Enzo G. Castellari
Fuga dal Bronx

LEAVE THE BRONX

SIGN UP FOR A NEW HOUSE

IN ENCHANTING NEW MEXICO

If you search on YouTube, you'll find a video where the great Enzo G. Castellari, pseudonym of Enzo Girolami, explains the method to immediately understand whether a movie is worth watching or not. According to his infallible method, the secret lies entirely in the movie's title. If it makes you exclaim, 'Mecojoni!', then we are talking about a great movie; on the contrary, if the reaction is, 'E sticazzi?', then well, it's better to move on.

Now, apart from the fact that it seems to me an indisputable and scientific method, it must be said that in the case of 'Escape from the Bronx' (1983), Castellari must have been quite confident about the success of his work. Also because the movie constituted a hurriedly shot sequel to '1990 - The Bronx Warriors', which came out just a year earlier and essentially revisited the same post-apocalyptic settings loosely inspired by John Carpenter's 'Escape From New York' and the same content of social criticism and the myth of violence, anarchy, and the ghettoization of the most degraded urban areas of large cities as Walter Hill's 'The Warriors'.

Moreover, mind you, the movie is filmed and set in the USA only for promotional reasons. Clearly, this guaranteed greater audience draw to the theaters (in fact, the movies were reasonably successful). But if we look at the more degraded areas of Italian suburbs, we realize that many of the film's mechanisms, certainly exaggerated in some aspects, constitute something that was precisely affirming itself in Italy during those years, with the creation of urban areas that (through real estate speculation and ill-fated administration operations) were almost deliberately built as ghettos and that today, in some places, are being demolished, just like the institutions want to do in this 1983 film with the Bronx.

An operation of 'disinfestation' led by militiamen (the 'Disinfectors') hired by the multinational Manhattan Corporation indeed has the mission to raze the entire neighborhood to the ground to build a new futuristic urban area destined to be the eighth wonder of the world. But some Bronx inhabitants rebel against the Disinfectors and institutions. It involves a small group of people who, having retired to live underground, once belonged to the area's gangs. When it becomes clear they have no choice but to fight to oppose the destruction of their homes, the young Trash, whom we already met in the first film and played by Marco Di Gregorio aka Mark Gregory, will emerge as a leader, challenging the institutions by kidnapping the head of the powerful corporation.

The film's plot is all there because the rest consists entirely of scenes of clashes between gang members and the militiamen and police forces. In these scenes, shot admirably, Castellari brings into play all his expertise and experience garnered over twenty years of westerns and police movies, and despite the prolonged duration of the clashes (not without bloodshed and acts of brutal violence), he manages never to bore the viewer with excellently filmed sequences supported by an adequate soundtrack (music by Francesco De Masi), and the usual team of character actors, extras, and stuntmen. The cast includes Henry Silva as the villain, the militia leader Wangler, Giancarlo Prete, Antonio Sabàto, Enio Girolami. In a small role, the popular actress Moana Pozzi also performs.

What strikes a discordant note, in a movie that clearly doesn't have great pretensions, is precisely the lead actor (apart from a couple of avoidable and nevertheless unsuccessful ideas, like the dynamite-wielding child). Mark Gregory, who here has also lost the typical musculature of the first film, objectively has zero charisma and zero appeal for a movie where perhaps a protagonist capable of rising to the occasion would have been enough to significantly raise the qualitative level. Which instead remains low. Despite the success of the settings and the excellent action scenes, a partly recycled but still interesting idea, something extra is missing here that ultimately makes the difference between a good movie and one that nevertheless remains deservedly a cult object.