be damned, for pure entertainment. The opening sequence with the boat chase demonstrates a flair for complicated action that isn’t present in his grislier films. Lucio Fulci’s horror films tend to be constrained in location, so getting to expand his canvas reveals strengths one couldn’t anticipate from The Beyond or The House by the Cemetery. It all has the visceral “train wreck you can’t look away from” effect that Fulci brings to his horror films, with maybe a more plausible (but less satisfying) storyline.Īs a crime story, it would be hard to call Contraband resonant, in the way superior films like The Godfather or Goodfellas are. This is one of the goriest crime films I’ve ever seen, with exploding faces, disembowelments, and a woman getting tortured with a blowtorch to the face. It was a show.Īnd when the foreign gangsters make earnest their invasion, the wildly violent gore is the same part of the show. Does it contribute to the plot? Who cares? The girls on the disco floor were flashing their breasts and parts beyond. So, when Luca and his brother go to meet a mob boss who owns a disco, we get at least five minutes of disco dancing. If the scene does not connect to the next scene, who cares? At least you got a show. But the nature of this distribution network was obscure, and rather random.Ī Scorsese or a Coppola could have made this clear with a stylish montage and a voiceover. There’s an interesting sequence of the distributors of the contraband being rousted, and all of them being just local peasants. It has a bunch of local flavor, but so little explanation that the flavor gets lost in the telling. Luca’s given an offer to join, but after a series of grisly murders, he finds he’s on a one-man mission to protect Naples from foreign encroachment.Īs a crime story, Contraband is odd. He’s sure one of the local mob bosses is the culprit, but he soon learns it’s outsiders muscling in on the territory who are to blame. Luca wants out, but when his brother is murdered in a fake police stop, Luca is all about revenge. He’s dragged his family into this criminal enterprise thanks to his brother, Adele. Then, improbably, the supply ship explodes! But fake bodies are found floating in the harbor. Everything seems fine, until a patrol boat approaches. Several blue boats skirt out onto the water to a waiting ship, where they collect their stolen cigarettes. We open with a stylish (if impractical) contraband pick-up. Its story is pure mafia, its execution is exploding body parts, full frontal nudity, and comic relief leading to horrific violence. Being directed by Lucio Fulci, this is an unsurprising development. Contraband comes in like a cool stylish Italian crime thriller and goes out like a Lucio Fulci gore fest.
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