Zanna Bianca alla riscossa

Lucio Fulci's White Fang must have been a hit, because Tonino Ricci made an unofficial sequel to it, casting Franco Nero lookalike (if you squint a bit) Maurizio Merli as the hero. This was Maurizio's break-out role and he would go on to punch 96% of the male population of Italy in the face in various Euro-crime films. Good call, Tonino!

Maurizio was just minding his business up in the mountains when his faithful dog/wolf (just a dog really) White Fang alerts him to the fact that his best mate, who has just struck gold, has been murdered and robbed by bandits Donald O'rien and Luciano Rossi (who is dubbed by a Peter Lorre soundalike for good measure). These two head off to the local town where evil businessman Henry Silva learns that there might be a gold seam out there, hooks up with the bad guys, and starts scheming against Maurizio, who has assumed his mate's identity and come to town looking for revenge. On reflection the only reason I can think of him stealing the identity is to set up a couple of sub-plots.

You see, a kid who has just lost his mother has wandered into town looking for his dad, and guess who that now is? Maurizio has to pretend to be this kid's father, is hitting on a local woman who was taking care of the kid, and is also trying to keep a low profile from local Mountie Renzo Palmer, who is deeply suspicious of everything that's going on.

Tonino Ricci is a bit of an erratic director. For everyone good one like Night of The Sharks we get a never ending snore-fest like his Close Encounters rip-off Encounters in the Deep. He does good here though, and seems to realise that everyone was going to get bored with the stolen identity thing, so he switches to a cross-country trace when Maurizio's son is kidnapped, with the Mounties chasing Maurizio. For those thinking 'wasn't this about a dog/wolf' there's plenty of dog action, mostly (thankfully) not involving other animals. This dog can lead horses around, untie knots, bark an awful lot and turn into a dummy dog when falling off a cliff!

WHITE FANG is an exciting adventure set in Alaska during Gold Rush . This adventure movie is set at the end 19th Century , in the Klondike region of Yukon, Canada . It has as starring the wolf-dog named White Fang , as when his master is killed by two nasties (Donald O'Brien ,Luciano Rossi), then warns another prospector named Burt Halloway . After that , the dog teams up the avenger prospector (Maurizio Merli) who changes his identity with the deceased and as he seeks revenge the killer his previous partner . Meanwhile , the murdered prospector's son arrives to the small gold town named Dawson City and befriends the wolf-dog . There the little boy meets a gorgeous girl , the saloon owner( Gisela Hahan who acted in ¨They call me Trinity¨) and Burt falls in love with her . The prospector and his faithful mate , the wolf-dog, attempt to stop the evildoer, an ambitious, snarling businessman (Henry Silva replacing to John Steiner from original film ) and hoodlum( Benito Stefanelli , also master of arms and stuntman ). They're deceiving of faking manner to the prospector by means of stealing the map of the Alaskan gold mine and to profit from him .

This following to ¨Lucio Fulci's White Fang ¨(with Franco Nero , Virna Lisi and Fernando Rey ) is a tepid and light-hearted adventure about known and classic novel by Jack London. Lumpy blend of adventures, action , villainy, though needlessly violent and aimed to young people . The film is loosely based on the novel by Jack London , though differs significantly from the book but this is an invented version , however remains the essential elements as the young-dog friendship , the gold rush , spectacular outdoors and locations and several moving scenes . The talent of diverse and wasting casting is redeemed in part for the spectacular outdoors filmed on Austrian landscapes . It's a passable sequel that maintains the charm and adventure style of the previous film but still makes for decent juvenile amusement . Weak screenplay from Giovanni Simonelli and Sandro Continenza who wrote in similar similar style to former movie . Atmospheric and evocative musical score by Carlo Rustichelli who also composed ¨White Fang¨ . The film is rated PG-13 (Parents guide), because contains some violent scenes about killing, a cruel fighting between bear and dog and brutal biting . The motion picture is regularly directed by Tonino Ricci, a below average director who in the 90s also realized other dog-films as ¨Buck¨ with John Savage and ¨Buck and the magic bracelet ¨ with Matt McCoy . Other adaptations about Jack London classic are : ¨Call of the wild ¨ by Ken Annakin with Charlton Heston , White Fang(1991)by Randal Kleiser with Ethan Kawke as young prospector and Klaus Maria Brandauer, and The return of White Fang(1994) by Ken Olin with Scott Bairstow and once again Ethan Hawke. Rating : acceptable and passable.

