Hard Men (1996)

There ought to be a word for that feeling you have when you can't tell whether you have seen a movie or not. That's the feeling I have watching Hard Men. I certainly recall it coming out in '96 but I didn't think I'd actually seen it. After watching it tonight, so many scenes rang a bell, that I think I may be mistaken. It feels like the eighteen year old me might have seen it with a kebab and a bottle of White Lightning and, given the brain killing properties of 'Quite Frightening', is it any wonder I can't be sure?

Then again, maybe I could be forgiven for thinking I'd seen it before because Hard Men isn't exactly original. In this tale of three lethal, sharp suited cockney hoods out on the town, chatting shit about the etiquette of oral sex and the merits of Abba over Blur whilst plotting a betrayal against one of their number, it is clear that the French born, London based writer/director J.K. Amalou is heavily influenced by Tarantino. But, despite some pretty high praise from the likes of Loaded, Maxim and Marie Claire, his low budget film struggled to find an audience, which is sadly ironic when you consider he had the jump on Guy Ritchie who would do the exact same thing to incredible acclaim just two years later, opening the floodgates of the genre for several imitators to follow.

The film concerns a trio of hitmen and debt collectors; the sensible Tone (Vincent Regan), the professional Bear (Ross Boatman) and the hothead Speed (Lee Ross), who each work for gangland boss Pops Den (played by real-life South London gangster 'Mad' Frankie Fraser). When Tone's ex girlfriend reconnects to tell him he's father to a baby daughter, he decides it is time he should retire and takes his friends out for one last carousal to announce his plans. But Pops Den isn't the kind of person to condone such a resignation and suddenly Tone's last night with the lads is potentially his last night on earth, with Speed and Bear now charged with not only offing him but also with delivering his amputated hand to Pops Den by 9am the following morning.

Amalou has a very arresting and stylised eye for the seamy side of London and outlandish violence that makes Hard Men quite a visually strong addition to the British gangster film, with a cool colour palette combined with an interesting sound design, but he's ultimately weak on getting the audience to truly engage with his characters thanks to their overall unlikeability and some occasionally poor dialogue. It's a shame though to see that his subsequent career has of late consisted of a couple of straight-to-DVD Danny Dyer flicks. For someone who beat Ritchie to it, he deserves more than that.

As for the cast it's easy to see why Vincent Regan went on to become an actor who straddles both a variety of British TV productions and the odd Hollywood blockbuster like 300, as his potential stands out in the role of the sensitive and mature Tone. Ross Boatman, marking time between leaving London's Burning and becoming a rather handy professional poker player with his older brother Barny, is perhaps even better, quietly convincing as Bear in a way that makes me grateful that he's returned to acting in recent years with his great performance as the brother in the BBC2 sitcom Mum. Lee Ross is an actor I normally admire a lot, but here I think he gets a little carried away with the opportunity to overplay Speed's character's jittery coke-fuelled intensity and cockney swagger. Someone like Marc Warren would have perhaps been a more natural and convincing fit. The stunt casting of real-life villain 'Mad' Frankie Fraser as Pops Den is again - when you consider how Guy Ritchie went on to cast Lenny McLean in Lock Stock -  another example of Amalou predicting what was to come, but it is also a deeply contentious one; the showbiz glorification that began to occur in the '90s of once genuinely violent enforcers and murderers is one that has always sat uneasily with me, and I fail to see why the production saw it fit to try and enhance his natural menace with several obviously fake facial scars. There's also an appearance from Ken Campbell that is unforgiveably all too brief - what kind of idiot employs a one-off like Campbell for such a small and insignificant role? That alone should have sealed Hard Men's fate.

Perhaps the best thing about Hard Men is the strapline; You Call. They Deliver. It Ain't Pizzas, but even that doesn't bear much scrutiny, much like the film itself. I am now fairly sure I've seen it before, but I'll mark it as a first watch nonetheless. Perhaps this inability to pin down whether I have or haven't seen it says all there is to know about Hard Men. It's not truly atrocious, but it's nowhere near great either. It's just really rather forgettable. 

