‘She doesn’t look at you, she looks in you.’
Two young men living by their wits in Athens are hired to protect a telepathic woman. She has witnessed a political assassination, and many people want her dead…
Ridiculous mashup of multiple genres, including science fiction, Eurospy, comedy and horror, seasoned with just a touch of the Giallo. Greek writer-director Nico Mastorakis throws everything but the kitchen sink at stars Maria Aliferi, Peter Winter, Hristos Nomikos and Jessica Dublin.
It’s a red letter day for handsome gigolo Ches Gilford (Nomikos) when best friend Robert Kowalski (Winter) flies into Athens. No sooner have the plane’s wheels touched the ground than Winter is up to his old tricks, locking a random businessman in the airport’s Mens Room, stealing his money and grabbing the poor man’s hired car and chauffeur from outside the terminal building. The happy-go-lucky duo ride into the city, grabbing lunch in a hotel restaurant. Despite having the money to pay for the meal, Winter tries to charge it to one of the rooms. Unfortunately, he chooses the room number of Geraldine Steinwetz (Dublin) and her strange, mind-reading daughter Christine (Aliferi), who are seated at the next table.
Rather than cause a scene, Dublin seems to laugh it off, and the sheepish friends decamp to the house of Nomikos’ middle-aged lover, where they enjoy a threesome with the pretty blonde home help. Unfortunately, their fun is short-lived. First, they receive a surprise phone call from Dublin, who somehow has the number and wants a later rendezvous. If that wasn’t enough, Nomikos’ sugar mommy arrives unexpectedly and throws everyone out into the street. When the chums meet with Dublin later, she tells them that Aliferi is in danger because she witnessed a murder. Worse still, it was a contract killing ordered by a highly organised terrorist group, and Aliferi’s abilities have gifted her the identities of the men responsible. Dublin wants to hire the two friends as bodyguards while the women are in Athens, and the promise of a hefty payday seals the deal.
In many ways, this bizarre concoction of disparate elements resembles the first novel put on film, a piece of work in which the author has flung all his ideas onto the page, desperately hoping that something will resonate with his readers. The similarity of approach here is not surprising when you realise that this was Mastorakis’ feature debut, his previous screen experience being mainly as a producer for Greek television. On the other hand, the writer-director may have identified his target audience as teenage boys and tailored the content accordingly, but it’s more likely that he just threw in everything that he thought was cool. I was only surprised that dinosaurs and robots didn’t turn up in the final act.
On one level, it’s simply the tale of two handsome, horny scam artists bed-hopping around Athens. Wherever they go, they encounter available, half-naked ‘chicks’ who can’t resist their (somewhat dubious) charms. The sex scenes aren’t graphic enough to belong in an adult movie, but they turn up with monotonous regularity and rarely have anything to do with the ongoing plot. That story involves Alfieri’s superhuman mental abilities, which bring science fiction and horror to the table. However, Mastorakis makes no effort to define her powers, or their limitations, which makes her a strange mixture of a harmless sideshow mind-reader and full-on Sissy Spacek Prom Queen. There are also a handful of car chases and shootouts for action freaks, plenty of denim-on-denim fashion disasters, and a soundtrack from Nikos Lavranos that channels the work of Lalo Schriffin through the far more mundane filter of a 1970s TV cop show.
The challenge facing Mastorakis is to bring all these components together and assemble a coherent, entertaining whole, but his work in this endeavour is far from successful. His prior career in television mainly consisted of producing Greek versions of popular international shows such as ‘Candid Camera’ and ‘This Is Your Life’, which was probably not the best training ground for delivering a full-length feature film. A firmer hand on the wheel might have hammered this odd mishmash of ideas into a more regular shape, but, as it is, the results often come across like the first draft of a script shot without revisions. Another strong possibility is that filming began without a finished script, and Mastorakis was still writing during the production.
All these issues can be best demonstrated by considering a sequence midway through the film. Winter and Nomikos are on the run with Aliferi after a botched hit at a restaurant. When the sun comes up the next day, they are in a wigwam on the beach (just go with it), but the bad guys are closing in both on foot and in a helicopter. However, when one of the assassins peels back the tent flap, the audience discovers that our heroic trio are hiding in the dunes nearby. Then Alfieri delivers her best impression of Drew Barrymore in ‘Firestarter’ (1984), and the tent goes up in a ball of flame. There had been no prior hint that she could do something like that. However, it turns out that she can’t crash the helicopter with her thoughts, although she tries, so she’s as sure of her abilities as the audience. Anyway, the trio hits the highway in their car, dodging volleys of machine gun fire.
