Speed Cross (1980)

A Disappointing Continuation

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

You gotta hand it to the Italians. They can find a genre in anything & make movies about them. In the early 1960's they made movies about Gladiators. Then they made Spaghetti Westerns. Then Spy Movies, Gothic Horrors, War Flicks, Giallo Slashers, Crime Trash Epics, Racing Movies, Rampaging Shark thrillers, STAR WARS ripoffs, and then modern horror. What's really neat about the Italians is that scripts & performances really didn't matter, often being reused from movie to movie, just like their stock pool of B movie actors.So what distinguishes individual examples of Italian cult cinema are the people involved: This one happens to be about racing motorcycles and stars Fabio Testi as an undercover cop who infiltrates the closed world of professional motocross racing to solve an old case and settle a personal score, or something to that extent. The movie mixes stock footage of motorcycle races with scenes of off-tack intrigue that when edited together & given a musical score function as a feature length narrative.This film has a lot of almost Gladitorial bike riding with competing riders trying to force each other off the road combined with a political corruption subplot, and may have been inspired by ROLLERBALL with James Caan. Such concerns are irrelevant -- The movie has a familiarity to it that is decidedly Italian in it's proprietary nature. You don't have to see a lot of motocross racing movies to enjoy the show, and as offbeat, obscure macho man entertainments go this one is pretty good, even if it is all pretty silly after all is said & done."Relaxingly stupid", with a fine disco era soundtrack, excellent color photography, a good buddy role for Fabio's sidekick, and another gem of an appearance by my hero, the late Romano Puppo, playing a bare-fisted motocross thug named "Kurt Schmidbauer" who works for Mr. Big. His job? Beating people up: Can you say "Posthumous Lifetime Achievement Oscar?" I tell you, give me two hours of this any day and you can keep your Tom Cruise, pointless remakes, juvenile superhero thrillers and movies about whacko candy magnates who creepily resemble Michael Jackson. Hollywood may be out of it's slump but their product is still in decline, and the honesty of these dumb little Italian films is refreshingly invigorating. 6/10.