Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Blistering performances.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Imagine Fulci making a cop movie. Imagine that the budget ran out two weeks in. Imagine that real mobsters paid for the film, asking for a title change and for more violence (like Fulci was going to say no). Don't imagine. All of these things are wonderfully true and make Contraband such a weird addition to your Fulci collection.Luca Di Angelo smuggles near Naples with his brother Mickey. They have a close call with the police and suspect a rival gangster, Scherino, of turning them in. After sharing their concerns with their boss Perlante, oen of Mickey's prize horses is killed and a fake police roadblock leads to Fulci paying homage (or straight up ripping off, depending on your perspective) to the scene where Sonny dies in The Godfather. Luca escapes death while his brother is not so lucky. Despite warnings that he should leave town, he has a speedboat funeral for his brother and vows revenge. Breaking into Scherino's house, he almost kills the man before running into his henchmen. He gets his ass kicked, but his life is spared after the boss tells him he had no part in the death of his brother.Adele, Luca's wife, wants him to forget this life. But he's in deep after discovering that a vicious French criminal named The Marsigliese is responsible. We meet this criminal during a drug deal, where he responds to a bad batch of heroin by burning a woman's face with a blowtorch. If you haven't realized that you are watching a Lucio Fulci movie, this would be the point in the film where you realize that fact.The Marsigliese starts killing all of the Mafia leaders so that he can become the sole boss of Naples. Even Perlante is nearly killed, only being saved by the fact that his chief capo was having sex with his mistress and triggered a bomb under the bed. After a meeting between Luca, Perlante and The Marsigliese, where they discuss working together, Luca warns his fellow smugglers that if the French boss has his way, there will be more drugs, more overdoses and more problems - with less money for all of them.The police are using all of the intercine battling to round up smugglers, but Scherino saves Luca and suggests they work together. They meet at Perlante's house, but Luca smells The Marsigliese's cologne. That's when gunmen bust in and shoot everyone but Luca, who escapes by crashing through a window. Scherino is mortally wounded, but not before shooting Perlante in the neck, killing him.Again, in case you wonder who directed this film, The Marsigliese kidnaps Adele and demands Luca turn over his smuggling operation over the phone...and then plays him the sounds of our hero's wife being beaten and gang-raped. Luca unites all of the retired mob bosses and old guard bosses, who are sick of hearing about the Frenchman taking over. They take out most of his men and Luca guns him down in a garbage-strewn alley in a scene packed with blood spraying everywhere.Adele and rescued and Morrone, the leader of the old school mob guys, tells the police that he has no idea who Luca is.Contraband was made as Fulci was starting to claim his gore crown. It's his only crime movie, but it's not a bad effort. And if you're looking for his trademark tics, as you've read above, this film is full of them. It has way more blood and guts than any film of this type and subverts the genre it should be in, so it's quite similar to how Fulci treated sword and sorcery with Conquest. This may not be one of his best-known films, but it's worth checking out.

Not to be confused with Mark Walberg's recent action flick of the same name. This is a tough and gritty Italian crime thriller from legendary director Lucio Fulci. Although best known for his gut churning work in the horror genre, Lucio has a diverse filmography of various genres he made. Contraband will surely please fans of his work in the horror genre as this film delivers big time on extreme violence and gore. Blood and guts splatter across the screen when bullet ridden bodies are filled with lead, Heads and body parts get blown off with sheer brutality from gunfire. While the action is not as abundant or crazy as a John Woo film, the aftermath of these gun battles is much more messy and sadistic in its execution. This film is centered around Luca(Fabio Testi), a cigarette smuggler who is at odds with a ruthless French gangster that is into selling narcotics and looking to dominate the underworld in Naples at any cost. This triggers a series of tragic events that have our hero Luca ready for all out revenge. In this brutal and depraved mob flick, the violence is very extreme and sadistic including scenes of torture and rape. The film is some pretty solid piece of gangster action, with great direction acting and sick gore f/x. Contraband is quite under rated in my opinion and is a great mob flick.

