02/11/10 - Quelli che contano (Cry of a Prostitute)

Quelli che contano (Cry of a Prostitute) (1974, 97 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0154468/

I head to the cinema to see a movie again and I'm not expecting a whole lot. It's the typical "weird" movie but for some reason I had faith in Black Caesar as a good movie before I went (it turned out better than the average "weird" movie with a 5/10) but this one didn't look promising at all.

The film stars a bunch of people in a mafia / western movie. The main star is Henry Silva as Tony Aniante but there's so much double-dealing with various crime families and so many minor characters I quickly lost track of pretty much everyone's name except Tony. He switches allegiances between the families as a semi-war breaks out and everything ends up concluding with him becoming a crime boss of his own.

One of the real reasons I didn't mention any other names up there is because everything is so forgettable. Everyone's acting is absolutely terrible. Silva is sadly no exception to this as he moves with the swiftness of molasses going uphill. Whenever anything happens he slowly takes everything into account. Then, at other times, he flies around punching people and knocking them out with absolute quickness. It just doesn't work for me.

One thing a lot of these movies have going is they don't come off as trying to be serious. The perfect example of this is Shoot 'Em Up which is hilarious and doesn't pretend to be serious in the slightest. Sadly, Cry of a Prostitute sometimes seems to think it's going to be an actual hit. Silva's acting just doesn't work for this atmosphere. If he had done everything ridiculously slow and the movie laughed at itself than it would all work a lot better. But as it stands, it's a stupid mishmash of styles that comes off as shoddy.

Another terrible aspect of the film is all the secondary characters. There's about twenty of them and they each have names and with how much Tony goes back and forth between the families you almost have to keep up with these names. Again - this just doesn't work. It's too many names for too many characters that really don't matter in the long run. But the movie really wants to make it seem like they do.

A lot of the scenes are also just absurdly awkward. The rape scenes come off as weird and serve no purpose. They don't add anything in terms of story or really even make you care differently about one of the characters. Similarly, there's some other scenes where Tony is running around talking to people that end up not amounting to anything.

Overall, I gave this film a 2/10. It's terrible on so many levels: the acting is bad, the plot is stupid, and the characters are completely forgettable. The only redeeming quality is that it really is - at occasional intervals - pretty fun to watch. But these moments are few and far between.