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Category: Tom Felleghy

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Plot: mysterious femme fatale plots to take over the world. Debonair playboy intervenes.

Leave it to the Italians to produce a spoof of a spoof. Argoman, the Fantastic Superman spoofs the Superargo movies with Giovanni Cianfriglia, themselves sendups of the more popular Eurospy exercises of the day. In Italy it was released as Come rubare la corona d'Inghilterra (or How to Steal the Crown of England) and there it was subject of a nifty promotion campaign that passed it off as a traditional Eurospy adventure romp while promotion at a later date focused on the superhero and fantastical aspect. Argoman takes a lot after the peplum Revolt Of the Praetorians (1964) and the spaghetti western The Colt Is My Law (1965), both from master hack Alfonso Brescia, wherein a debonair character doubles as a masked avenger. There was a time and place for Argoman, the Fantastic Superman and that was in the late sixties. It is the sort of production that has to seen to be believed. It’s exactly as crazy as it looks – and it never makes any qualms about what it is. Fun is first and only objective that Argoman, the Fantastic Superman sets for itself and it succeeds with flying colors even when it falters in other aspects. At heart Argoman, the Fantastic Superman is a children’s movie but one clearly meant for more grown-up, adolescent audience. This is pure male wish fulfillment.

Like many of his contemporaries director Sergio Grieco was a journeyman who dabbled in every popular genre under the sun. Be it adventure, swashbuckler and sword and sandal epics to Eurospy and poliziottesco. In the mid-sixties Grieco directed a string of Eurospy romps with Agent 077 Mission Bloody Mary (1965), Agent 077 Operation Istanbul (1965) and Password: Kill Agent Gordon (1966). These led him directly into Argoman, the Fantastic Superman, a semi-comedic curiosity that crossed the Eurospy with the fumetti. In the 1970s Grieco would direct The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine (1974) and write the screenplay for action specialist Enzo G. Castellari’s World War II epic The Inglorious Bastards (1978), famously remade by Quentin Tarantino in 2009 with a slightly altered title. Before there was Supersonic Man (1979), before Infra Man (1975) – there was Argoman, the Fantastic Superman (just Argoman hereafter).

The fumetti were Italian comic books for adult audiences and are generally considered the precursor to today’s graphic novels. In the late sixties and early seventies they served as the basis for a number of masked superhero productions. The fumetti craze led to memorable productions as Kriminal (1966), Barbarella (1968) with Jane Fonda, Diabolik (1968), Satanik (1968) and Sadistik (1968) (originally named Killing in Italy, but popularly known under its French name). Another prime example of the fumetti was the The Three Supermen (1967-1970) franchise. Argoman had the good fortune to capitalize on both the fumetti and the Eurospy craze in the wake of the early Bond movies with Sean Connery becoming a worldwide phenomenon. That it was released the same year as The Million Eyes Of Sumuru (1967) and pushed a similar message of women’s liberation and feminist empowerment is just another happy coincidence. That it is certifiably insane by any metric you choose to employ helps in no small part too.

When the Royal Crown of England is stolen in broad daylight from the Tower of London inspector Lawrence (Nino Dal Fabbro, as Richard Peters) from Scotland Yard is left to investigate a case he can’t possibly crack. He calls upon suave English playboy Sir Reginald Hoover (Roger Browne), a gentleman-criminal of considerable repute who lives in a opulent French villa on a remote island, to help locate a prime suspect in the case. In his palatial abode Hoover senses the presence of Regina Sullivan (Dominique Boschero) and guides her to her coastal bachelor pad through telekinesis. Hoover challenges Sullivan to target shooting contest. If she wins she’ll get a brand new Rolls-Royce and a box of precious stones. If he wins, he’ll get her for the remainder of the day. After consummating his relationship with Sullivan, Hoover confides in his turbaned butler Chandra (Eduardo Fajardo, as Edoardo Fajardo) that he loses his ESP abilities for 6 hours after each sexual encounter. Meanwhile the real thief of the Royal Crown, criminal mastermind Jenabell declares herself ‘the Queen of the World’ (Barbarella wouldn’t claim the title of Queen Of the Galaxy until a year later) and her henchmen led by her trusty enforcer Kurt (Mimmo Palmara, as Dick Palmer) returns the Crown of St. Edward to its rightful owner with the promise of a demonstration of her real power.