NOPE, capital letters. While Signore Fulci once had some not-too-big ambitions ("Paperino", "Lizard in a Woman's Skin"), this less than mediocre mafia/ poliziotto mix has one okay scene that maybe lasts a bit more than a minute: when the bad ol' boys of the Camorra, all withered pensioner consiglieres with pale moustaches and spectacles, settle the accounts with their tommy guns, including Non-Maestro Fulci in a cameo role. Apart from that, you get a nonsensical script, probably the worst and already then totally outdated disco soundtrack of the early 80s, highly unattractive Italian housewives plus a black transvestite in the females roles, hairy vaginas, a bit of zombie make-up, a bunsen burner held to a lady's face, an anal rape Napoli style ... a bag of guilty pleasure goodies, some might think, but it's all as gritty and shocking as the spaghetti bolognese at Luigi's grimy restaurant next door. Even the (Danish) DVDs extras don't tease afterwards. Here, you won't stay for dessert.

This attempt at crime drama by Fulci is a success for probably the wrong reasons but Contraband is still an entertaining piece of ultra violent Pasta for the dedicated Fulci-phile and other adventurous film-goers in search of Italian junk-food.Luca and his brother Adele make their living smuggling cigarettes in Naples. Luca (Fabio Testi) is more than happy with distributing smokes, a small vice in the grand scheme of black-market goods but unfortunately one mafia don doesn't hold with the Di Angelis brothers' conservative POV and is hell bent on pushing the brothers and their partners out of the way (read: whack in the messiest method possible) seizing their territory to distribute the kind of hard stuff that would send Tony Montana on an all night bender. From there on, we're witness to the most spectacularly violent scenes of carnage I've seen in this genre. Those who think Fulci would be restrictive of his usual excesses in a non-horror flick are thankfully proved wrong. As gun blasts disintegrate skulls, unravel intestines and generally soak the screen in squib blasts (not to mention the Bunsen burner applied to a face and a bit of the ole' non-consensual in & out) you realize Fulci has just transferred his usual outrageous flamboyance from Gothic horror to gritty crime drama. The sadistic set-pieces he's mostly remembered for are in ample evidence, if not as expertly re-produced, so there's no reason a seasoned veteran of spaghetti horror should pass this up. A chance encounter with a steaming lime pit and interesting applications of a cork-screw are just a few more novel instances of brutality the filmmaker vomits out, situations closer to the absurdly contrived knock-offs of slasher flicks than a lean, mean bullet ballet.Fulci-regular Sergio Stalvatti is on-board but unfortunately doesn't duplicate his photographic skills from Fulci's living dead quartet and consequently, Contraband does look sadly plain on that front. Like most of his movies Fucli does flounder in the pacing department too, taking his sweet time to get going( like the ultra-cheese disco scene that's murder on the eyes, the best example of the whole trashy retro eighties ambiance of the thing). Once it does though its good gory fun for those who can stomach the sadistic escapades, most of which are shot in delicious, ridiculous Peckinpah slow–mo so the viewer can really savor the graphic bodily harm. When a gun blast liquidates a mafia boss's face the glaringly obvious dummy head barely registers; it's just part of the outrageous window dressing of this over-the-top mafia cheese movie, much the same way the pipe-cleaner tarantulas of The Beyond were just part of the show. If you surround your blatantly fake fx around enough solid, real world material apparently it's not as hard to swallow.Concerning the rape of Luca's wife, not to mention the loving detail with which the blowtorch scene is filmed (the damsel's face frying to a crispy black in a typical Fulci leering zoom) Contraband is one of the Maetsro's anti-woman exercises. This is a guy's show through & through, the sort of bruised machismo we've been accustomed to since at least The Godfather; the ladies here only get in the way. The violence is perpetrated in a more of a real world context I guess I'm saying, not the dreamy landscape of the living dead epics which makes the misanthropic vibe more difficult to laugh off (something taken to the max in New York Ripper).