Mubi Monday: Fists In The Pocket (1965)

Although I have labelled this as a drama, and although I found it uncomfortably dark and disturbing, there's certainly a vein of black comedy running through Fists In The Pocket that would arguably place it close to some famous Ealing titles, or modern British films influenced by those Ealing features, when it comes to making comparisons. An Ealing comedy mixed with something like We Need To Talk About Kevin. There's a combination for you.

Lou Castel plays Alessandro, a young man stifled in a home with his brothers (the eldest being Augusto, played by Marino Masé), his mother (Liliana Gerace), and a sister (Giulia, played by Paola Pitagora) he seems unhealthily in love with. Alessandro thinks that he has the answer to many problems created by his dysfunctional family, but that answer involves a number of deaths.

Having enjoyed a number of other films from director Marco Bellocchio, although I wouldn't call him consistent, I am always willing to at least go into his movies with an open mind. This film requires viewers to be a bit more open-minded than usual, considering how dark and twisted things get, but I couldn't say whether or not those viewers will feel rewarded enough once it ends. Not that it's a bad film, I didn't think so anyway, but it's a film that is happy to start and end in a way that seems to emphasise how much more there is to explore and experience at either end of the runtime. 

Castel is very good as someone who is quietly psychopathic, and he even retains a vulnerability that makes him easier to keep watching as a lead character, while Pitagora is an intriguing mix of innocence and potential trouble. Giulia is not exactly Lady Macbeth, but she gets to show that she's not entirely turned off by Alessandro's ideas. While they're not kept in focus as often, both Masé and Gerace do well as the two people who loom largest over Alessandro, for better or worse.

I would recommend this, but be warned that it's not an easy watch. I think people will either love or hate it, there's very little reason to find it average. It's quite an ugly film, tonally, and none of the technical aspects work to hide that ugliness. This is a film that wants to drag people into a very dark and disturbing mental space, even if viewers are reluctant to go there. One to appreciate more than simply enjoy, but I hope there are others out there who will give it a go, and maybe appreciate it as much as I did. I never want to watch it again, but I have said that about quite a few films that made me feel equally unsettled and wanting to scrub myself clean in a hot bath. This may seem tame in comparison to others in the same vein, especially as I also mentioned Ealing comedies in the opening paragraph, but it worms under your skin and into your brain as everything creeps closer to . . . something that you have to call an ending simply because it's placed at the end.

8/10

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Contamination (1980)

Luigi Cozzi, who wrote and directed this movie (billed as Lewis Coates), must have thought he'd struck gold when it was banned during the infamous "video nasty" debacle of the 1980s because it's yet another movie on the list that doesn't deserve any of the attention it gets from fans (with myself being guilty as charged) looking to seek out the forbidden fruits of the past.

The story is all about alien eggs being smuggled in to New York and the three people who may be able to stop some sneaky plan to enslave America or somesuch nonsense. The three involved include someone who survived a mission that found the first substantial stash of eggs being imported(Marino Masé), a female Colonel (Louise Marleau) and an ex-astronaut who mentioned the same eggs when he returned from Mars and was subsequently mocked and regarded as slightly mad (Ian McCulloch). Oh, when the eggs get to a certain temperature they can explode and make people who get sprayed with the . . .  albumen (????) explode too. Chests burst open much like they did in that far superior little movie known as Alien.

Trying to mix horror with some kind of intriguing detective thriller movie, this film fails to satisfy fans of either type. The main attempt, at about the halfway point, to draw out one main set-piece into something nail-bitingly tense is just undermined by the ludicrousness of it all, and the audio work that seems designed to work against, rather than complement, the visuals.

Cozzi doesn't do too bad when it comes to working with whatever budget he managed to scrape together though. He's certainly better in the directorial role than he is with the writing duties, shared with Erich Tomek (who did much better work just one year later with the very enjoyable Bloody Moon).

The acting is a bit shoddy, to be honest, although it's often entertaining enough. McCulloch is fun to watch, as he was in a number of other movies during this period (and I have heard horror fans speak highly of his way of discussing them with good grace and humour), so it is a shame that nobody else is really reading from the same sheet, as it were. The action and plot is really rather dull in between moments of gut-busting carnage, most of the second half feels like it has been excised from the very weakest Bond movie you could imagine, and even the gore gets dull pretty quickly when it's clearly the same "gag" being used over and over again.

Things do get a bit better in the last 15 minutes or so, and there's a good practical creation that gets some star billing in the opening credits so, added to the fun of the characterisations and the frequent exploding goons, it's not all bad. There will always be others who like it a lot more than I did. For me, it just never rises above average.

5/10

You can buy the movie here.