RIP Rod Taylor

Vintage Hollywood star Rod Taylor, famous for roles in The Birds, The Time Machine and Giant, has passed away just days before his 85th birthday.

Australian actor Taylor's persona was that of a suave and hunky tough guy, a role he played very well. As well as his most well known films he also appeared in mercenary adventure Dark of The Sun (based on Wilbur Smith's novel) and the James Bond spoof The Liquidator (based on the novels of John Gardner, who would later go on to pen official Bond novels in the 1980s) He lent his vocal talents to Disney's 101 Dalmatians and was last seen as Churchill in Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds.

RIP

Girls With Guns

Christina Lindberg in the 1973 Swedish cult classic Thriller - A Cruel Picture (known on the American Grindhouse circuit with characteristic originality as They Call Her One-Eye) A huge inspiration on movie magpie Tarantino, of course.

Here's Christina sans gun and eyepatch. She's now a journalist in her native Sweden.

Smoking Hot

And if nicotine ain't your bag, there's always the *ahem* great taste of coke...

Out On Blue Six : Chuck Berry

End Transmission

Girls With Guns

 

RIP Elmore Leonard

With a writing style that was quick, punchy, and so laconic it was drier than a Martini, Elmore Leonard was the Dickens of Detriot, responsible for many a ripping good read in the crime and western genre. He sadly died yesterday aged 87. 

Leonard behind a poster for Joe Kidd 

the 1972 film he wrote the screenplay for

Over the years I've read and enjoyed many a Leonard novel including Freaky Deaky, The Hunted, Maximum Bob, Rum Punch, Escape From Five Shadows and The Hot Kid as well as enjoyed watching many of the succesful big screen adaptations of his work such as 3:10 To Yuma, Out Of Sight, Get Shorty, Jackie Brown (directed by Tarantino from the novel Rum Punch) Hombre, Mr Majestyk  and Valdez Is Coming to name but a few. Most recently his character the dead shot US Marshall Raylan Givens, a modern day Wyatt Earp, has been given his own cool as ice TV series Justified.

We've lost a true literary great of our times. RIP.

Theme Time : Quincy Jones - Ironside

Ironside was a detective series that ran on NBC in America from 1967 to 1975. Starring Raymond Burr (who was also TV's Perry Mason) in the title role, it told the tale of San Francisco police chief Robert T Ironside, who was forced to retire in the pilot when a sniper's bullet left him paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. With some guile and strength of character however, Ironside makes himself indispensable and secures a position with the police department as a consultant, thereby continuing the fight against crime.

Equally popular here in the UK on BBC1 (even being broadcast on afternoons as recently as the last ten years), the show was originally retitled to A Man Called Ironside, perhaps to differentiate that this was the character's name and not as many believed a nickname based on his wheelchair status!

The theme tune, a distinctly rocking, jazzy affair from the legendary Quincy Jones takes its place in TV's hall of fame as being the first synthesiser based theme song.

It was also later used as a brief excerpt in Tarantino's Kill Bill Volume 1 

Proving much of American entertainment is now creatively bankrupt comes the news this week that Ironside is to be remade for NBC staring former LA Law star Blair Underwood as the wheelchair bound lawman, updated and this time relocated to New York (but filmed in LA).

 "All new characters, a new city, new texture, new storytelling, new audience" the excited star told the LA TV Critics Association. 

Which begs the question, why couldn't they have come up with a new show?!

I can't help but think of that old Lenny Henry gag (yup back when he was remotely funny...well, tolerable at least) about how US TV in the 1960s was revolutionary enough to employ a black man...but only to push Ironside's wheelchair around. Well, now we've got the black man in the wheelchair, that's progress I guess, but it still feels lame to me.

This will probably flop like Ving Rhames ill advised remake of Kojak from a few years ago.

Smoking Hot

Uma Thurman, Pulp Fiction

The Wilby Conspiracy (1975)

Jim Keogh: "Are you a communist?"

Shack Twala: "Because I read Marx and Lenin? I also read Mein Kampf, the Magna Carta and Winnie The Pooh"

Jim Keogh: "Then what the bloody hell are you then?"