Said power comes from a prized diamond ("Muradoff A IV" is its technical designation) and with the diamond, through the sun’s energy, Jenabell and her legion of automatons (a slave race of humanoid robots) is able to dissolve steel and thus the French currency is under threat of devaluation. The second part of her scheme involves robbing the Bank of France with an army of her leatherclad henchmen in tow and littering the streets of Paris with francs and banknotes as a distraction. The crime leaves inspector Martini (Edoardo Toniolo, as Edward Douglas) puzzled. Hoover uses his glamorous girlfriend Samantha (Nadia Marlowa) to distract Jenabell’s forces and changes into Argoman as he takes on her goons. Argoman possesses sonar, telekinetic and magnetic powers of unknown origin that make him practically invincible – and his only known weakness seems to be beautiful women. Argoman allows himself to be abducted to Jenabell’s fabulous art-deco subterranean lair. Jenabell gives him the choice to either be her consort or her slave. After briefly being distracted by Jenabell’s constant costume changes (the attire includes a black widow, a snake bikini, a queen from outer space and a tinfoil fright wig) Argoman decides to save Samantha, who as per third act convention has been kidnapped, from the advances of a behemoth metallic robot and safeguard the world from Jenabell’s dominion of terror. The Queen of the World seeks to replace all men of power with identical clones doing her bidding. Fighting off goons and clones alike Argoman is able to stop Jenabell from escaping by destroying her plane.

To its credit at least Argoman realizes how silly it is. The costume alone makes Juan Piquer Simón’s Supersonic Man (1979) look as a paragon of good taste and restraint in comparison. The Argoman costume consists of a yellow body stocking, black mask with a red psychedelic spiral on it, a red cape with red velvet lining and flashlight visor eyes. In other words, Argoman looks suspiciously like a candy-colored, psychotronic version of Gort from the Robert Wise science-fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). True to his European standards Argoman is the designated nominal hero of the piece but that doesn’t stop him from killing without scruples, compulsively talking his way into bedding whatever woman strikes his fancy and/or stealing riches from whichever evildoers he’s been fighting. Argoman is often on the right side of the law but, true to anti-hero tradition, he isn’t afraid to bend or break the law if it involves personal gratification or - enrichment. Where Argoman’s sonar, telekinetic and magnetic powers come from is never explained nor why he loses said abilities after doing the horizontal mambo with any of the many women. Argoman was prescient where the commedia sexy all’italiana was headed was by having Nadia Marlowa stroll down a street in nothing but lingerie, stockings and boots. Almost ten years later Gloria Guida could be seen cavorting around in nearly identical attire in the so-so The Landlord (1976). The retro-future production design inspired by The Giant Of Metropolis (1961) is just icing on a cake already brimming with wall-to-wall insanity. As a bonus it lifts a pivotal plotpoint wholesale from the brilliant The Million Eyes Of Sumuru (1967).

