The TSL Grindhouse: Casablanca Express (dir by Sergio Martino)

Posted on January 11, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1989, Casablanca Express takes place during World War II.

The three leaders of the Allied nations — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill — are scheduled to meet in Casablanca to plan the Allied strategy for the next phase of the war. Churchill insists that he will take a train from Algiers to Casablanca, despite the danger that might put him in. Even though everyone advises him against it, Churchill is determined. He makes it clear that he will be traveling by train.

When Major Valmore (Jean Sorel), Colonel Bats (Donald Pleasence), and Maj. Gen. Williams (Glenn Ford) learn that the Germans are aware that Churchill will be on the train and that they will be sending their own intelligence agents to try to kidnap or even assassinate him, they assign three intelligence agents to travel with Churchill. The agents are Alan Cooper (Jason Connery), Captain Franchetti (Francesco Quinn), and Lt. Lorna Fisher (Jinny Steffan) and they are under orders to do whatever is necessary to protect Churchill’s life. Unfortunately, Cooper gets so busy chasing after a French double agent that he misses the train’s departure time. When Otto van Tiblis (Manfred Lehmann) makes his move to take over the train, it falls to Franchetti and Lorna to stop him. Despite their best efforts, they fail. Now, it appears that Churchill’s only hope is that Cooper will not only be able to reach the train but also defeat the army of Germans who have taken it over.

Directed by Sergio Martino, Casablanca Express is an Italian film that owes quite a bit to the legacy of writers like Ian Fleming and Jack Higgins. The plot to capture Churchill owes more than a bit to The Eagles Has Landed, right down to one of the film’s final twists and Donald Pleasence making a cameo appearance as an authority figure. Alan Cooper is a combination of James Bond and Indiana Jones. He’s just as comfortable in a suit and tie as he is riding a camel across the desert. Sergio Martino was one of the best directors of Italian genre films. He dabbled in everything, from giallo films to Hercules films to crime films to cannibal films to action films like this one. As a filmmaker, he was efficient and quick to get to the point. The action in Casablanca Express moves quickly. In fact, it moves so quickly that the audience often doesn’t have time to consider all of the plot holes. Martino knows better than to worry about authenticity. That’s not the type of film that Casablanca Express is.

The film stars Jason Connery and Francesco Quinn, the sons of Sean Connery and Anthony Quinn. They are both adequate in their roles, even though neither one of them has quite the screen presence of their famous fathers. Jason Connery is handsome and he looks good in a suit and Francesco Quinn looks good throwing a punch. That’s all that’s really required of them. Personally, my favorite character was Lorna Fisher, who fought the Nazis by distracting them with her legs. That would be my strategy as well so I’m glad to see that it worked here.

Casablanca Express was made at a time when the Italian film industry was going through a down period. Hence, the budget is low and the film can sometimes seem a bit rushed. But, all in all, it’s an entertaining B-action movie.

International Horror: Short Night of Glass Dolls (dir by Aldo Lado)

Posted on October 2, 2021 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Short Night of Glass Dolls, an Italian thriller from 1971, opens with the discovery of a body in Prague. American journalist Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel) is found lying in a plaza, his blank eyes staring up at the sky. When he is examined by a doctor, we can hear a heartbeat pounding faintly on the soundtrack but Gregory is still declared dead. At the hospital, he is taken down to morgue and left on a slab until a coroner can get around to opening him up….

The only problem is that, as the heartbeat indicated, Gregory Moore is not dead! Instead, he’s paralyzed. He can’t move or speak but he is alive and he can think. As he waits to be dissected, Moore tries to figure out how he came to be in the situation. He searches through his mind and we search with him. He remembers his lover, Mira (Barbara Bach), who begged him to help her defect. He remembers how she mysteriously vanished and how he worked with Jessica (Ingrid Thulin) and Jacques (Mario Adorf) to investigate her disappearance. Moore’s mind is full of disturbing and surreal images but, as he remembers, it slowly starts to make sense. And yet, even if Moore does eventually figure out what happened to Mira and how he came to be paralyzed, the coroner is still making his way over to Moore’s body….

