The calm in Beast with a Gun lasts about 30 seconds. Then Nanni Vitali (Helmut Berger), the "mad dog murderer" busts out of jail with his gang and all hell breaks loose.
Inspector Santini (Richard Harrison) is soon in pursuit but Nanni and co. evade him.
While Santini 'phones his father, the judge who sentenced Vitali to 23 years, and works out his MO, Vitali moves in on Barbaresci, the informer whose evidence was instrumental in securing his conviction.
Vitali rapes Barbaresci's girlfriend, Giuliana (Marisa Mell), and after savagely beating Barbaresci, has him buried alive and doused in quicklime.
Santini goes to see Giuliana, unaware of Barbareschi's fate or that Vitali is in the next room. Sensing that something is up, he has his men tail her. But when Vitali announced his plan to rob the factory where Giuliana's father works, she comes into the police station and tells Santini everything.
The robbery is foiled, but Nanni again evades capture. After attempting to assassinate Giuliana for 'betraying' him, he kidnaps Santini's father and sister…
This unpretentious Polizia from veteran exploitation director Sergio Grieco goes by a number of titles – Ferocious , The Mad Dog Killer and Wild Beasts with Machine Guns . All successfully convey its remit: to cram as much violent action into 90 minutes as humanly possible.
Rape, mental and physical torture, beatings, shoot outs, car chases – Beast with a Gun has them all. The one thing it doesn't have is a political edge. Some polizia, like those of Umberto Lenzi, were right-wing. Others, like those of Sergio Sollima, were left-wing. Still others, like director Stelvio Massi's collaborations with star Maurizio Merli, presented a confusing and contradictory mix of ideologies – more often than not down to differences in opinion among the participants. Here, Vitali is simply bad, a "mad dog". Like Cody Jarrett in White Heat , he simply is , his badness neither the result of the permissive society and a breakdown in authority, as the right would have it, nor of social inequalities, as the left would have it.
The performances from the leads – German, American and Austrian respectively – are good, within the confines of the genre. Berger makes a chilling psychopath. Maybe not quite in the class of David Hess, the überpsycho of Last House on the Left , Autostop Rosso Sangue and House on the Edge of the Park infamy, but still memorable. Harrison is suitably upright and uptight as Santini, even if the character's essential righteousness prevents him from having as much expressive scope as Berger, while Mell does well with what is largely a decorative role.
Director Grieco keeps things moving along nicely, while the scoring – a simple motif, repeated almost ad nauseum in a variety of different orchestrations – augments the on-screen action ideally.
Anchor Bay are to be thanked for rescuing this obscure little nasty from oblivion. Unfortunately this DVD is not one of their better releases. While presented in its full widescreen glory, the print is on the grainy side. The only extra is the original trailer for the film, which somehow manages to mention Helmut Berger's name every 30 seconds, in case we'd forgotten it…
Regardless, Beast with a Gun is an entertaining, unpretentious, vicious little film that's worth a look for the more adventurous bored with Hollywood product.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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