Shack Twala: "The most feared species in Africa; a kaffir who cannot be broken"

This is my offering for a list of reviews on Letterboxd to celebrate Michael Caine's 80th birthday today. I'm a huge fan of Caine, so it was quite a call to pick one film of his to rewatch and reviews. However, I decided swiftly enough to shine a light on one of his overlooked and forgotten works. For that, I needed to go to the 1970s, a decade in which Caine was incredibly prolific. The days of his springboard to international fame and acclaim, the 1960s with films like Alfie and the Harry Palmer series, were just behind him and he was sometime off the 'doing it for the tax bill' years of the late 70s and early 80s (The Swarm, Jaws 4) and the second act of his career as an elder statesman of cinema (Little Voice through to the Batman series and Inception) The early 70s are littered with gems and near misses with Caine turning in 2 or 3 films per year. The Wilby Conspiracy is one such film. It's by no means a classic, but it does play to the screen persona he created, that of a sardonic, self made man/everyman, charming and prone to humour as a defence mechanism, but when his back is against the wall, willing to fight and surprise himself as a rather hard bastard. 

Set in Apartheid South Africa, Caine plays British mining engineer Jim Keogh who is visiting his girlfriend a civil rights barrister played by Prunella Gee. Her most recent case successfully frees black revolutionary Shack Twala (Sidney Poitier) from Robin Island, but on leaving the courthouse a roadblock incident turns nasty and both Caine and Poitier find themselves on the run from the police and authorities, represented by Nicol Williamson as a deadpan cynical and racist BOSS officer, trying to reunite Poitier with his leader - the Wilby of the title - and, just to muddy the plot waters hidden diamonds!

For Poitier, it's little more than a retread of The Defiant Ones, with Caine taking the Tony Curtis role, and no doubt hoping for a more political and humanitarian message. However, the mixture of a right-on essay on the horrors and brutality of Apartheid and a rollicking rough and ready bloody buddy movie make for strange bedfellows and the uneasy tone of earthy humour and drama that often permeates 70s movies is most evident here. There are some truly ill advised scenes such as Poitier, after 10 years incarceration and unspeakable genital torture which he has previously referred to, rediscovering his sexual urges when hiding out in a broomcupboard with Indian Persis Khambatta (with hair this time, unlike her appearance in Star Trek:The Motion Picture) To highlight this immediate physical attraction between the pair, the film's composer Stanley Myers overlays director Ralph Nelson's close ups of their eyes and sweating brows with African and Indian music respectively to suggest 'the two worlds colliding'.

Oh dear. 

There's even a scene where Prunella Gee, to act as a decoy for the pursuing police strips down to her bra and pants! 

Oh dear, oh dear.

And a totally out of place comic moment when Caine falls asleep at the wheel of his car; the car disappears from view and a second later, we hear the inevitable crash followed by a camera shake! 

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

A modern day viewer will also naturally feel some discomfort watching Caine using such slurs as 'kaffir', 'cheeky kaffir' and 'bantu' towards Poitier's character in what the script clearly thinks of as 'banter' between the two mismatched characters. Sure, these terms were sadly commonplace at the time but it didn't make them right and somewhat muddles the message the film is surely trying to get across. For anyone who struggled with the endless use of the N word in Tarantino's recent Django Unchained, this film won't be a walk in the park.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Tarantino likes this film, as it includes his motif of camera in the car boot...

That said, it is the natural easy chemistry and snappy, punchy interplay between Poitier and Caine (friends in real life) that make this movie quite charming, and despite some poor 'comic' moments and choices of questionable taste from Nelson and/or the script, when the film is funny it really is funny, with lines like the one I've used at the top of this review, Keogh's "A politically committed Indian dentist? That sounds like all the people I can't stand at a cocktail party" very amusing, if again racially dubious, and scenes like the nervous Caine and Poitier trying to act natural and innocent, grinning inanely at two highway patrolmen, or Caine, stinking from being on the run for days, sharing a lift with a very haughty looking well dressed lady. 

The film also has something of an eclectic cast, with the aforementioned Caine, Poitier, Williamson, Gee and Khambatta joined by Saeed Jaffrey, Patrick Allen and, in I think his first English language role, a young Rutger Hauer as Gee's rather mercenary minded estranged husband. It's not a great performance from the young star I'm sorry to say. 

