1968 Italian/Spanish action movie
Rating: 7/20 (Dylan: 16/20)
Plot: Somebody's kidnapping world-class athletes and using them to make an army of faceless giants, and it's up to former wrestler Superargo and his sidekick Kamir to stop him.
"I can't put my confidence in an agent who calls himself Superargo and wears a mask and a cape and that red outfit."
Fans of El Santo and Blue Demon movies might enjoy being slightly disappointed in this, the second of the Superargo movies. Superargo, as he explains, wears that red outfit and mask and cape because it's what he wore as a wrestler and had some good luck with it. I'm not sure why he, like El Santo, feels the need to wear it all the time, but I'm not going to question the guy. I'm also not sure why a wrestling outfit needs to be bulletproof, but that did set up one of my favorite moments in this movie where the bad guys are shooting at Superargo and a bunch of people as their elevator opens, and our hero--despite it being revealed earlier that his costume was bulletproof--jumps out of the way, allowing the people behind him to be shot.
Superargo. like Santo, is skilled in hand-to-hand combat. His best move is one where he gets a running start and then hops and launches himself at two or three faceless giants. At one point, he does leap from the ground to a window about five stories up. The leap is accompanied by a slide whistle, much to my delight. There were no superpowers shown before that although he does have the power to read minds apparently, a skill learned from his turban-donning sidekick Kamir. Later, we see Superargo display this neat little trick where he's chasing somebody in the woods, grabs a tree branch, hoists himself into the tree, and then somehow manages to jump down in front of the person he had been chasing. He also has a car that, with the push of a button, can have all these blades and shit poking out of it, setting up a ridiculous poorly-edited action sequence where he drives around and knocks down a bunch of the faceless giants, some who are very nearly within reach of the things protruding from the vehicle.
Those faceless giants aren't really faceless, by the way. They all kind of look like Miles Teller to me. They aren't a very menacing lot even though they're armed with flails. They're definitely not giants. And I was really confused about how these things were controlled. The bad guy would just sit in a car and fiddle with a couple of knobs. Later, he's in his cavernous evil lair fiddling with some knobs, and at one point he turns things all the way up to 70. I was on the edge of my seat at that point, but it turns out that 70 was the exact same as 60 or 50.
Superargo is played by Giovanni Gianfriglia (aka Ken Wood), and sidekick Kamir is played by Aldo Sambrell, a guy who was in several notable spaghetti westerns and who doesn't look happy to be in this movie at all. Gianfriglia (Wood) is as bland as Adam West's Batman though not nearly as charming. He looks good in the suit and has a fine mandible which I suppose is all that really matters.
The good guys win in the end, of course, but the villain's demise is worth sticking around for. That is, if you've ever wanted to see a pile of leaves kill a person.
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