Crimebusters

Crimebusters (Poliziotti Violenti) (1976)

Runtime: 90 minutes

Directed by: Michele Massimo Tarantini

Starring: Henry Silva, Antonio Sabato, Silvia Dionisio, Ettore Manni, Rosario Borelli

From: Capitol International/Staff

About time I see another poliziotteschi movie: 

This is not to be confused with the film starring Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, but it does star a pretty cool duo. Here, this is a poliziotteschi where the two leads are Henry Silva and Antonio Sabato.

This is typical of the genre as there are plenty of shootouts, vehicle chases, aggro masculine moments, and yeah... gross things happening to women; plus, there is the “bonus” of there being a trans character and of course for a movie like this, a certain slur is used a few times. The plot: Silva is in the Air Force and Sabato is a cop; they have an uneasy partnership as a fancy new machine gun that is supposed to be used only by the military is in the hands of criminals; turns out, there's political corruption involved.

The movie takes awhile to get going; not that it's uninteresting, but there's plenty of talk and setup. Once there are action beats... they are pretty exciting and more so than typical, many pedestrians and innocent bystanders are murdered in a variety of different ways; pretty sadistic. There is a setup or two which ends up being a dead end (you see Sabato racing a car on the track in one scene as it's his way of therapy; later he works on that track car more than once yet that vehicle isn't used in a big chase at the end) but otherwise I can't do too much carping here as it's still an interesting film which has a few sepia tone moments to represent moments from the past... and not only does Silva get involved in a romance, he even gets laid!

The fact that this is well shot and has the expected groovy score from Guido & Maurizio De Angelis means that at least for me, Crimebusters was worthy of a viewing.