The star of Argoman is Roger Browne, an American actor that lived in Rome from 1960 to 1980. Browne was a fixture in peplum and later seamlessly transitioned into the Eurospy genre. Like any working actor Browne appeared in many different productions, among them, Vulcan, Son Of Jupiter (1962) (with Bella Cortez), Samoa, Queen of the Jungle (1968) (with the delectable duo of Edwige Fenech and Femi Benussi), Emanuelle in America (1977), and Alfonso Brescia’s The War of the Robots (1978). Dominique Boschero is best described as a lesser Eurocult queen and Nadia Marlowa was a relative nobody. Boschero has credits dating back to 1956 and include such illustrious titles as Secret Agent Fireball (1965), the gialli The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire (1971) from Riccardo Freda and All the Colors of the Dark (1972) (with Edwige Fenech), as well as the Laura Antonelli drama Venial Sin (1974). Mimmo Palmara was a peplum regular that appeared in Hercules (1958), Hercules Unchained (1959), The Trojan Horse (1961) and later in a supporting part in the Gloria Guida comedy That Malicious Age (1975). Eduardo Fajardo was a monument in Spanish cinema even at this point making his appearances in drek as Umberto Lenzi’s pandemic shocker Nightmare City (1980) and in the original Spanish version of Eurociné’s nigh on incoherent shambler Oasis of the Zombies (1982) all the more lamentable.

It seems almost unfathomable that Argoman didn’t in some major way have an impact on director Juan Piquer Simón’s gaudy pastel-colored vistas for Supersonic Man (1979) and the candy-colored excesses that were part and parcel in Luigi Cozzi's amiable StarCrash (1979), Hercules (1983) and The Adventures Of Hercules (1985). It’s the best kind of kitsch. It’s pure camp. Argoman never takes itself seriously (neither should you) and it pushes all the right buttons as a spoof of the Eurospy and superhero genre . Sometimes it’s able to overcome its limitations, budgetary and otherwise, and sometimes not. It goes by the old adage that anything goes as long as there are pretty girls to look at. Dominique Boschero is godly as Jenabell in her crazy costumes and Nadia Marlowa has one scene forever seared onto the retina of cult fans everywhere. Eduardo Fajardo provides the prerequisite comedic note whereas Roger Browne is as wooden as ever. Whatever the case Argoman, the Fantastic Superman is a 60s curiosity that works best as a pastiche of the two genres it pays homage to. It has no reason to work but it somehow does. Argoman is one part Batman (1966-1968) with Adam West and prescient of where Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981) would take science-fiction in the following decade all while pushing camp to whole new levels and remaining strangely enjoyable through out. Too bad it was produced amidst the fumetti craze and remains somewhat of a forgotten gem.

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Plot: businessman gets lost in the Yugoslavian wilds and encounters vampires.

The Night Of the Devils (or La notte dei diavoli back at home in Italy) is a minor entry in the continental European vampire horror canon at the dawn of the wicked and wild seventies. The basis for the screenplay was the 1884/1950 Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy novel The Family of the Vourdalak. Mario Bava had first adapted it in the ‘I Wurdulak’ segment of his Black Sabbath (1963) and now almost ten years later it was time for a more contemporary adaptation. Overall it leans closer to the understated dread of Damiano Damiani's The Witch (1966) than to the psychotronic exuberance and excess of Jean Rollin, Mario Mercier, Luigi Batzella or Renato Polselli. In more recent years Tolstoy’s story was faithfully adapted in the Crimean gothic Vurdalaki (2017).

With credits dating all the way back to 1936 director Giorgio Ferroni was a dyed-in-the-wool craftsman who had a solid, if mostly undistinguished, career in Italian genre cinema. True to form he did everything from spaghetti westerns and poliziotteschi to comedies and documentaries. What he seemed to excel at, however, were peplum and horror on a budget. In that capacity he directed the atmospheric little gothic Mill of the Stone Women (1960) (an underseen and underrated Italian sub-classic) and a slew of entertaining pepla, including but not limited to, The Trojan Horse (1961), Conquest of Mycene (1963) (with Rosalba Neri) and The Lion Of Thebes (1964). His most prestigious and widely seen features were probably his liberal adaptation of Euripides' classic tragedy The Bacchantes (1961) and the World War II epic The Battle of El Alamein (1969). Amidst the vampire horror craze of the early 1970s he contributed the minimalistic, anachronistic and quiet The Night Of the Devils. Produced by Eduardo Manzanos and featuring an ensemble cast of Italian veterans as well as special effects from Carlo Rambaldi The Night Of the Devils would be Ferroni’s last horror outing before his death in 1981. Another minor classic is hardly the worst way to go out.

