Blazing Magnum (1976)

"Cracking EuroCrime Picture With Spectacular Car Chases"

Who knew the Canadian police enjoyed such exciting over the top car chases? Well now you can see for yourself as Alberto De Martino's BLAZING MAGNUM aka UNA MAGNUM SPECIAL PER TONY SAITTA aka STRANGE SHADOWS IN AN EMPTY ROOM aka TOUGH TONY SAITTA gets a Blu-ray release from Studio Canal.

While in the middle of an over the top car chase tough Ottawa cop Tony Saitta (Stuart Whitman) is contacted by his sister Louise (Carole Laure) with something important she needs to tell him. Unfortunately Tony is too busy mercilessly gunning down bad guys to take her call and pretty soon she's dead by poisoning. 

Ignoring all the rules of actual policing (but abiding by all the rules of crazy Italian cop movies) Tony investigates Louise's murder himself with the aid of sidekick  John Saxon. Was she murdered by the doctor (Martin Landau) she was having an affair with? Or is something altogether more complicated going on? As another body turns up it becomes less clear but Tony's determined to get to the bottom of it even if he has to beat up every transvestite and visit every well-stocked and spacious sex shop in town.

BLAZING MAGNUM is an amazing, extreme, and above all supremely entertaining example of the Italian cop movie (it was a co-production between Italy and Canada). Whitman's Tony Saitta is the most two-fisted example of a policeman imaginable, never bothering to check he's got the right guy when he can just beat the hell out of them / drown them in a sink / shove them through a plate glass window. The movie opens with a really good car chase but that's nothing compared to the one we get in the middle of the picture, all organised by the master of such things, Remy Julienne (THE ITALIAN JOB et al).

As well as all the action, De Martino stages at least one fantastically suspenseful sequence involving Tisa ZOMBIE FLESHEATERS Farrow as a blind girl who doesn't realise the floor to ceiling windows on the second floor of her apartment block have been removed, and the whole film moves at such a breathless and perfectly executed pace it's a real surprise that this one isn't better known.

Studio Canal's Blu-ray comes with a 22 minute piece on the movie by Kim Newman who extols its virtues and I agree with every complement he gives this one. There are also extracts from an audio interview with the director from 2012 conducted by Eugenio Ercolani which covers the movie and some of De Martino's career. Top stuff.

Alberto De Martino's BLAZING MAGNUM (aka all those other titles up there) is out on Blu-ray from Studio Canal on Monday 11th September 2023