The greatest movie ever made..!

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

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.

Luca Di Angelo (Testi) is a Naples-based cigarette smuggler. He and his smuggling buddies ride their speedboats up and down the Italian waterways to deliver the goods, but it's never anything really harmful like drugs. Luca has a wife and young son, and doesn't want to jeopardize their lives. Things turn deadly serious when a French drug kingpin, known as The Marsigliese (Bozzuffi) decides he wants to move into the Italian territory, with hard drugs and all. Being a sadistic torturer, he murders, tortures, disfigures or mutilates anyone who gets in his way. When his wife Adele (Monti) is kidnapped, the normally mild-mannered Luca goes on a rampage of revenge the likes of which Naples has never seen. Will Luca get out alive? While not, strictly speaking, a Poliziotteschi (because the role of the police is pretty limited and it's not a procedural), director Fulci has crafted some kind of cross between the crime films prevalent at the time, and the gore films he is most known for these days. It's all beautifully shot by cinematographer/master Sergio Salvati, and the make-up effects brilliantly done by artist/master Franco Di Girolamo and his team, and the music is stellar as well, done by the great Fabio Frizzi. These men and others help make Contraband a very well-made and entertaining movie. But it's not for everyone. Anyone who reads this site will surely love it, but the level of violence is definitely over the top - in an awesome way, of course.You have to transport yourself back to 1980 - while characters are playing Pong and going to the discotheque (while wearing some amazing clothing), they also are being subjected to what had to have been new heights (or depths, depending on your outlook) of blood, guts, and gore. Even today with our jaded and experienced eyes, it's powerful - imagine what they thought back then? There's other things that presage the oncoming 80's as well, such as the sax on the soundtrack, a couple of blow-ups and fights, and a kid with the time-honored bowl haircut.Fabio Testi is charismatic and likable, and he has a truly amazing fur coat at one point. Thankfully, Contraband was made long before political correctness. But besides all that, it's just a good, solid movie, well-made on all fronts. Fulci was truly a maestro and this is one of the feathers in his cap. He was undoubtedly a man ahead of his time, yet firmly rooted in the traditions of the past. The way he marries the two is an example of his no-rules genius. Look for him in a tiny cameo at the very end of the movie as one of the shooters. The Blue Underground DVD is excellent, although it would have been nice to have an Italian track with subtitles, instead of a no-options dubbed version. But that's a minor quibble, as this fine film is well worth owning.Contraband is just great. If you haven't already, we definitely recommend purchasing the DVD.

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).

Alongside LIZARD, CONTRABAND is among the best non-zombie movies Fulci would make. Made right after he made ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS, Fulci was obviously quick to cotton on to the money-making potential for extreme gore. With this late-in-the-day crime thriller, made when the Italians were just beginning to ease off from that genre, he came out with one of his most shocking movies.The Mafia operations in Naples are being set back by unknown parties. A massive contraband deal is interrupted by the police, a Mafia stables is burnt to the ground, and the brother of minor league Mafioso Luca (Testi) is assassinated at a phony police roadblock. This sends Luca on an obsessive hunt to find out who's causing all the mayhem. He's not long in finding out - a French drug racketeer known as 'The Marsigliese' (Bozzuffi) is killing his way through the Neapolitan crime lords, hoping to replace the penny-ante contraband pipeline with his own drug network.Though CONTRABAND lacks the pace and conviction of the dynamic Lenzi and Di Leo police thrillers, Fulci does well enough and handles the action scenes well. Shootouts at a traitor's house and on a dawn street (the latter involving geriatric assassins - one of whom is Fulci himself in a witty cameo!) are standouts, as are the fight scenes at a sulphur-pit and a deserted liner dry-docked at an angle.It certainly is way more violent and unpleasant than any American thriller you'd care to name, if not necessarily realistic in its approach. Submachine-gun fire literally disintegrates a guy's head, pistol-shots take out huge chunks from necks and skulls, shotgun blasts blow stomachs WIDE open, and in one of the most effective killings, one poor sod has an entire machine-gun clip emptied into his body until he takes a tumble down a cliff! This isn't mentioning the other unfortunates who are stabbed, boiled in pits, pistol-whipped, or blown apart in bomb-blasts. The make-up FX vary wildly from good to bad, but their extremely brutal approach do make it a film you won't forget in a hurry.Two scenes in particular are especially hard to take. The first involves a pretty female drug courier. Her face is blow-torched to a horrible crispy, steamy black when she tries to double cross the villain, who sees through her attempt to pass him virtually worthless cut cocaine. This goes on for almost one full seriously unpleasant minute. The second has the villain attempting to force the hero into a deal - by having Luca's kidnapped wife beaten and sodomised, with her screams echoing down the phone line as an additional push. The rape itself isn't shown, but the convincing turn by the actress involved, and gloating manner of the villain ('This time, we have to do it right!'), make the scene nigh-on impossible to sit through without provoking some sort of reaction.One of the most extreme crime thrillers, CONTRABAND further benefits from a great Euro-funk Fabio Frizzi score and some better-than-usual acting. Testi is likable as the 'honourable' hero, even if he does sometimes use sadistic torture. But his character is pretty much the same as the one he played in Fulci's ultra-sadistic 1975 western FOUR OF THE APOCALYPSE.The French/Italian actor Bozzuffi, well-known for his appearance in international productions, is excellent as the main villain of the piece, playing his ever-grinning sadist as an amalgam between his two most famous roles (his beaming gay thug from Z, and his sleazy cold-blooded hit-man from THE FRENCH CONNECTION), and presenting a character with no virtues at all! Romano Puppo, as the villain's imposing hit-man (who kills off most of the cast!), also makes a big impression, and has a great face that was perfect for crime movies. You can't wait for both to meet painfully gory deaths, and Fulci does score in that department! It's a shame that neither turn up until the halfway mark, but the film picks up considerably when they do. Sadly, both actors are no longer with us in real life, depriving the world of two vastly under-appreciated talents.Other appearances are clocked in by Luciano Rossi as a hunchbacked drug chemist, Venantino Venantini as a lazy cop named 'Tarantino', and hardcore starlets Ajita Wilson and Cinzia Lodetti as the playthings to a playboy mobster. The latter gets a great scene rubbing her tits in a gay gangster's face before she gets blown up! So, CONTRABAND is a sleazy movie, and sleazy enough to make it worth seeing, BUT there are some irritating flaws. The English dubbing is chronic, and seriously mars some otherwise good performances (Bozzuffi gets saddled with a particularly bad gay voice, while Testi's voice turns up on at least three other different characters). Plus, the first third of the film is slow and boring.Since virtually all of Fulci's movies are flawed in some way, at least CONTRABAND does deliver the goods, and is essential viewing for anyone into Fulci or European crime-slime in general.