But apart from the two leads, it's the chain smoking Nicol Williamson, paired with an endlessly sinister grinning Rijk de Gooyer as his sidekick, who provide the film with great performances of genuinely sinister cruel brutish menace. One scene where the excellent and all too overlooked Williamson berates and bullies a town's tribal elder especially sticks in the mind, not because of any violence or indeed any actual threat of violence, but because more than anything this embodies the attitude the S African establishment had towards its black population in that time; disgust, sneering pity and a genuine belief that they were second class citizens to despair of and treat with contempt. It's an extremely hard watch.

It's moments like that that make one realise that The Wilby Conspiracy's heart was in the right place, even if it's head wasn't always.

Django Unchained

I ventured out to my local cinema today to see Django Unchained and....I loved it.

A good tale well told that fitted its epic length rather well. QT has definitely matured as a film maker to tell this story truthfully and still feel able to tip his hat to his exploitation loves. 

It is well directed, well shot, it looks beautiful. The soundtrack is a pleasing damn good mish mash, there are some genuinely funny moments and of course some genuinely tense moments. I love how QT has turned some things totally on its head; in the original Django, the bad guys wore (red) KKK style sacks over their heads and were a figure of genuine menace. Here, on proper Deep South KKK territory, he replicates the 'bag heads' but discards the menace to go for a scene that wouldn't be out of place in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles!

There's been much talk of the violence of this film, but to be honest I didn't find it in any way OTT, and when you consider the original Django has a man cutting someone's ear off and eating it before him, this seems largely tame. The violence inherent in the cruelty of slavery is respectfully addressed in an utterly non sensationalist way, and often played out on the fringes of the action, seen briefly. QT wisely leaves the majority to our imagination. The rest is just squibs-a-go-go, a delightful homage to Peckinpah.

Leonardo Di Caprio proves once again what a genuine and interesting film star he is, Jamie Foxx gives his greatest ever performance, Samuel L Jackson as both terrifying and amusing in equal measure, there's amusing cameos from the likes of original Django Franco Nero (his "I know" line when Foxx tells him the D is silent, is beautifully played) Lee Horsley, Jonah Hill and Don Johnson (plus one definitely unneeded cameo from QT himself, sporting an awful Australian accent. Seriously mate, give it a break with the cameos) and Christoph Waltz pretty much steals the film. His Dr King Schultz is now my hero.

The cinema experience itself - something I loathe and dread - wasn't too bad. There's a lot to be said for afternoon matinees as it means the screening room itself is largely empty, though I did end up with a couple sat an empty seat away from me; she was constantly looking at her mobile phone, he curled up against her and went to sleep after 90 minutes! And there was the ridiculous queue to get a ticket as my local cinema has dispensed with a box office, preferring instead that you buy a ticket either in advance or get served at the sweets/icecream/drinks/popcorn etc stands, in an attempt to get you to hand over cash for their goodies as well. No dice.

Django Kill!

Extremely hokey dubbing aside (though that's often part of these films charm) I've always enjoyed this spaghetti western. It's a deeply perverse grotesque and utterly immoral movie with characters who have little or no redeeming features, not even Django himself played here by Thomas Milian, radically different to Franco Nero's interpretation and I dare say Jamie Foxx's too.

The plot is difficult to comprehend at best but it almost doesn't matter, what matters is the stylised approach to this Italian western cum Mario Bava style horror. It's a sadistic, weird and unsettling mediation on violence, revenge and overall greed (the scene where the townsfolk rip apart a man to get the gold bullets that felled him out of his corpse is especially gruesome and blackly comic) with some interesting and perplexing direction; the flashback scenes near the start are eyecatching with their washed out hallucinogenic dreamy/nightmarish look and are strangely intercut, with shots lasting little more than a frame or two, Franco 'Kim' Arcalli's editing is indeed very unique and striking, only really settling down to tell the tale in the here and now, whilst director Giulio Questi is clearly Catholic when it comes to his metaphors....

Christ complex!