Yugoslavia, 1972. On his way to a business appointment Italian lumber importer Nicola (Gianni Garko) takes a dusty road through some particularly thick woods wrecking his 1967 Fiat 124 Sport Coupé as he tries to avoid crashing into a mysterious woman. Forced to look for help in these unhospitable environs he happens upon a family of eccentric woodcutters sequestered away in a 19th century tenement somewhere in darker bowels of the deep woods. When he spots the world-weary Ciuvelak clan they are in the process of burying the recently deceased brother of patriarch Gorka (William Vanders, as Bill Vanders). As Nicola asks Gorka whether there’s any possibility of someone driving him to the nearest village for repairs the old man spouts an ominous warning about the woods not being safe whenever night falls. Gorka invites Nicola to stay overnight at the family homestead and continue his journey home the following day. In short order he meets Gorka’s wife Elena (Teresa Gimpera), eldest son Jovan (Roberto Maldera, as Mark Roberts), daughter Sdenka (Agostina Belli) as well as his cousins Irina (Cinzia De Carolis) and Mira (Sabrina Tamborra). The next morning Jovan commences repairs on Nicola’s car as Gorka announces that he’s going to hunt down the “living dead” witch (Maria Monti) that supposedly haunts the woods and has cursed the Ciuvelak clan with an unspecified malady. If he doesn’t return that same evening at 6 o’clock sharp they are to kill him with no questions asked.

That night Gorka does return to the homestead and comes bearing a severed hand as evidence for his slaying of the witch. As the hours pass Sdenka insinuates herself into Nicola’s chambers and Gorka spirits little Irina away into the blackness of night. The strangeness becomes almost too much to bear when Nicola is witness to Irina returning as one of the living dead and Jovan is forced to drive a stake through Gorka’s heart. As one by one members of the Ciuvelak fall victim to the curse of the living dead Nicola soon finds himself in a fight for life and limb as the clan descends upon the homestead. Bloodied and bewildered he manages to escape within an inch of life and somehow he’s able to navigate the woods. Exhausted from his ordeal Nicola passes out near an idyllic stream. He’s brought to the local mental ward where he’s examined by doctor Tosi (Umberto Raho) and before long law enforcement in the form of officer Kovacic (Renato Turi) wants to interrogate the vagrant in expensive attire. The physician informs the inspector that the man spends his nights peering out of the window, “looking into the darkness like a scared, cornered animal.” Shortly thereafter a beautiful woman introduces herself claiming she knows the wealthy foreigner. As the doctor takes the woman to see the man, he flees from his room in abject horror.

Ferroni managed to assemble quite the cast for this atmospheric little horror ditty. First and foremost, there’s peplum and spaghetti western veteran Gianni Garko. Garko was a mainstay in Italian pulp cinema that somehow always remained somewhat of a second-stringer. His credits, among many others, include the giallo The Flower with the Deadly Sting (1973), The Psychic (1977) as well as the German sex comedies Three Swedish Girls in Upper Bavaria (1977) and Summer Night Fever (1978). The lowest he had to go was with Alfonso Brescia’s craptacular space opera Star Odyssey (1979) and bounced back with Luigi Cozzi’s space peplum Hercules (1983). The other monument here is Umberto Raho. Raho was a pillar of peplum, spaghetti western and Eurospy. Raho had acted alongside two of Britains greatest imports. First with Barbara Steele in The Ghost (1963), Castle Of Blood (1964) and The Long Hair of Death (1965) and in between with Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth (1964). Towards the end of the decade he acted alongside unsung Polish import Magda Konopka in the fumetti Satanik (1968). He was in the giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) from Dario Argento as well as Amuck (1972) from Silvio Amadio. Other noteworthy appearances include, among others, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971) (with Erika Blanc) and the slightly deranged The Exorcist (1973) imitation Enter the Devil (1974) (with Lucretia Love and Stella Carnacina) from Mario Gariazzo.

