Fresh from battling it out all the way From Corleone to Brooklyn, Merli and Merola are at it again. This time the English dubbing is by the B-team however, the same people who brought us the awkward dubbing for EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS. They do a better job here but Merli's voice by Michael Forest (who had moved back to the USA from Italy the year prior) here is sorely missed.
Of all of Stelvio Massi's crime films, this is one of the more enjoyable Merli pairings, up there with CONVOY BUSTERS. I particularly appreciated the chaotic and violently unpredictable side of the narrative early on coupled with the uneasy alliance between Merli, seasoned mafia don Francisco Rabal, and supposedly reformed mobster Mario Merola trying to pass himself off as a mere restaurateur. You know one of them is going to double cross another at some point, and the tension helps keep this one from falling on autopilot like a lot of Eurocrimers can do.
Unfortunately for Massi, the genre was already running out of gas at this point and this film really doesn't offer much new. The action scenes don't quite hit the same fever pitch energy that Castellari could dish out and the energy of an Umberto Lenzi outing isn't there. It's just kind of in-between helped out by another funky groovy soundtrack by the late great Stelvio Cipriani. It suffers from a lot of the same pitfallls of other Stelvio Massi offerings of the time, including an overly complicated plot and a highly unsatisfactory ending. It is also bizarre that Francisco Rabal and Nando Marineo, two very similar looking actors, have such large roles in the same movie. It leads to a lot of unintentional questions of mistaken identity, especially during a key scene late in the film.