You know this film isn't half bad! For a dollar at the Shop Mart you can do a lot worse, though I doubt most people who glom onto it will really understand what they are seeing. This is essentially a later era Spaghetti Western made at a time when the form was becoming passé. To jazz them up Italian directors were making hybrid versions with Kung-Fu subplots, comedy shenanigans or in this case, plundering the writings of Jack London & moving the locations up into the Rockies (played here by the mountains of Sweden and still coming off well).

Crime thriller star Maurizio Merli is brought in as the indomitable prospector looking to avenge the murder of his former partner and finding himself saddled with the movie's requisite plucky young tyke, an obnoxious element thrown in the mix to appeal to the film's target audience of 8 - 12 year old boys. Sexy Gisela Hahn plays the saloon harlot with the heart of gold (necessary to keep the tag-along fathers interested) and the always enjoyable Henry Silva takes on the Jack Palance role of the crooked town crime boss who's schemes the hero interrupts. This one has the added twist of Merli adopting the identity of his murdered friend in a bid to get to the bottom of things, which of course requires lots of desperate walks through the snowy wilds, bar room fistfights, shootouts with the bad guys and displays of wintertime survival skills.

But the star of the film is of course the dog, arbitrarily called White Fang: There were about a dozen of these Jack London derived Doggy Adventure Snow Westerns cobbled together, and the real hero is a German Shepard unconvincingly cast as a white timber wolf who befriends our plucky young tyke, saving him and Merli's necks a bunch of time as he does clever and exciting things like bearing down snarling on secreted assassins, finding the key to the jail cell or fighting off the inevitable wolf attack that is also a vital if unfortunate element of the formula. I say unfortunate because the animals were more or less coaxed to actually fight on camera and sensitive viewers might be concerned that the doggies were perhaps being exploited. Chances are they were, but for $1.00 per DVD nobody seems to care.

Then there's the bear. One of the more absurd subplots in this outing has the local shysters bring in a bear (which is substituting for the hired killer role of this were a standard issue oater) and White Fang has to contend with the beast on no less than two snarling, sprawling, overlong fight sequences that once again remind us that in 1974 nobody gave a damn about "animal rights". For a family film it's pretty fierce stuff and kids may want to know why the bear and the doggie are fighting when in all actuality they would probably have just avoided each other if they weren't thrown into a pen together by a bunch of thick-skulled Italians.

But those segments aside this is a very passable if somewhat violent movie that you can pretty much all watch together, and fans of genre cinema will be delighted by some of the familiar supporting cast faces like Renzo Palmer, Benito Steffanelli, Luciano Rossi and the insane Donald O'Brian. Written in part by Giovanni Simonelli with music by the always dependable Carlo Rustichelli and directed by Spaghetti Western legend Tonino Ricci, this is actually a film with some respectable talent on display and interesting low budget production design. What's going around is a full-frame English language printing on various public domain DVDs priced appropriately at about $1.00, and you can do a lot worse for that $1.00; I've already watched mine about six times, which is a pretty good cost to entertainment value ratio if I might say.

6/10

Tonino Ricci. A name that inspires consternation among Italian genre movies lovers. He's touched all the genres, and yet most of his movies are unknown to the general public and hard to locate, even for patient seekers.

This spaghetti western he has shot features Maurizio Merli in the lead, along with an impressive cast that includes Donald O'Brien and Henry Silva. It involves Merli, a gold seeker living in the Canadian woods, trying to avenge his best friend's death by litterally stealing his name and identity and trying to find the killers in town. He will inherit both his best friend's dog (White Fang) and his son (Kim) and will have to deal with all these new relationships while trying to find his thugs.

Silva is once again very stone-faced as the town's main gangster, always a coward, just like the character played by Donald O'Brien. The dog "playing" White Fang does neat tricks here, but he constantly barks and that becomes very irritating after a while.

Nice locations, but the city seems okay, while as soon as a three is showing, the ground is inevitably covered in snow ! A slight contrast we soon forget as soon as Ricci's camera dives into Gisela Hahn's cleavage.

Overall a satisfying spaghetti western, impregnated with routine film making and the usual revenge cliches. Watch out for Renzo Palmer's mountie punch in the face !