But it's perhaps the violence and the tone of the piece that is most striking of all and it comes as no surprise that the Italian courts confiscated this a week after its release because of the savagery. It was later approved with between 20-30 minutes cut in Italy and many other countries, England included.

The opening shot with the hand of Django climbing out of ithe burial pit was perhaps later homaged by Peckinpah himself in Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia.

It's possibly my favourite of the Django series, I think it was the first I saw actually, though it may not be considered the best film. But what's not to like about a film  whose camera lingers on the eyes of bats or a three legged hedgehog?! Or which has a gay bear bandit villain called Sorrow who has a talking parrot and Mariachi style outlaws for his companions?!

Look out too for Ray Lovelock as Evan, the Anglo Saxon looking Italian actor later to star in Oasis Of Fear (previously reviewed on here) and The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue

Out On Blue Six : Roberto Fia - Django, 1966

Because as much as I admire Tarantino, the real original Django is the Italian Spaghetti Westerns. It is Franco Nero, and it is this beautiful theme tune from Luis Bacalov and Roberto Fia.

It's really sad to see videos of the theme, like the one above, at one time hardly viewed suddenly soaring with hits and comments concerning the new movie utterly swamping any praise for the originals.

Oh well.

I bet after one listen though that will be in your head all day eh? ;) Quality theme.

End Transmission

Circus

Guy Ritchie has a lot to answer for.

The unexpected and indeed to me still inexplicable success of the turgid Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels brought about a slew of copycat Britpop Loaded magazine generation gangster movies in the late 90s and the turn of the Millennium, all largely flops, amongst them You're Dead, Rancid Aluminium, Sorted, Essex Boys and Circus.

Circus brings together the most quirky and brilliant cast -  John Hannah (looking rather cool) Famke Janssen (looking rather gorgeous), Peter Stormare, Amanda Donohoe, Fred Ward, Tom 'Tiny' Lister and, against type, comics Brian Conley and Eddie Izzard as ruthless and extremely dangerous gangsters...hell there's even Christopher Biggins in there too! - for a Brighton set sardonic and bloody crime caper with twists and turns that would give the aforementioned Ritchie a headache.

John Hannah

Famke Janssen

Brian Conley

Eddie Izzard

Perhaps a little too many twist and turns actually because any real fun to be had in the movie buckles under the weight of the double crossing and confusing plotting that unfortunately squanders that eyecatching cast and the neat wit and stylish touches the film otherwise has throughout. And there really are many stylish witty touches too - the Bedazzled (1967) style fairground lit opening credits (over a clubby late 90s score), Izzard's pop music lyric quoting money lender, Tiny Lister's heavy 'Moose' squashed into a Mini Cooper and an ugly pug running on a treadmill. Watching back now,  it's the archetypal British movie of that era, you can almost feel the promise of the pre Iraq New Labour, see the simian swagger and hear the Mockney accents of the wannabe lads mag readership. 

It's perhaps a little unfair that Circus came about at this time and in the wake of Ritchie though, as anyone familiar with the hardboiled would spot that the writer, David Logan (who would later write more succesfully for Izzard in the BBC's excellent Christmas film Lost Christmas last year) was clearly more influenced by the likes of Elmore Leonard, Tarantino and even Raymond Chandler (where have we heard of a heavy called Moose searching for his missing girl before?) Even the film's ironic casting of comedians and light entertainment figures suggests a nod to the British gangster films of yesteryear (Freddie Starr in The Squeeze and Lennie Peters of music duo Peters and Lee in The Hit spring to mind) rather than anything from Ritchie. But the whole thing over reaches itself and was marketed rather strangely here in the UK clearly to cash in on the successful rise Eddie Izzard was experiencing as a stand up at the time. The issue being Eddie's part is rather small in this!

Ultimately it's a film that disappoints, but when all is said and done I'd still rather this than Lock Stock. I hate that film.

Hey Joe

Where you going with that gun in your hand?

