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The Appropriate Tune - "Mambo Italiano" by Dean Martin
One of the stranger episodes in the saga of Hollywood is the 1952 movie Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. A genre film in the vein of the Abbott and Costello horror crossovers such as Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff, the film starred Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, two young comedians who bore a striking resemblance to the duo of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. So much so that Lewis and his manager threatened to sue the ass off of everyone involved with the project, there was even talk selling the negatives so that they could be destroyed, thereby wiping the film from existence. Ultimately though that deal fell through and Brooklyn Gorilla would go on to a life of poor reviews and general obscurity, to the delight of losers like me who talk about weird movies all the time.
Unfortunately when your debut film is a blatant ripoff of one of the most popular acts in the country at the time it doesn’t bode well for your career, and indeed that was the case for Mitchell and Petrillo, who were hounded by Lewis’ people and essentially blacklisted from the industry up until the dissolution of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s partnership in ‘56. Patrillo went into film production with a minor in porn while Mitchell had a couple bit parts in a few movies no one remembers before settling into the club circuit in Palm Springs and typically that would be the end of the story, except for the fact that in the mid 70s, over a decade after his last film appearance, Mitchell pulled a Cassavetes and decided to try his hand at making movies independently. He would end up making two films before his death in 1981, Massacre Mafia Style and Gone with the Pope (which had only gotten as far as the workprint stage), and it would be another couple of decades before these films were rediscovered in his son Jeffrey’s garage and given a formal release on home media. Gonzo exploitation films made by a former Dean Martin impersonator sounds right up my reviewing alley, and it just so happens that while I was in the process of uploading Hellraiser 2 I happened to stumble across one of those films while browsing my local streaming service. That’s the kind of opportunity that this blog was built on, so let’s give it a try.
Released in 1974. Massacre Mafia Style was written, directed and produced by Duke Mitchell, with additional production help by Joseph R. Juliano and Spartan Films. Duke Mitchell stars as Mimi Miceli, son of Don Miceli, the former head of organized crime in America before he was deported back to Sicily. Mimi is tired of living in his father’s shadow however, and he decides to move to Los Angeles to break into the business with his family friend Jolly Rizzo (Vic Caesar). Which they do in the classic fashion, kidnapping some schmuck and mailing his body parts to family members. Crime today is not the same as they were in Pappy Miceli’s time however -- the former lieutenants are now trying to pass themselves off as legit businessmen, and the seedier aspects of the business have been taken over by *gasp* minorities. The respect for tradition, for family, that once supposedly defined the Cosa Nostra, that Mimi learned of at his daddy’s knee. Well fuck that, Mimi wants the cash and he wants the power, and he’s going to show all these guys what it means to be a mobster. Even if he has to massacre them, mafia style.
With national morale at an all time low, it’s no wonder that the 70’s saw the explosive revival of the crime film. Loose cannon cops, pimps, street punks, con artists, these were who the youth were flocking to rather than John Wayne or Andy Griffith. Of course that classical archetype of criminal syndicates, the Mob, also got a new generation of eyes on it with Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 magnum opus The Godfather. Massacre Mafia Style takes some cues from Godfather obviously, going so far as to say that Coppola’s film is based on the life of Don Miceli, but this is certainly not a sweeping drama. This is an exploitation film, which means that the focus is on the more visceral aspects of gangster life, meaning extreme violence, gratuitous tits, and plenty of naughty language. The kinds of things you don’t want on the screen when your mom walks in the room.
Of those three, the most screen time is devoted to violence. The first five to ten minutes of the film is literally like a scene from Postal 2 or some forgotten Tarantino picture, walking up to people and blasting them to hell before moving on to the met room. Nothing especially gorey, except for one scene (you’ll know it when you see it), but then this film was made for 12,000, so they worked with what they had, which was a lot of fake blood and prop guns. Quantity over quality, the calling card of grindhouse films, and this film is a prime example of that.
That lack of quality shines through when you get to the acting, which ranges from decent to more wooden than a lumber mill. Duke himself is one of the better ones, which you’d hope for considering he made the damn thing, but he often suffers from a monotonal cadence which limits his emotional range. It’s good enough in short one-liners but when the dialogue drags on, like the several speeches Duke likes to give he ends up suffering for it. Still this isn’t quite a Tommy Wiseau situation, Mitchell knows how filmmaking works and the acting, while hit or miss, still has a logic behind it that makes sense. Scenes play out as you expect, characters act as you’d expect them to act, et cetera. While it may be a vanity project, there was some care put into its creation.
I also think it’s prudent to write a little on the film’s approach to race relations here. Now you can say that this was a more loose period, and that these are bad people who do and say bad things, but there comes a point where it goes beyond establishing a character and starts getting uncomfortable. There’s one scene where Jolly is ranting for what feels for several minutes, and it feels like half the words out of his mouth begin with the letter ‘n’ while the other characters in the scene sit in silence. Again maybe if the Black characters gave it as good as they got, or there was some sort of repercussions then there’d at least be a purpose, but there are exactly two Black people in this movie (one of whom is even named a racial epithet) and they only exist to show off how macho the mafia is supposed to be, and nothing that ends up happening to any of these characters is a result of these scenes. And it’s really only Black people who get it too in spite of this multiethnic cast, I think there might be one Japanese guy who gets a slur thrown at them, but considering that particular word hasn’t seen major use since 1945 it doesn’t have quite the same impact. Mitchell was the sole creative voice on this film, so there’s no one else you can raise the eyebrow at. Just really awkward atmosphere in this dumb gangster picture.
Oh yeah, and there are naked breasts. Whatever.
Massacre Mafia Style is a film that wants to be a hard boiled noir but ends up closer to your run-of-the-mill video nasty. It’s violent and occasionally absurd, but I never felt connected to the story so it amounted to nothing. The story felt disjointed as well, with events suddenly popping in with little preamble and plot points that make little sense, all leading up to an ending that I’m sure Mitchell felt was very profound when he was writing the script. Massacre Mafia Style is definitely a cult film -- in the sense that every low budget movie from the 70s and 80s with a little gore and some tits has some kind of following, but calling it a ‘cult classic’ would be going a step too far. The novelty of watching a grindhouse exploitation flick made by the big band equivalent of an Elvis impersonator might be enough to earn a watch for the exceptionally curious, but I can’t give it the recommendation. Gone with the Pope sounds like it might be fun though, maybe one day I’ll get around to it.
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