This is highlighted when an external mob from Marseilles decide to muscle in on the Di Angelo brothers territory in order to smuggle heroin. The screenplay written by the quartet of Gianni Di Chiara, Lucio Fulci, Giorgio Mariuzzo and Ettore Sanzó is transparent in its leftist sympathies, but the result of this is a far fetched and naïve presentation of the career criminals who inhabit Naples. This is a mob with socialist principles who smuggle goods for an economically depressed populace who rely on the cheap contraband. He is part of a smuggling operation led by his ebullient brother Micky (Enrico Maisto) and we first see them charging up the coastal waterways of Naples in high powered speedboats. mobsters crime flick and Di Angelo is an unlikely criminal with an ideological heart of gold. We also have the dependable, but on this occasion workmanlike, presence of Fabio Testi playing the lead character Luca Di Angelo. To compensate for this though the photography by Sergio Salvati of the wonderfully evocative Neapolitan locations brings the film to life in a way that most other aspects do not. His rather jaded sub-Goblin disco dirge lacks inspiration and is repeated far too often. Speaking of the soundtrack the music by Fabio Frizzi is noticeably uninspired. The soundtrack is even utilised in a manner very similar to his horror productions, with a whining synthesised sound effect preceding moments of extreme violence. In this respect Contraband does sit alongside Fulci’s contemporaneous movies. If Fulci couldn’t make the best poliziotteschi flick, he could certainly make the goriest. A man who gets the back of his head blown off during a busy race meeting, a backstabbing villain who gets his throat blown apart, and sundry gore drenched exit wounds. These include a particularly grisly blow torch to the face scene which Fulci’s camera predictably glorifies with a fetishistic attention to detail. The film itself is actually a fairly routine and mundane affair briefly punctuated by Fulci’s trademark scenes of absurdly excessive violence. Fortunately this was redressed with the release of Contraband in an uncut form on DVD by American distributor Blue Underground in 2004. Zombi 2 was the most successful film in Fulci’s long and illustrious career, but the film that followed it sank without a trace into a murky distribution limbo. Its position has not been helped by substandard and patchwork distribution. Either way the result of this is that Contraband has steadily built itself a reputation as a cult curiosity in Fulci’s filmography. One can only assume that either the cycle didn’t interest Fulci from a written point of view, or that no suitable project came to his attention. With Fulci’s incredibly competent approach to a myriad of genres it seems almost inconceivable now that he didn’t direct a crime picture at the height of the genre’s popularity in 1970’s Italy. The films status as a departure for Fulci is indicated by the fact that it was made in between Zombi 2 (1979) and City of the Living Dead (1980), and at a time when the poliziotteschi cycle itself was on the decline.

Contraband was Italian writer/director Lucio Fulci’s only entry into the bitter and cynical terrain of the poliziotteschi.

Contraband 1980