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The EuroCrime genre pretty much starts where the spaghetti westerns left off. The reason for this is that as popular culture started to get bored of the western, the writers and directors of these films simply looked at what was going on around them for new material. Italy was a very violent place in the 1970's. The mafia, smugglers and a terrorist group known as "Brigade Rosso" ran Rome, while the corrupt and underpowered police were helpless and usually looked the other way. This is when the Italian film industry began to capitalize on this turmoil and began churning out these very violent, politically charged police films that shared a lot of the same characteristics. Often featured was the lone cop who works by his own set of rules and was not afraid to take the law into their own fists to bust a few heads in the name of justice. These new films were still essentially westerns with the traditional tight close-ups, surreal flashbacks and stylized shoot outs, but now they featured charged up car chases instead of on horseback and automatic gunfire instead of six shooters. As the masters of the genre (Enzo G. Castellari, Sergio Martino, Stelvio Massi, etc.) helped make these films popular, several well known cult directors took a stab at making some too: Lucio Fulci, Ruggero Deodato, Umberto Lenzi, the list goes on. These directors also made sure to include their own signature touches as well, making them sick and sleazy, with heavy does of sex and violence. Like spaghetti westerns before them, the EuroCrime genre soon gave way to the new cinema trends of the time like the cannibal, zombie, and post apocalypse films of the 80's. May of the directors never really would leave the action genre totally though and continued making action/sci-fi, action/horror, and action/war films well into the early 90's. Here we present the whole spectrum of rare EuroCrime and Action movies where the directors made films that didn't worry about being politically correct and the characters that populated them weren't afraid to kick some major ass. |
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