Film Review - Italian Spiderman

The first devastating salvo of Dario Russo and David Ashby into an unsuspecting world came in the guise of Alrugo Entertainment and the staggeringly brilliant Italian Spiderman, with Tait Wilson, Will Spartalis and Boris Repasky. It started as a student film of a trailer for an apparent lost film but secured funding from the South Australian Film Corporation provided backing for ten webisodes, all around four minutes long - and spwaned a famous reaction GIF. These are stitched together to form a film of some 37 minutes, at which point "Alrugo" split up, Russo and Ashby instead going on to form Dinosaur and make the sublime Danger 5. So technically Italian Spiderman was unfinished, ending on a cliffhanger, but it doesn't matter - the thing could have gone on forever and never actually finished, which is part of the brilliance.

It's the sort of thing that could never have happened pre-internet, but in a good way. The YouTube phenomenon of terrible official or unofficial superhero films made by people who've seemingly never seen the source material is a clear inspiration for what was originally posted as a lost Italian film from the sixties. The other major influence was Toei's infamous Spider-Man series, where the company paid a lot of money from Marvel for the Japanese rights to the webslinger only to put him in a random super-robot show where he might as well have been anyone. 

The titular hero of Italian Spiderman - always, without fail, referred to by his full title regardless of context - is an overweight, womanising, moustachioed, long-haired guy (Ashby, dubbed by Russo for maximum bad lip-synch and presumably padded compared to the buff form of Jackson in Danger 5) in a domino mask and badly stitched sweater. He chain-smokes, punches women with minimal provocation (usually after claiming they should be respected), uses guns with abandon and tends to develop new abilities whenever the plot (and I use the term loosely) demands it. His ally of sorts is scientist Professor Bernardi (Carmine Russo, Hitler in D5), who calls up this maniac whenever his projects need it, though he mainly dabbles with the lab-coated models floating around - in this case entrusting him with a strange asteroid that's fallen from space. Up against them are a mass of random villains, led by Captain Maximum - a guy in a suit and a luchero mask. 

The whole thing is pitch perfect, in what pay or may not be actual Italian, sporadically subtitled. The film is treated to look like crap film transferred to long-play VHS (someone amusingly put up a colour-corrected version on YouTube); fight scenes swing from campy slow tussles to absurd ultra-violence; sexism is rife; bluescreen is abysmal; ill-fitting stock footage is dragged in to double for hazards and there are numerous product placements, ranging from stuff being uncomfortably close to the camera to Italian Spiderman sitting down for a smoke with a voiceover proclaiming Il Gallo to be the preferred cigarette of Italian Spiderman. There's even a surf-off between hero and villain. 

And it is hilarious, constantly hilarious. Because the problem with sitting down and watching actual bad films is they're usually bad and for every hilarious special effect failure or idiotic line there's five minutes of boring rubbish. Not in Italian Spiderman, though, which is endlessly funny and inventive, if totally batshit.