04/08/10 - Poliziotto superpiù (Super Fuzz)

Poliziotto superpiù (Super Fuzz) (1980, 97 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082924/

Another Wednesday means another bad movie. The offering this week is the cheesy cop movie called Super Fuzz. From the description I had low expectations. Plus, at 97 minutes I wasn't planning on a good film.

The movie stars Terence Hill as Policeman Dave Speed, a policeman who accidentally gets caught in a nuclear blast and then inherits superpowers - except when he sees the color red (because the explosion itself was red). Playing his cop sidekick is Ernest Borgnine as Sgt. Willy Dunlop.

The good part about the film is that it never tries to take itself seriously. In a flick of this sort I think that's really important. I mean, the guy can't use his superpowers when he sees red because that was the color of the explosion. The movie presents this "fact" and then we accept it because that's the way this film runs. I'm looking for good cheesy entertainment and Super Fuzz delivers dynamically.

However, the terrible part about the movie is the about thirty minute lull in the middle where absolutely nothing happens. There's no corny superpower display, no quirky jokes, no action, just a bunch of nothing essentially. It's really bad and it seems to go on to no end. As you can probably guess, it really hurts the end product.

However, when I look back on Super Fuzz, I'll mainly remember it for the ending. The film pulls no stops as it goes over the edge of craziness. The superhero cop survives an electrocution, revives his dead cop partner from the dead, travels around the city on a giant bubble gum bubble, leaves his now alive partner on the bubble as he fights crime, saves everything, looks up to see his partner falling from the bubble, dashes to save him, catches him and in the process falls through the center of the Earth to China. Yes, all the way to China. It's hilarious how over-the-top the movie goes in the last portion. It works though because as I said above: it never tries to take itself seriously.

Overall, I gave this film a 4/10. Super Fuzz is fun, there's no doubt about that. But it sure has pacing problems. It seems like the writers thought up the beginning and the end and had nothing to fill thirty minutes so they threw in random "plot" there that ended up being boring. In a similar complaint, the bad guys weren't really thought out that well. I mean, Super Fuzz is a fun movie when it's just the main cop Dave Speed doing super tricks, but when it's not that (which is the majority of the time), the movie is pretty bad.