B-Movie Night: Magnum Cop/Emergency Squad 1


The last two films from the Big Guns Collection. I watched these two back to back, so some of the details may have merged together.

In Magnum Cop we’re introduced to a former cop turned private detective who’s skirting the edge of bankruptcy until he receives a large cheque and a request to hunt down the missing daughter of an Austrian banker. Finding the girl is easy enough- she has fallen in with a religious cult and started sending pornographic images to her father just to annoy him- but holding onto her and getting her back to Vienna proves trickier. When gratuitous nudity doesn’t sway him, she fakes a seizure and does a runner when he’s getting medicine- only to be kidnapped in the street wearing nothing more than a bedsheet.

The action moves to Vienna and the plot thickens as the banker calls off the search. Our hero, between seducing his Austrian associate’s secretary, starts investigating a schoolgirl’s death, gets involved with a stripper played by Joan Collins and uncovers a teen sex ring. All of which, eventually, ties in to his original job.

The tone is at odds with the sleazy subject matter, with the Italian hero and his Austrian counterpart both playing the buffoon at odd moments. This detracts from any efforts to build tension and rather undercuts the accelerating body count and the nastiness of the final twist reveal. If you can get past that, this is an interesting little thriller with a bit of nudity and less violence than you’d expect.

Emergency Squad is an altogether more dour film. An Interpol agent whose wife was gunned down by bank robbers finds similarities between a wages snatch and the robbery she was killed in. Out for revenge, he begins a relentless pursuit of the gang responsible for both crimes. This quickly becomes a long chase to the sea and the gang’s boat to freedom.

One by one, the gang are killed- mostly due to in-fighting- until it’s just the leader and the Interpol agent on a dock. The ending is all too obvious- it would have been neat to see the cliche undercut- and you do spend too long wondering why the Interpol man’s even being allowed to lead an investigation he has such personal investment in.


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