Some fan art I made of Joe Strummer taken from the hilariously surreal mock Spaghetti Western Alex Cox film Straight To Hell (a film Tarantino totally stole from)

Here's the original screen shot

It's A Long Night

It's almost impossible now to imagine just how huge Eddie Murphy was in the 1980s. That a sassy silver tongued African American comic who traded on his own culture and experiences scored hit after hit at the box office and home video market not just on his home territory but internationally too. As a white kid here in the UK at the time I thought he was hilarious, and films like Beverly Hills Cop and its initial sequel, Trading Places, Coming To America, 48 Hours and even recognised turkeys like Best Defence (with Dudley Moore) would routinely be a family treat, if a little dubious for my infant eyes and ears! 

For a long time Murphy was King Midas, but like every star some of the shine starts to fade, he continued to make increasingly poor taste comedies before chasing the Disney dollar; and he's been trapped in substandard out and out family efforts and weak vehicles ever since. 

How did that come about? When did the golden touch turn to shit? And why did something so successful in the 1980s fail to translate to the 1990s and beyond? Well, let's look no further than 1989's Harlem Nights for our answer; a film that even the then 10 or 11 year old me decreed as 'crap'

On paper it looks like it can do no wrong, a film that would bring together the two most successful and popular African American entertainers, Murphy and Richard Pryor, was bound to hit the jackpot. I certainly know my family, fans of both, had high expectations so I'm sure the film world certainly did. But it was not to be and watching it back now I can still say I stand by my original verdict and more; An exercise in arrogance and vanity over talent and humour, Harlem Nights is a crass, offensive tasteless and unfunny mess.


An uncertain and deeply obnoxious tone pervades throughout this poorly written, badly performed piece which has some truly obvious and embarrassing amateur direction from its writer/director, executive producer and star, Mr Murphy. 


There's a series of scenes featuring Murphy's pal Arsenio Hall that is especially grim and littered with this uncertain tone. Less than five years later and in the hands of Tarantino such farcical violence would be acceptable and handled with a certain blackly comedic flair which is supremely lacking here and leaves the viewer cold. There's nothing funny about watching a man cry for his brutally slain brother and his own fatal comeuppance equally brings about zero laughs. The main thing I can take away from watching it again however, is the absolute sorrow I feel for Richard Pryor, a man with a direct line to my funny bone, who wanders through his scenes like a zombie. Clearly his ill health was beginning to show.


As for Murphy it is one of his blandest performances, seemingly trying to get by on his trademark honking laugh and use of the F word, which is, along with its derivatives, uttered 133 times throughout the course (or should that be coarse?) of the film. It would be kindly to suggest he had more on his mind with writing, producing and directing his baby, but frankly the talent isn't there either; the film suffers with poor pace and childlike plotting and exposition, the alleged gags are so signposted you can see them for miles, and if you miss it, don't worry, Murphy will linger on it long enough, or return to it just to make sure you got it. This is either the mark of a man who thought his own script so hilarious he didn't know when to quit or he actually had such little faith in the material that the direction simply had to hit the audience over the head with it. It's as if Murphy was too enamoured in the tailoring his character gets to wear in the film, or by his own later admission, he was simply too concerned with where the next party was at than with giving this his full attention.


I'm told that the film has had some revival of interest in the last few years, that it has something to say to the 'get rich or die trying' ultra flamboyant hip hop generation in the States, but I cannot see why. Clearly what united us in admiration for Murphy across the Atlantic in the 80s isn't as durable towards a retrospection of his career now. For me, this truly is a film to avoid, or perhaps I should say it is one to watch - but only if you relish films that so spectacularly fail to deliver on all points.


Harlem Nights joined a long list of 1980s revisionist homages to the prohibition era set gangster movies that resoundingly flopped such as The Cotton Club, City Heat, The Bloodhounds Of Broadway and We're No Angels. Thank God then that the Coen Brothers were just around the corner with Miller's Crossing to pay a fitting tribute to the 30s gangster films.


Now that is a film worth setting the night aside for.


Still, let's not end on a sad note for those involved. Let's try and remember something funny with Richard Pryor

Ah yes, there we are ;)

Macaroni Combat, 80s Style

Anthony M Dawson was the alias of the prolific Italian film maker Antonio Margheriti (1930-2002) a man who had worked on everything from sword and sandal B movies like The Fall Of Rome to the spaghetti westerns such as Leone's Fistful Of Dynamite before branching out to Andy Warhol's Frankenstein and Andy Warhol's Dracula, Cannibal Apocalypse and two Treasure Island adaptations - the first starring Orson Welles, the second being the more loose adaptation, Treasure Island In Outer Space with Anthony Quinn.