All this mayhem is a good reason for an impromptu singalong of ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’ as they speed away, but their ride runs out of gas. Winter has to get out and push, but Nomikos and Alfieri race off into the distance, laughing because it was all a hilarious gag. It’s even funnier when you consider they have abandoned him in the middle of nowhere when people are trying to kill them. But no worries! Winter is picked up moments later by a Les Mans racing car (what’s it doing on a public highway?!) driven by a beautiful woman (Maria Elise Eugene). They go back to her place for sex (of course!), but Winter can’t get it on after he realises that Alfieri is watching them telepathically! If all this sounds like the surefire ingredients of a fun spoof, well, yes, they do. However, there are no actual gags here, and the cast doesn’t play it entirely straight either, so the results don’t feel like a comedy at all.
Worse issues of tonal confusion follow. An assassin (Gerard Gonalons) breaks into Dublin and Alfieri’s hotel room while they are sleeping. She wakes up and uses her unspecified powers to prevent him from pulling the trigger. He flees down the hotel passageway with a stone-faced Alfieri behind him. An outstanding edit finds them face to face in the deserted bowling alley in the hotel’s basement. The outcome of the stand-off for Gonalons is not a pleasant one. This entire sequence plays like something from a supernaturally flavoured Giallo. It’s superbly shot and easily the best sequence in the film. It’s also completely out of place with everything else, and it’s not just a momentary aberration.
In the last twenty minutes, Mastorakis turns everything on its head with a pretty outrageous plot twist. It’s not very convincing and liable to give the audience a bad case of tonal whiplash, but to his credit, it is surprising and quite clever. What seemed to be sloppy writing in the first act is now revealed as nothing of the sort. Seemingly random events now make far more sense, and apparent plot holes are pretty neatly closed. Of course, it doesn’t mitigate the general lack of logic already presented, but it does show there was more to the film than just a jumble of unrelated events. Again, however, Mastorakis can’t resist a bit of juvenile last-act wish fulfilment as Winter and Nomikos leap bare-chested onto a motorbike to rush to the rescue and save the day. The fact that the authorities would have had trained agents already on site to resolve the relevant crisis is conveniently ignored. I guess it’s best to leave it to a couple of random screw-ups who keep their brains in their trousers.
There are also quite a few other vaguely bonkers moments to enjoy. Alfieri and Dublin might be the targets of a murderous conspiracy but know there’s nothing silly about doing the town with Winte and Nomikos. Some might say that laying low in their hotel room might be a wiser option, but girls just gotta have fun, right? Smashing plates and Greek dancing in a restaurant in front of the entire clientele isn’t that conspicious, after all. Winter chats up a blonde dancer (Louise Melinda) by impressing her with his love for novelist Benito Mussolini. Later on, back at her apartment, it turns out she’s one of the killers, so he holds a gun on her and gets her to take her clothes off, because nudity. There’s another wonderfully stupid moment where the assassins are briefed by their handler on the unexpected new players in their murderous game. As our two heroes are non-professionals, he explains that they have no information on them, only to give out their biographies in the very next breath. Winter is a Vietnam vet (seriously?!), and Nomikos is a part-time gigolo, part-time racing driver and karate expert. How cool is that?! Oh, and, just for the record, Alfieri’s eyes are green, not blue. This could have been an oversight of some sort, of course, or perhaps it’s just another demonstration of the director’s strange sense of humour? Who’s to know?
On the evidence of this film, it might seem likely that Mastorakis sunk back into the byroads of film obscurity, never to be heard from again, but that’s far from the truth. After all, he was already a big success in several areas of the Greek entertainment industry. As a young journalist, he posed as a musician to gain access to Aristotle Onassis’ yacht when the tycoon was entertaining Jackie and Ted Kennedy. He took photographs of them with a camera hidden in his guitar and was arrested by the secret police of the Greek’s ruling military junta. Even so, he still managed to be the first to break the news of Onassis and Jackie’s forthcoming marriage.
He was also very active in music, being a successful disc jockey, record producer and concert promoter. He worked extensively with young composer Vangelis in the 1960s and rubbed shoulders with John Lennon and the Rolling Stones. His work in television became controversial in the 1970s when he was arrested on several occasions by the authorities before he agreed to cooperate with them by filming interviews with students jailed on charges of civil unrest. However, when the junta was overthrown in 1974, his participation in these interviews made him persona non grata in the TV industry, so he turned to filmmaking. His second film, horror shocker ‘Island of Death’ (1976), hit screens first and became one of the most banned films in cinema history. A role as a co-producer on J Lee Thompson’s ‘The Greek Tycoon’ (1978) opened international doors, and he founded his own film company and media empire, Omega Entertainment. He has directed over 20 films in subsequent years, working with famous actors such as David McCallum, Robert Morley, George Kennedy, David Soul, Oliver Reed, Tippi Hedren and Nastassja Kinski.
A dash of style and more coherence could have turned this into a serious cult item. Instead, it’s a hopelessly uneven mess with a handful of memorable moments.