‘The Executioner’ aka ‘Massacre Mafia Style’ (1974) – Duke Mitchell.
In the funky anals of far-out filmdom very few Grindhouse features are able to arouse the kind of unruly clamour among celluloid cultists like Duke Mitchell’s terminally deranged ‘The Executioner’, witnessing the exhilarating explosion of uncompromisingly violent, unexpurgated bullet-shredding carnage during the credits doing little to prepare the agape, blood-spattered viewer for the ceaselessly gratuitous salvo of malevolent, mob-handed mega-deaths to follow!
Leaving behind
a suspiciously Californian-looking Sicily, Mimi Miceli Jr. the bellicose,
pistol-happy son of ‘Capo dei tutti’ Don Mimi (Lorenzo Dodo) aims to build a
criminal empire in L.A. to rival that of New York and when he hooks up with epically-named
childhood compadre ‘Jolly Rizzo’ (Vic Caesar) they join their not
inconsiderable forces and bloodily hatch an altogether nefarious plan to destabilize
local mobster’s Chucky Tripoli’s (Lou Zito) ‘legitimate’ business and via brute
force rather than guile in order to re-establish their own far from ‘legitimate’
retrograde mafia in the city of angels, and the diabolical, death-dealing duo
of Mimi & Rizzo very soon confront a worthy adversary in ‘Super Spook’
(Jimmy Williams), a towering pimp who refuses to acquiesce to their rather inflexible
demands, and the tumultuous bloodshed subsequently unleashed as their monstrous
lust for power inevitably places them dead bang in the retaliatory crossfire of
a singularly sanguineous showdown that raises ‘‘Massacre Mafia Style’ vertiginously
aloft upon the corpse-strewn celluloid pantheon of all-time hardcore B-Movie
bad assery!
At any given moment during the hysterical swathe of hypertrophic gun violence it frequently felt as though one were witnessing an especially gruesome missive from some benign grindhouse god, ‘‘Massacre Mafia Style’ is far more than just a trashy gangster flick, it is a mayhemic mantra to outrageous Mafioso-style murder madness and lurid visionary Duke Mitchell’s cinematic legacy is assured by having unleashed one of the more sensationally seismic 70s grindhouse extravaganzas ever conceived for serially sin-seeking, sewer-dwelling cinephiles. Ending on a somewhat metaphysical note, after recently experiencing the aforementioned film I was left with the profoundly unsettling sensation that the indomitable vanguard spirit of Duke Mitchell had been reincarnated in the eerily sound-alike figure of fellow Thespian Mickey Rourke!
‘Duke
Mitchell’s grisly gangster gang-banger ‘The Executioner’ hits you like a
double-barrelled shotgun blast to the head!’
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