Good start, but then it gets ruined

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

A crippled guy in a wheelchair getting beaten by two jerks. Three schoolchildren gunned down in front of some nuns. Massimo Vanni hoofing Luciano Rossi in the nuts over and over again. Welcome to Violent Rome, where the moustaches are thick, the cars as brittle as poppadoms, and the general public certainly doomed.Rome in 1975 is a filthy hovel full of bagsnatchers, conmen, bank robbers, hustlers, pickpockets, rapists, psychopaths, murderers and bawbags running riot while cop Maurizio watches in horror, almost helpless as there's only so many criminals one man can either shoot or punch in the jaw. He does have some help, however, in the form of undercover cop Ray Lovelock. And some guy who dresses up as an old lady to catch bagsnatchers, but don't get hung up on that as it has nothing to do with the rest of the film. When Maurizio pops a cap in a particularly violent criminals ass, he ends up quitting his job as a violent policeman and starts working as a violent vigilante instead, which makes him even more violent and rage-filled. In fact, this film has so much violence, car chases, and member of the public killing that it leaves almost no time to have any kind of plot at all. Not that I was caring!Out of the cast of regulars who keep showing up in these sorts of films for the next decade, John Steiner stands out the most as an evil bank robber who'll shoot anyone in his way. He always makes a great bad guy, and he's backed up by rapist Luciano Rossi and violent vigilante Massimo Vanni too. Richard Conte is a good guy in this one, and sadly, this is also his last film, as he died of a heart attack in 1975. Completely lacking in style, good acting, or plausibility, Violent Rome makes an ideal addition to your collection as it's full of all the other stuff you want in a film called Violent Rome.

Richard Conte signed out on a relatively high note on this not-too- bad Italian cop film quickly put together as a spiritual sequel to 1973's LA POLIIZIA INCRIMINA LA LEGGE ASSOLVE. The producers couldn't get Franco Nero or Enzo G. Castellari to come back so instead what they did was hire Nero's lookalike Maurizio Merli and Castellari's father Marino Girolami to direct. On top of that, they brought back genre regulars Silvano Tranquilli, Massimo Vanni, etc. as well as Guido and Maurizio De Angelis to score (often relying on music tracks taken right out of LA POLIZIA). This would not be the only Eurocrime movie to do this.As relatively cheap and rough as this movie feels with plenty of awkward scenes and barely a plot to speak of, this movie is notable for 3 big points:1) Maurizio Merli. Merli could have just been a cookie-cutter fill- in for Franco Nero but very much makes it his own with a new definition for "physicality". Merli's first act upon entering frame is to clench his jaw and grind his teeth standing over a poor homicide victim. From then on out it's hell to pay as Merli shoots, beats, foot-chases, and car-chases his way through the criminal underground with dogged determination. It's a formula that worked so well that he repeated it about a dozen times in the following 5 years... usually with Attilio Duse as his clueless loyal sidekick.2) The car chase! While there were a lot of great ones in the genre, the chase in this film I find the most deliciously entertaining. It takes us through the streets, parks, and highways of Rome, gloriously destroying several cars, a flower stand, a random pile of freeway debris, and several innocent bystanders before it ends. The first crash of the chase is a particular delight, spinning in circles with glass and metal flying in all directions.3) John Steiner. This film also gave the fledgling British character actor a whole new career by casting him in a small but extremely memorable part as a particularly violent and snarky bank-robber. While Steiner had already had a few memorable villain roles, he said that this film changed the game for him like no other, and secured him nonstop work for the following 15 years. He's hilarious, mischievous, and ultimately frightening in the second of the film's two career-defining roles.Even if you're a casual fan of the genre, I'd recommend you give this film a try. It represented a paradigm-shift unlike any other film in the genre and set the table nicely for Umberto Lenzi's several subsequent contributions.

In autumn 1974, High Crime was a monster hit for the Italian movie industry, but neither superstar Franco Nero nor director Enzo G. Castellari were available for a follow-up cash-in. So the producer of Roma Violenta rang up Maurizio Merli, who had already impersonated Nero in the Jack London rip-off White Fang to the Rescue, and teamed him up with Castellari's papa (!) Marino Girolami. The first part of the Commissario Betti trilogy, a fierce and ferocious vigilante opera, has the rawest, most unleashed feel of the remorseless triptych – followed by the bigger budgeted, slicker and more generic Napoli Violenta and the utterly bleak Italia a Mano Armata – and delivers all the nasty way to hell, culminating quite early in a high class car chase involving an Alfa Romeo Giulia Super 1600 and a BMW 1800. Despite the loose, vignette-esque script by Vincenzo Mannino, Roma Violenta is spot-on throughout, with Merli – who actually considered himself superior to Nero – doing his Italian job with a somber, easy-to-underestimate bravura that serves as the single anchor in the widening gyre of the inferno. Sure, that's crypto-fascist dirt, a shame for a country that got rid of the Duce only three decades before, the most successful poliziottesco ever, and a tightly entertaining affair summarized best in the timeless words of N.Y. punk rockers Ed Gein's Car: "I've got five dollars for each of you/ And a bullet in the back/ Boo f*ckin' hoo."

"Violent City" is a poliziotteschi that suffers from all of the usual problems of that particular genre. It's colourless, boring film-making that fails to distinguish characters from each other, or make us take notice of plot details. The film is an endless series of muggings and robberies which, as in most (all?) poliziotteschi, only serve to remind you of how desperate the film-makers are to depict a titular "violent city". They are too stagy and over the top to succeed at this, though. The violence itself, particularly all the beatings, is so unrealistic you constantly have to tell yourself you're supposed to be watching someone being hurt, because it sure doesn't feel like they really are.The movie has no memorable characters; the only reason why the main character stands out is because he is blonde. It does have two memorable scenes: in one, some guys are riding in a car and spot a criminal on a motorbike. They tell him to pull up closer to them so that they can tell him something, and when he does, they shove him in front of an oncoming truck.In another, a woman is stripped naked in front of her father, apparently in preparation for a rape that isn't shown on screen. This is the movie's only nudity, and there's no sex in it.This is also called the most violent poliziotteschi, which is ridiculous. In no way is its violence worse than the likes of Fulci's "Contraband", or the lurid "Ricco: The Mean Machine".So it doesn't even stand out for that, or anything else.