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The Smuggler- aka "Contraband"(1980)

Dir: Lucio Fulci.

Don't let the first half of this film fool you, this does live up to it's infamous status.

Fabio Testi ("Four of the Apocalypse", "Red Rings of Fear") stars as the head of a gang of smugglers trafficking in tobacco and booze.
After the Police break up an ocean pick up he suspects they have been betrayed. Soon the smugglers and various gang bosses are being taken out by a new organisation that wants to control all the smuggling and concentrate on hard drugs...

 

Made in 1980 this was made at the height of Fulci's success. In this year and the following he would make "The Beyond", "City of the Living Dead", "The Black Cat" and "House by the Cemetery", and this Thriller has all of Fulci's Horror overtones.

His regular crew, photographer Sergio Salvati is joined by Fabio Frizzi on the Score and Vincenzo Tamassi on editing duties, help make this brutal crime drama come to life.
Salvati's work is only workmanlike here and nothing compared to his superb achievements on Fulci's 3 Gothic Zombie classics.
Frizzi's score is Jazzy and funky with only a few hints of cheese and sounds a bit like the music in "Cannibal Apocalypse"!
Testi makes a handsome, hard-boiled anti-hero and does a fine job. As the lesser of the many evils on show here he gets the viewer on his side with ease.

But it's Fulci who is the main event here, he moves the film along nicely building up the plot and characters (some like a sleazy, drugged out playboy gang boss are interestingly strange) before hitting us with graphic violence, gore and sex in the last half.

Highlights include a very brutal, superbly realised scene where a Women smuggler has half her face burnt off with a Bunsen burner. No dodgy looking plastic heads here, this is done with carefully applied latex skin on the actress and it's hard to watch as her hair burns and her skin is seared off her face, all the while we see the actual actress struggling.
We have a great effect where a man has the back of his head blown away via a gun in his mouth, once again the actual actor is used to make the scene very realistic.
We also have loads of very splattery slow mo bullet hits, and close up shots of mangled faces after an explosion.
A gunshot to the neck is a real Horror film effect, and is nearly up there with the classic neck snuff from "The Beyond" and "Zombie". Plus it comes completely out of the blue!!
But the stand out has to be an amazingly OTT splatter scene where a man gets a doubled barreled shotgun blast into his stomach that blows a huge hole in him which sprays blood, flesh and intestines out over the ground. Again in slow motion!

We also have a smattering of nudity to liven things up even more, and if you think you saw a black woman dancing in a cheesy 70's disco with no underwear on...you were correct!! Sort of...actually it's the late Transexual actress Ajita Wilson who of course starred as the sadistic Warden in Jess Franco's sleaze fest "Sadomania".
But not all the nudity is as fun. There is an amazingly nasty rape that seriously tests the viewers resolve. The woman is held down, stripped and then raped from behind, maybe sodomised, it's not made clear. All the time she is letting out a really, really horrible scream through a gag in her mouth. All this is being relayed down a phone and as the penetration occurs the gag is pulled out so her scream will carry better!! This is really sadistic stuff and adds more ammo to those who accuse Fulci of misogyny.

Also look out for Fulci semi regular and Italian exploitation character actor Venantino Vinantini (who shoved good old John 'Mr Radice' Morghen's head into the drill in "City of the Living Dead ") playing a Police Captain called Tarantino! We also have one of Fulci's best cameos! He appears near the end as a machine gun toting Mafia Soldier!!

Overall after the slow, if interesting, first half Fulci delivers a truly brutal entry into the Italian crime genre. The movies of Lenzi and Deodato in this field have their share of brutal scenes but Fulci outdoes them all with "The Smuggler" offering up a unique variant on the genre norm...A gore Thriller with scenes straight out of a Horror film.