Super Fuzz

Super Fuzz AKA Poliziotto superpiù AKA Super Snooper
October 2, 1981
El Pico S.A./ TVI/ Transcinema
Comedy/Action/Sci-Fi
VHS
B

This is an Italian production made in America, but that doesn't entirely explain why it's so strange.  In some ways, it's a so-bad-it's-goodie, but it also seems hip to itself in a way that, for instance, Can't Stop the Music isn't.  Let me talk about a sequence that's late in the movie because it's extreme but hardly unique in this movie:

• Officer Dave Speed (Terence Hill) is on Death Row for the alleged murderer of his cranky but good-hearted pal and superior, Sarge (Ernest Borgnine).
• Speed has super-powers but his kryptonite is the color red.
• Film star Rosy Labouche, who's also Sarge's crush, sneaks red roses into Speed's presence.
• Speed asks for gum, which he'll have "later," even though he's about to be electrocuted.
• He gets the flowers out of the room.
• He uses his super powers to divert the electrocution to the witnesses.
• He busts out of the room and into the ocean.
• He rescues Sarge from a sunken boat, using the gum, which inflates to look like a small yellow balloon.
• The gum becomes a huge yellow balloon, big enough for both men to ride, many feet off the ground.
• Speed jumps down on to a plane where Labouche and her boyfriend Torpedo are escaping, with Speed's girlfriend/ Sarge's niece Evelyn as a hostage.
• Speed manipulates the plane until the villains have to land.
• Meanwhile Sarge is still on the gum-balloon, so he tells Dave to catch him.
• As Sarge plummets to the earth, Dave runs to get in place, although Rosy's red boa is caught around his foot.
• He loses the boa right before he catches Sarge, but they still sink deep into the earth.
• Their boss starts to deliver a eulogy, only to be interrupted by a phone call, from Dave and Sarge, in China!
• Dave has Evelyn get on the phone so he can propose to her.
• The last scene is of their wedding, where he lifts her veil, only to find she's dyed her hair red!

This is a lot of suspension of disbelief for only a few minutes of viewing.  And I don't think we're meant to take any of it seriously.  There are other absurd touches to the movie, like the recurring rather disco-ish "Super Snooper" theme song, and the visual pun with a John Wayne poster, as well as the way Speed sounds both sincere and wisecracking.  They don't make 'em like this anymore, but then they seldom did.

Julian Voloshin, who's the old man in fishing boat (at age 71), was Prof. Nep in Birds Do It, which also took place in Florida.  And Jack McDermott was a hit man in that movie.  Marc Lawrence, who plays mob boss Torpedo, was Stiltskin in Foul Play and Webster in Goin' Coconuts, so you could say he's typecast.