Mondo Robbery Part 1

Einstein said 'For every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction' - well in the world of exploitation films that isn't entirely true. For every big budget or successful film there is a reaction but whether that is equal or not is debatable. We're talking about 'rip off' films, those released to cash in on the success of the popular movie. These can be 'unofficial' sequels, titles designed to confuse viewers with the original movie or just blatant 'we have no copyright here' clones. The ironic things is that some of these productions are occasionally better than the original or at least just as enjoyable in a sideshow kind of way. For these reasons they've attracted legions of followers and collectors (here a 'legion' is defined as some where between 10 and a few dozen).

So let's have a look at the most notorious (and some of my favourite) of this unethical genre...

 Part 1: The Italian Connection

The revolution of Home Video opened up a huge new market for film distributors. The novelty of watching films in the comfort of your home was the latest craze and VCR owners were renting everything they could get their hands on. It's hard to believe a time when films like  'Driller Killer' and 'I Spit on your Grave' were popular on rental charts. This demand led to a flood of the market by what some would consider an inferior product. Many films were being made to jump on the bandwagon of more popular American titles, or lower (worse?) still, movies were being retitled to so they might be mistaken for the US version. This was taken to the extreme when films were renamed as sequels. No country at the time did this better than Italy.

My first encounter with this happened back in the very early 80's when I was already smitten with the zombie bug. After devouring Romero's 2nd zombie film, ‘Dawn of the Dead’, I was eager to watch more of the same. That's when I discovered my first Italian horror, ‘Zombie Flesheaters’. I admit, it was lower budget and the direction and acting weren't exactly inspired, not to mention the shitty?? dubious?? dubbing but unlike most people who rented it I actually liked it. It has atmosphere and amazing makeup (which actually surpassed the film it emulated). I did a little research on it and discovered the film was actually released in Italy as 'Zombi II', a sequel to Dawn of Dead which was titled 'Zombi' there. The director, Lucio Fulci, churned out several more titles before Romero could add another film to his series. By 1981, he had made 3 more walking dead films: 'City of the Living Dead' , 'The Beyond' and 'The House by the Cemetery'. Sometime later he even attempted a sequel to his sequel, 'Zombi III' but illness prevented him finishing it and it was passed to another director.

Fulci wasn't the only one jumping on the Zombie Train - We had another 'Dawn' clone with ‘Hell of the Living Dead’ (by Bruno Mattei, the guy who finished 'Zombi III'), 'Burial Ground' and the excellent 'The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue' (which was a Spanish/Italian co-production).

This form of 'flattery' could be found with other horror titles. After the success of 'The Exorcist' on tape came its Italian cousins 'The Tempter' and 'Beyond the Door'. There was also an unofficial sequel, the somnambulistic, 'Exorcist III: Cries and Shadows'. In the bizarre case of Mario Bava's 'Lisa and the Devil', they actually shot new exorcism scenes and inserted them into the film, retitling it 'The House of Exorcism' for it American release. 'The Omen' too had it imitators with 'Holocaust 2000' while Wes Craven's 'Last House on the Left' spawned titles such as 'Last House on the Beach', 'Last Stop on the Night Train' aka 'New House on the Left' and 'House on the Edge of the Park' (which had the same star as the Craven original).

‘Jaws’ too was hit by a string of low budget horror copycats: 'The Last Shark', 'Devouring Waves', 'The Shark Hunter', 'Shark's Cave', 'Great White' , 'Devil Fish'. Unlike some of the earlier films mentioned these really have little or no redeeming features and very little shark action.

The success of 'Mad Max 2' which single handily invented the 'post-apocalyptic biker' sub-genre gave the Italian directors a new template. There must have been a time when every quarry pit in Italy had a film crew and a couple of bikes in it. My favourite of these are made by Enzo G. Castellari, who incidentally made the original 'The Inglorious Bastards'. The best of the bunch is 'Warrior of the Wasteland' which takes  the homosexual undertones  of 'The Road Warriors' to ridiculous degrees by having the principle bad guys as bunch of futuristic, sodomising Knights Templar. Fred William steals the show as the side-kick who has a knack for making people's heads explode. Castellari followed this up with an unofficial remake of John Carpenter's 'Escape from New York' called 'The Bronx Warriors' which was actually filmed on location in The Bronx where it did actually look like the bomb had dropped. He of course followed it up with a sequel. Fulci too contributed to this genre with a 'Rollerball' inspired film 'Fighting Centurions' as did others with '2020: Texas Gladiators', 'Endgame' and '2019: After the Fall of New York' to name just a few.

In fact, there are very few films that the Italians haven't tried to emulate at one time or another: ‘Rambo’ and ‘First Blood’, ‘Conan the Barbarian’, ‘Dirty Harry’ and ‘The Deer Hunter’ all have their European versions. This phenomena lasted for less than a decade, it was probably a combination of consumers getting wiser and more main stream films reaching the market that killed off the copycats/emulators. For the majority of renters that were fooled in viewing poorly dubbed and sub-standard imitations it's a good thing, but for me - I still pour a little beer on the curb for those times past.