By the mid 80s, stirred by box office Hollywood hits like the Rambo series and greatly influenced by the success of the British actioneers from Euan Lloyd like The Wild Geese and Who Dares Wins, Margheriti (who had by now taken the Dawson moniker after realising the translation of his real name into English was 'Anthony Daises', something he decreed to effeminate!) decided to produce a trilogy of Italian films, similar in their mercenary/soldier for hire theme but unrelated on the whole, that would become classed as part of the 'Macaroni Combat' series, a pleasing tongue in cheek mirroring of the Italianisation of that other movie staple, the western, being termed spaghetti western. These films were 1984's Codename: Wild Geese, 1985's Commando Leopard and The Commander from 1988.

Each of these films would be headlined by Lewis Collins, the star of TV's The Professionals and the aforementioned Who Dares Wins who had reputedly - though pinches of salt may be required - turned down Bond and had aimed to join the SAS in real life (he did serve as part of the TA Parachute Regiment I believe) He would be joined in each film by a wealth of fading Hollywood stars, many familiar with spaghetti westerns, such as Lee Van Cleef, Ernest  Borgnine, Donald Pleasance and Klaus Kinski, as well as old hands in the Euro pudding game such as Manfred Lehmann and the English actor and now Hollywood estate agent, John Steiner. 

It is perhaps the first film, Codename: Wild Geese, that is the best remembered of the trio, cannily cashing in on the title of its more illustrious and quality predecessor, Euan Lloyd's 1978 film The Wild Geese and its  dreadful sequel, 1982's The Wild Geese 2 (indeed as a child in the 80s, roaming my local video store, I actually thought this was in fact a second sequel) whilst cheekily pinching Lloyd's star from Who Dares Wins and indeed, many themes from the original Wild Geese film; like that, the plot of this concerns itself with drug cartels, double crossing and, as the survivors of the mission drop in number, the inevitable revenge theme.

Perhaps the success of this first movie can be summed up by the number of poster and art work available on the net. Examples two and three displayed here especially put one in mind of the art work for Lloyd's Wild Geese...it's no wonder the schoolboy me got confused!

Just for comparison, here's the posters for Lloyd's two official Wild Geese movies - though obviously we'd all like to forget the second one!

See what I mean?

One year later and Collins, Kinski and Lehmann were back for Commando Leopard. With an estimated budget of 15 million in Swiss francs, this was for the time, the most expensive Swiss budgeted film. Approximately half of the budget went on the miniature special effects. This time, Collins, who had previously played the distinctively British mercenary Robin Wesley, was now cast as the enigmatic Latin Robin Hood gun for hire Enrique Carrasco (though like Connery, he never changes his accent!) whilst Kinski chewed the scenery as the villain of the piece; Col Silvera, the head of police for a despotic corrupt Latin American dictator.

Commando Leopard is the one film of the trilogy that is still routinely available on DVD here in the UK. I picked it up about ten years ago for less than a fiver before passing it on to Cex for trade. I am now staggered to see a copy change hands on Ebay for around twenty quid! Wha?! Haha

The loose trilogy wrapped some three years after with The Commander, a film more in keeping with the format of the first in that it gives Collins, as Major Colby, the role of a former British soldier turned mercenary again as opposed to  that of Commando's good hearted outlaw, and brings Van Cleef back into the fold as his former superior officer and mentor. The film sends Collins on the drug trail once again, this time deep in the Cambodian jungle with a hand picked bunch of mercenaries including a duplicitous Manfred Lehmann, overseen in Berlin by Donald Pleasance, playing for laughs.

Margheriti died in 2002 of a heart attack, but his huge body of work lives on. Indeed, that self confessed lover of cult, Tarantino, paid tribute to him when he loosely remade the 70s Macaroni Combat outing Inglorious Bastards as 2009's dubiously but deliberately misspelt Inglorious Basterds by naming Eli Roth's character in the film after him.