Slashing With the Nasties

One thing which is notable about the “video nasty” moral panic of the 1980s is the way it was somewhat classist in what it chose to target. Arthouse movies by and large got by scot free, but lowbrow B-movies got hammered, and sure, extreme content tends to be the purview of B-movies, but then again Last House On the Left was directly inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring but only one of those got on the infamous Department of Public Prosecutions list.

What with the moral panic coinciding with the heyday of the slasher movie, a swathe of slasher and slasher-adjacent films ended up either on the DPP list or otherwise associated with the “video nasty” concept due to gaining ostentatious levels of BBFC approval. Here’s three of them which somehow ended up on my to-watch pile at some point.

Mother’s Day

We open our story at a meeting of EGO – a cultish self-help group run by the buzzword-spouting Ernie (Bobby Collins) – the name stands for Ernie’s Growth Opportunity. Two youths who dress like an extremely square person’s idea of what the Manson Family looked like end up getting a lift from a sweet old lady (Beatrice Pons). The hippies obviously planning on killing and robbing her – but before they can enact her plan, she leads them into the clutches of her ultraviolent sons, Ike (Gary Pollard) and Addley (Michael McCleery), who decapitate the dude, beat down the young lady, then watch as their mother garottes the girl whilst they snigger in the background like Beavis and Butthead.

We jump to 1980. The Rat Pack, a trio of former college dormmates, have retained their friendships even though they all graduated and went their separate ways 10 years ago and have lived very different lives since. Trina (Tiana Pierce) has become a dyed in the wool yuppie, throwing bawdy booze and cocaine-fuelled pool parties, Jackie (Deborah Luce) has become an untidy New York slacker haunting the periphery of the art world, whilst Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson) has made lots of personal sacrifices in order to care for her sick mother.

Each year, the Rat Pack take it in turns to arrange “mystery weekends” for the gang to all enjoy together. Jackie, it turns out, has arranged the reunion this year – a camping trip in the New Jersey Pine Barrens (or the “Deep Barons”, as a local roadsign has it). Unfortunately, that’s where that creepy murder family from the pre-credits sequence live! When the Rat Pack are kidnapped by the family, the women are going to need to pull out all of their ingenuity to survive… but who or what is Queenie, the one individual that Mother seems to he scared of?

Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, Direct Like a Sleazeball

Italian B-movies aren’t exactly averse to sensationalism or extreme content, and in his prime Ruggero Deodato wasn’t averse to cranking both dials up to 11. Most known for infamous video nasties with a shockingly nihilistic ethical worldview such as Cannibal Holocaust and The House On the Edge of the Park, Deodato also turned out this entry in the poliziotteschi subgenre – a particular style of Italian crime film from the 1970s which emphasised extreme violence and a murky worldview in which the line between cop and criminal was thin at best.

Perhaps the closest equivalent in American cinema would be Dirty Harry, since like that movie the poliziotteschi genre often entails applying the amoral worldview and extreme violence of Sergio Leone-esque Spaghetti Westerns to a modern-day cop story. Even by such standards, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man is an ugly and bleak piece. Fred (Marc Porel) and Tony (Ray Lovelock) are police officers in a special undercover squad, which uses highly advanced computer intelligence correlation systems to predict the actions of organised crime and help the cops get to where they need to be before crime happens. They’re also vicious thugs with little compunction about, for instance, straight-up murdering pursued criminals if they reckon they can get away with it, and wildly irresponsible to boot. (There’s a great scene at one point where they practice their sharpshooting skills by running around shooting over each others heads at tin cans, in a sort of William Tell-themed obstacle course.)

The major target of their squad is the organised crime gang headed by Roberto “Bibi” Pasquini (Renato Salvatori), and their heavy-handed tactics only get more brutal when Bibi’s goons assassinate one of their colleagues on the squad. Torturing goons, burning the parked cars of rich clients of one of Bibi’s elite casinos (along with two car park attendants/guards), it’s all fair game as far as they our cop “heroes” are concerned. Maybe Fred and Tony do get results – but there’s a mole in the police department who’s willing to leak their identity to Bibi. Once Bibi finds out who they are, can the duo survive his revenge?

Deodato rarely misses an opportunity to get sleazy and exploitative – there’s a bit where the two cops confront Lina Pasquini (Sofia Dionisio), Bibi’s sexy young sister, and she more or less literally drags them into bed with her – and he’s also got a real way with violence, opening the film with a really over-the-top motorcycle chase that might just qualify as the movie’s best action sequence altogether. However, it’s also kind of a chore to sit through – you cut from heartless, self-centred, amoral policemen to heartless, self-centred, amoral gangsters, and sooner or later you find that there’s nobody to really root for in the movie.

This would be fair enough if it were something like The Shield, where underpinning the tough cop talk and ruthless action there’s a more nuanced and serious examination of corruption in police work and violence begetting violence and so on. However, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man doesn’t carry itself like that – instead, it gives every impression of wanting to be a light-hearted Lethal Weapon type affair – if Lethal Weapon had implied at one point that Danny Glover and Mel Gibson raped the big bad’s girlfriend, directly showed them murdering and torturing people, and then showed their boss coming out of nowhere at the very end to kill off the bad guy whilst the aforementioned implied rape is happening offscreen. Like Dirty Harry and its imitators, the polizioschetti films are often accused of being fascistic celebrations of vigilante violence on the part of the police; Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man is one of those movies where such accusations hit the nail on the head.

Also, when Bibi’s boat gets blown up at the very end, it’s very obviously just a tiny model boat floating in a puddle.