Almost Human 1974

For some this is one of the summits of Eurocrime and it is a good place to start as any. Like when you want to check out a band, you may aswell buy their greatest hits rather than the last album they released that nobody liked.

So, Almost Human more or less hits all the prerequisites of Italian crime cinema of the 70s. There is sex. violence, fast cars, lots of guns and Tomas Milian. Tomas Milian is an actor who started small in Spaghetti Westerns before hitting it big in Eurocrime flicks, ending up fronting his own series of comedy cop flicks as a daft policeman on a bike. These are as shit as they sound.

Almost Human concerns a hapless low level hood for hire Giulio Sacchi who seeks the big time as quickly as he can get there after one beat down too many by his erstwhile fellow gangsters. Breaking off, he forms his own little gang and catches a glimmer of possible wealth by snatching the daughter of a wealthy billionaire who his girlfriend works for. Along the way, he and his men steal, murder, sexually abuse and butcher a household whilst rocketing on booze and pills. This carnage sets copper Inspector Grandi, played by Henry Silva. Silva is the kind of cop that fuck up Judge Dredd for having mud on his shoes in a police parade.

Silva is usually the gangster and here he seems to relish the hero part, he has an easy going swagger with just a little aura of menace rather than his usual nuclear in ya face fuck you approach. Milian on the other hand is a manic thunderbolt, writhing and twitching with tics and blasts of his machine gun, loving his dirty deeds done dirt cheap.

This is one dirty movie. Literally, the house abuse sequence is genuinely unpleasant, bordering on the grotesque but it works as the movie's director Umberto Lenzi never allows Sacchi to become a hero. From the first scene he is painted as a rat who only goes further down the sewage pipe as the film progresses.

Like a Jim Thompson protagonist his road to hell can only end in one place.

As already mentioned, Umberto Lenzi directed this film, along with at least another nine crime movies. He is definately one of the top men of the game. There were other more cerebal directors but few could manage Lenzi's skill with pace, filth and outrage. To me his output is as close as Eurocrime came to the sleaze and action of a cheap US paperback, the kind with a guy with a gun with a loose woman drapped over his arm but with a fiat in the background and a bottle of J and B in his fist.

Fuck me, Almost Human is a damn fine romp. Available on a now out of print region 1 dvd.

Viva Eurocrime!