Massimo Dallamano followed The Exorcist with his own pasta-possession movie, The Night Child, but before that he made a his own version of Dirty Harry in Super Bitch. While his work is never quite on a par with that of William Friedkin orDon Siegel, it’s not half bad. Slick, stylish, appropriately violent and with a spectacularly contrived plot, Super Bitch may be tongue in cheek but its only slightly less serious than much 70’s crime drama fare. Of course trivial things such as dialogue are unimportant but this is no cheap soft porn flick. What it lacks in substance is more than made up for in style, and if that doesn’t seduce you, the casual violence and nudity just might.
Dirty cop Inspector Cliff is played by Ivan Rassimov, who proves to be a nice substitute for Clint Eastwood. If you can’t get the real thing then why not get the Italian equivalent, much like Django director Sergio Corbucci did with Franco Nero, when making his film consisting of striking similarities to A Fistful of Dollars. Cliff is investigating an escort agency that films its clients and their perversions to blackmail them. One of their chief sirens is Joanne (Stephanie Beachem) with whom Cliff begins a relationship, but in an ever untangling web of deceit and agent provocateurs, it soon becomes difficult to everyone involved to distinguish friend from foe.
Dallamano is a smooth operator, his car chases are thrilling and at times his gunfights echo those seen in Sam Peckinpah’s wondrous Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. The key difference is Dallamano knows when to throw in a bit of humour and pastiche to lighten the load of living up to the benchmarks from which he draws inspiration.
A informal attitude to woman’s rights, expensive but garish furnishings and lots of stylish sex firmly implants Dallamano’s film in the 70’s and to that extent it serves as something of a time warp into the Italy of that time. While few of Dallamano’s films ever make it beyond cult status, among that moniker his are highly regarded and Super Bitch is one of his sharper features, hardly ingenious but exceptionally good fun, almost too entertaining to turn your nose up to.
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Super Bitch is now available on DVD courtesy of Arrow Video