Contraband (Fulci)

Casual Italian horror fans who assumed that the outlandish gore present within director Lucio Fulci's popular supernatural genre films (The Beyond, Zombie, City of the Living Dead, et al) is an active element only in those horror titles may be in for a rude surprise: the filmmaker's 1980 crime drama Contraband is easily one of his most savage, violent, and unsparingly bloody films, with a level of mayhem that rivals (and in some ways, surpasses) the carnage depicted in his horror work. Indeed, for fans of those Fulci shockers, Contraband - a film which is also known as The Smuggler and The Naples Connection - is likely to be the director's most interesting work outside of the horror genre, and the film is recommended viewing for anyone interested in investigating the less familiar entries in Fulci's filmography (you're on your own with his 1960s comedies, however).

The story involves Luca (a strong, charismatic performance from the reliable Fabio Testi), an alcohol and tobacco smuggler working in Naples, just as more ambitious organized crime outfits begin to muscle into Luca's territory, resulting in the murder of Luca's brother, and his subsequent quest for revenge. The trail of vengeance leads Luca to French gangster "the Marsigliese," a sadist not above taking a Bunsen burner to a woman's face over a bad coke deal, or arranging the mass slaughter of various mafia dons who stand in his way. While the aforementioned third-degree torture is likely the grisliest bit of business in Contraband, the level of bloodshed permeating the entire film is often startling, even if it is largely limited to squib-happy shootings and stabbings, rather than the more outré mutilations and murder present in Fulci's horror pictures. But as Fulci biographer Stephen Thrower astutely observed in his book Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, it is the lack of any distancing fantasy context for the violence in Contraband that makes it even more shocking than some of the director's pure horror work (Fulci would return to more realistic savagery, with equally disturbing results, in his 1982 thriller New York Ripper).

While there is much else that can be appreciated within Contraband - particularly Fulci's eye for seedy Neapolitan locations and authentic background casting – one is primarily just impressed by the film's unsparing brutality, which pushes the envelope for violence in Italian crime films far past what directors like Ruggero Deodato and Fernando Di Leo had achieved in their work.

Travis Crawford