Because it’s an Italian thriller from the 70s, Short Night of Glass Dolls is often mistakenly referred to as being a giallo. Actually, it’s not. Though the film does have the type of convoluted plot and the stylish imagery that is typically associated with the giallo genre, the film also lacks a black-gloved killer and really, it can’t be a giallo unless you have the unknown killer wearing black gloves. Instead, Short Night of Glass Dolls is a deliberately paced paranoia thriller, one in which Moore uncovers not just a single crazed killer but instead a shadowy conspiracy. It’s also an effective horror film, one that makes good use of Prague’s gothic atmosphere and which is full of haunting imagery. Whether it’s the leering gargoyles that seem to be present on every building or the mysterious chandelier that continually shows up randomly in Moore’s mind, Short Night of Glass Dolls plays out like a cinematic dream. Moore finds himself trapped, both physically and mentally. His body is trapped in the morgue while his mind is trapped in the past.

Director Aldo Lado was always one of the more political of the Italian thriller directors and, not surprisingly, there’s a heavy political subtext to Short Night of Glass Dolls. It’s probably not a coincidence that the journalist, who starts out as being cocky just to eventually discover that he doesn’t understand the world as much as he thinks he does, is an American. It’s also not a coincidence that the film takes place in Prague, which was, at that time, a Communist-ruled city. Prague is portrayed as being a city that is controlled by secret police and secret societies, where no one is allowed to fly free. In the end, Short Night of Glass Dolls is full of secrets.

Italian Horror Showcase: A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin (dir by Lucio Fulci)

Posted on October 7, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1971 film A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin is a story of greed, love, lust, repressed desires, bloody murder, and two rather hateful hippies. It’s a surreal tale that manages to combine LSD, politics, therapy, and a good old-fashioned whodunit. It’s a film that clearly a product of the late 60s and the early 70s and yet, it’s also a film that is so shamelessly sordid and wonderfully strange that it feels timeless.

And not surprisingly, it was directed by Lucio Fulci.

Over the course of his career, Lucio Fulci was credited with directing 56 films and one television miniseries. Though we tend to primarily think of Fulci as being a horror director, he actually worked in every genre. He directed peplums. He was responsible for some of the best and most violent spaghetti westerns ever made. He even directed comedies and an adaptation of Jack London’s White Fang!

Still, it is for his horror films that Fulci is best-remembered and his non-compromising and frequently surreal style was perfect for the genre. Though 1979’s Zombi 2 is frequently cited as Fulci’s first excursion into the horror genre, he had actually dabbled in it before with a set of stylish and violent giallo films that he directed in the early 70s.

For example, A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin deals with a horrific crime and features some of Fulci’s most striking and disturbing images. The film deals with Carol Hammond (Florida Bolkan), who is the daughter of a politician (Leo Genn) and the wife of a wealthy attorney (Jean Sorel). Carol is haunted by bizarre dreams involving her decadent neighbor, Julia Durer (Anita Strindberg). In her latest dream, Carol not only has a sexual encounter with Julia but also stabs her to death immediately afterward! It’s only after Julia’s dead that Carol realizes that she’s being watched by two hippies, who appear to be amused by the whole thing.

After telling her therapist about the dream, Carol learns that Julia Durer has indeed been murdered. In fact, she was stabbed in exactly the same way that Carol saw in her dream! Was it just a dream or did Carol really murder of Julia? Or did someone find out about her dream (which she recorded in her journal) and then murder Julia in order to frame her? But who would want to do that? Could it be maybe her weaselly husband, who is having an affair with his secretary? Or maybe someone looking to embarrass her father?

And what about the two hippies? It turns out that they’re real and they have a story of their own tell….

The mystery at the heart of A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin is a convoluted one and while the film’s plot did hold my interest, this film is less about the story and more about the way that Fulci tells it. Dealing with hippies, visions, LSD, and a potentially unstable protagonist gave Fulci whatever excuse he needed to turn Lizard In A Woman’s Skin into a surrealistic carnival ride of psychedelic images and sexually-charged dream sequences. From Carol’s nightmares to the scene where an intruder chases Carol through a sanitarium, A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin is full of strange images that are designed to keep the viewer just as off-balance as Carol. The film’s most shocking scene — which involves Carol coming across four dogs being used in a medical experiment — actually led to Fulci and special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi being taken to court and forced to prove that the dogs in the scene weren’t real. (Fortunately, Rambaldi brought his dog props to court with him.) It’s a shamelessly sordid film, one from which you will not be able to divert your eyes.

Florinda Bolkan gives a great and sympathetic performance was Carol while Antia Strindberg is properly decadent as Julia. Penny Brown and Mike Kennedy plays perhaps the most hateful and callous hippies of all time and Kennedy especially makes a strong impression. Trust Lucio Fulci to make a film where the hippies are just as frightening as the zombies who populated his later work!

A Lizard in A Woman’s Skin is a classic giallo and one of Fulci’s best.