Easygoing Naples cigarette contraband smuggler Luca Di Angelo (a solid performance by the handsome and charismatic Fabio Testi) ain't having an easy time of it: his beautiful, but fed-up wife (the luscious Ivana Monti) can't stand his law-breaking lifestyle, the zealous local police are closing in for an arrest, and ruthless narcotics baron the Marsiguese (a splendidly hateful'n'heinous villainous turn by Marcel Bozzufi of "The French Connection") wants Luca and his fellow smugglers to start peddling hard drugs. Things go from bad to worse after Luca's brother gets rubbed out, leading to an all-out ferocious turf war in which various criminals gets bumped off in assorted grisly ways.
Lucio Fulci compensates for the occasionally poky pacing, a rather tedious opening third and the grinding predictability of the standard crime/action thriller scenario by pouring on the excessively gory and gruesome graphic carnage with his customary rough and lingering aplomb: One guy gets tossed into a pit of sulfuric acid, another dude has his brains blown out, a lovely lady courier has her face viciously disfigured with a Bunsen burner, yet another fellow has his stomach blasted wide open, and countless crooks bleed several pints worth of blood when they get filled full of bullets. In a particularly nasty scene Luca is forced to helplessly listen over the phone as the Marsiguese's brutish goons savagely rape and defile his screaming'n'squirming abducted wife. It's these foul, harsh, exceedingly gritty and unflinchingly nihilistic touches that distinguish this hard-hitting feature and lift it well out of the rut of your run-of-the-mill generic crime opus. Topped off with a rousing climax and a perfectly bleak bummer ending (Luca gets his revenge, but it comes at a horrible and substantial personal price), this no-holds-barred cruel and wicked film rates as one of Fulci's most unjustly neglected and underrated movies.
Lucio Fulci compensates for the occasionally poky pacing, a rather tedious opening third and the grinding predictability of the standard crime/action thriller scenario by pouring on the excessively gory and gruesome graphic carnage with his customary rough and lingering aplomb: One guy gets tossed into a pit of sulfuric acid, another dude has his brains blown out, a lovely lady courier has her face viciously disfigured with a Bunsen burner, yet another fellow has his stomach blasted wide open, and countless crooks bleed several pints worth of blood when they get filled full of bullets. In a particularly nasty scene Luca is forced to helplessly listen over the phone as the Marsiguese's brutish goons savagely rape and defile his screaming'n'squirming abducted wife. It's these foul, harsh, exceedingly gritty and unflinchingly nihilistic touches that distinguish this hard-hitting feature and lift it well out of the rut of your run-of-the-mill generic crime opus. Topped off with a rousing climax and a perfectly bleak bummer ending (Luca gets his revenge, but it comes at a horrible and substantial personal price), this no-holds-barred cruel and wicked film rates as one of Fulci's most unjustly neglected and underrated movies.