Tough To Kill

Starring:Luc Merenda, Wolfango Soldati, Laurence Stark, Arne Elsholtz, Lorenza Rodriguez, Donald O'Brien, Bill Vanders, Percy Hogan, Alessandro Haber, Piero Vida
Director: Joe D'Amato
Studio: Stallion Releasing
Product Type: DVD

Average customer rating:

Very cool action adventure movie.
Tough to Kill (1979)

Tough To Kill
Starring: Luc Merenda , Wolfango Soldati , Bill Vanders , Percy Hogan , and Laurence Stark
Director: Joe D'Amato
Manufacturer: Stallion Releasing
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B0007YMWEG
Release Date: 2005-05-17

Customer Reviews:

Very cool action adventure movie. .......2005-07-03

Tough to Kill is a surprisingly cleverly-written and tightly-directed film considering the time and talent involved.The transfer is from a one inch master being the only print left in existence.Even though this is a budget dvd with no bells and whistles it is still well worth the price. Actually D'Amato's simplistic and often trashy approach tend to make the film even more effective.Luc Merenda (Le Mans, Torso) stars as a hard-bitten loner who joins up with an outfit in some war-torn Central African country as a mercenary. He immediately begins training with a mercenary regiment led by Donald O'Brien (Doctor Butcher M.D., Ghosthouse) and, being the smart-mouth that he is, lands in a bit of trouble with the others. After a lot of the usual macho training camp mumbo jumbo, a big mission pops up and Merenda climbs aboard, not because he wants to do the mission, but so he can kidnap a fellow mercenary and collect the $1,000,000 bounty on his head back in Switzerland. However, things go awry when he finds out commander O'Brien and a couple of the other mercenaries including Wolfgango Soldati (Keoma, The Heroin Busters) are up to the same scheme he is. The four precariously team up to kidnap Vida and abandon their mission to collect the reward. However, they are in the middle of enemy territory and are desperately short on food, supplies, and Merenda (the only one who knows where the rendezvous with the money-men will take place) gets badly injured in a firefight. The four men proceed to literally tear each other apart in order to collect a larger share of the money as they slip further away into the jungle and into madness, driven only by greed ...and maybe a little testasterone.Tough to Kill is a pretty tough-guy-oriented movie. Lots of macho banter and posing amidst a pretty entrancing tropical setting. For some reason, just about everyone in the cast has to take their shirt off at one point and sput out at least one cheesy line like, "I didn't have to talk to em, I just shot em." Even old-guy Donald O'Brien takes off his shirt at one point, revealing himself to be surprisingly chiseled. There's a healthy dose of action, surprises, and suspense, but this movie wins out with some excellent characterization. All the mercenaries are very very tough guys, but each one has a pretty unique and interesting personality with their share of quirks. For instance, Soldati's character insists on taking a little white rabbit with him wherever he goes. Stelvio Cipriani's simplistic musical score works very well with the sleaziness of the concept and the brutality of the jungle setting. D'Amato also lends some credible camerawork which nicely fits his tight-knit direction. Even if Tough to Kill is pretty trashy and sleazy, this is a pretty well-made movie.

Tough to Kill (1979).......2005-06-29

OK, this is a true case of getting what you paid for. It's a cheap release (which is good because I'm not sure the movie is worth more than ten bucks) but, be warned: NO extras and this is OBVIOUSLY a transfer from a VHS copy. The image is soft and the colors are either washed out or muddy. Nothing worse than an old VHS tape though. It's also "letterboxed" but I'm not sure I believe it, it looks more like a matte put on after it was transfered to DVD.

The movie itself is just OK, it has a few strong moments, but this sort of thing has been done better (the excellent "Tarzan the Magnificent" from 1960 comes to mind or, strangely, Ridley Scott's "Alien" has a similar character dynamic). To it's credit, though, "Tough to Kill" is kind of early in the mercenary/war cycle that really hit its stride by the mid 80's when Golan Globus' Cannon films was churning out hundreds of Rambo knock-offs!

The plot is pretty standard but the characters are nastier (imagine if every character was Tom Berenger in "Platoon"!). The locations are under-used and the cinematography is just God-awful! Also, even though it's a classic 42nd street device, the use of racism in this film can be hard to take at times.

Still, despite everything I just wrote, I'm glad that these obscure, little Z-grade films get DVD releases. I'm a big fan of the film's lead, Luc Merenda, so I was happy to get this. If you like 70's Italian jungle films with miserable characters inflicting pain on everyone around them than this is for you!

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