the suspicious death of a minor

For those who enjoy the work of Dario Argento but sometimes long for a little more logic, clarity and (let's be kind) narrative cohesion, Sergio Martino might just be the director for you. With sixty-six films to his credit, Martino has made a prolific career of emulating other's artistry, whipping out knock-offs of everything from Jaws (1979's The Great Alligator) to The Road Warrior (1983's After the Fall of New York) to Dirty Harry (1973's The Violent Professionals). But his early work in the Italian giallo is probably his most memorable, using Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage as a template for a series of violent, sexy thrillers that delivered the exploitation goods with no artistic aspirations to weigh them down.

Yet, Martino's rough and ready style has its own appeal and offers up as much (or more) "accidental" artistry as any other genre filmmaker working at the time. Case in point, The Suspicious Death of a Minor (1975), a giallo / poliziotteschi hybrid involving a ring of underage hookers pimped out to upper crust clientele. The case is vigorously pursued by Paolo Germi (Claudio Cassinelli), part of an elite kidnapping task force, who winds up becoming a one man army, involved in no fewer than three car chases, five foot chases, one shoot-out at amusement park, another in a crowded movie theater and, finally, tracking down the bad guy on a speeding underground train.

The film winds up being as convoluted as anything in Argento's oeuvre; that's part of the appeal of the giallo, after all. But Martino has a much more straightforward, action-oriented approach, his characters more relatable and realistic. And The Suspicious Death of a Minor is an outlier besides, combining the vicious murder-mystery format with an equally recognizable crime story and some atonal comedy bits straight out of the Italian slapstick catalog. Martino's movie winds up fitting in no category and all of them at the same time.

It's a cocktail that doesn't always go down smooth. The script, by the equally prolific Ernesto Gastaldi, doesn't even bother to introduce its protagonist as a cop until nearly 30-minutes in. So Cassinelli, who died tragically on the set of another Martino production in 1985, is introduced instead as a sleazy potential "john" with inexplicable curious tendencies. But Martino eventually clears things up, staging the ensuing action scenes with a manic energy that invigorates the rest of the film. For fans of Italian genre cinema, it’s a wild, unpredictable ride. And for an industry built around one predictable knock-off after another, that's quite a compliment.

Arrow Video's new 2K restoration presented on a Blu-ray / DVD combo looks simply superb with a commentary track from author Troy Howarth (whose giallo reference book is an essential home video companion) and a lengthy 45-minute interview with Martino himself who digs pretty deep into the production process and his career path. For those in the know, this one gets a serious thumbs up.