Agostina Belli was one of the classic redhead belles that effortlessly alternated between mainstream fare, comedies and horror. As such she could be seen in the sugary sweet Romina Power-Al Bano musicarello period piece Symphony Of Love (1970), the horror Scream of the Demon Lover (1970), the giallo The Fifth Cord (1971), the Lucio Fulci sex comedy The Senator Likes Women (1972), Scent Of A Woman (1974) (the American remake with Al Pacino, Chris O’Donnell and Gabrielle Anwar from 1992 was as soulless as it was unnecessary – but, god forbid, if the average American has to read subtitles on an import), The Career of a Chambermaid (1976), the amiable The Omen (1976) imitation Holocaust 2000 (1977), the period piece Manaos (1979) as well as the comedies Dear Wife (1982) and Go Ahead You That Makes Me Laugh (1982). Her strangest outing was perhaps the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) imitation The Brother from Space (1988) from the specialist in such things, Mario Gariazzo. The other illuminating presence is Teresa Gimpera, a reliable pillar in continental European pulp, who could be seen in Night of the Scorpion (1972), the gothic horror Crypt Of the Living Dead (1972), the Alfonso Brescia giallo Naked Girl Murdered in the Park (1972), the sex comedy Healthy Married Life (1974) and León Klimovsky's illicit The Last Man on Earth (1964) remake The People Who Own the Dark (1976).

What this most closely resembles are the two Mario Mercier features Erotic Witchcraft (1972) and A Woman Possessed (1975) as well as the American fantastique Blood Sabbath (1972) (with Dyanne Thorne, Susan Damante and amply endowed Swedish softcore porn star and sometime Russ Meyer muse Uschi Digard). Ferroni understands, perhaps better than anyone else, that less is always more. For this atmospheric, gothic-tinged horror he and director of photography Manuel Berenguer make full use of the sylvan location and the arboreal surroundings. It’s not a big leap from here to the naturalistic environs in which Jean Rollin frequently dabbled or something like Seven Women For Satan (1974) from Michel Lemoine. What little money there was, was obviously spent where it mattered. One year later León Klimovsky would use a similar premise for his The Vampires Night Orgy (1973), except there an entire town of vampires descended upon a travelling couple thrown together by circumstance. Amidst the deluge of gothic horror revivals, The Night Of the Devils was a sobering earthy and grounded affair with none of the supernatural overtones that more or less were the standard of the day. Instead it uses a sprawling natural environment to utmost effect and electrifying performances from Garko and Belli heighten the experience.

While arguably 1973 was the banner year for Italian gothic horror, 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of this little talked about slice of Italian gothic pulp. For an Italian production it comes off as either very French or British, depending on your preference. If you’re looking for a low-key production that’s overflowing with atmosphere and not some extravagant special effects spectacle as, say, The Devil’s Wedding Night (1973) (with Rosalba Neri) or The Dracula Saga (1973) (with Helga Liné, Betsabé Ruiz and Cristina Suriani), The Night Of the Devils will be right up your alley. What Night Of the Damned (1971) was to the giallo and what The Witches Mountain (1972) was to the Spanish fantastique and witchcraft horror, this is to the Italian gothic. This is a wonderfully understated feature that banks heavily on its natural surroundings to sell what otherwise is on its face a patently ridiculous premise. Just like Mill of the Stone Women (1960) twelve years earlier The Night Of the Devils is a boundlessly atmospheric and creaky gothic that manages to push all the right buttons and is custodian to exemplary performances from Gianni Garko and Agostina Belli. With the benefit of several decades of hindsight it’s near criminal that Giorgio Ferroni has gone down in history as a reliable but underappreciated second-stringer.