Jackie Kong
Pattuglia Di Notte

Rarely do you get the chance to see a movie where everything is wrong: "Night Patrol" indeed has the merit of being so bad that it's brilliant. The plot is a classic: Melvin, a mustached and somewhat unlucky police officer, transforms into a masked cabaret performer by night just as the city is terrorized by a mysterious masked killer who, incidentally, wears the same mask as our Melvin (a paper bag with two holes for the eyes). Adding to the mix is an unrequited love for a colleague, the iconic Linda Blair, aka the most famous possessed girl in cinema history.

So far, so good, it might seem like a typical low-budget Police Academy-style comedy, but instead, "Night Patrol" is much more. It is a nightmare, a collection of surreal scenes, a mishmash of tasteless jokes, a series of scenes assembled by a mind twisted by a perverse brilliance. Allow me to proceed haphazardly: unforgettable is the police chief, a (real) dwarf who continuously emits farts and disgusting belches (yes, disgusting: we're not talking about the classic fart à la Alvaro Vitali, but actual fetid, clothed emissions, the classic rotten ones). Spectacular is the cameo of Master Miagi in the role of a poor pensioner victim of a collective assault by a group of angry feminists. Almost pathetic is the mustached Melvin, always with the wrong expression at the right moment. Linda Blair is absolutely over the top. Unforgettable is the scene with the stinky waiter with his finger in the cup (a classic of comedy) because "I have an infection, I need to keep it warm." "But couldn't you stick it in your ass?" is Melvin's response, to which he replies, "I do that over there, when I’m in the kitchen." In short, a comic apotheosis, which explodes in the finale, where the director references the final duel from "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" with contenders dressed as Mexicans, complete with ponchos and the like. A goosebump-inducing scene.

Needless to say, we are speaking of a practically unobtainable gem (in the mid-'90s, I watched it on TelePadova-Italia7, which aired it practically once a week) unless you find it in some ultra-specialized video library (in crappy films, I might add). I owned a very rare VHS copy and have long contemplated digitizing it, but who knows if I'll ever find the time.

Essential for understanding 90s America (and indeed the film was released in '84).