David Hemmings plays a hard-assed police captain in charge of a special unit stationed in Rome trying to break the drug circuit between New York and Hong Kong. At a drug bust at the airport he accidentally busts Fabio Testi trying to smuggle tre kilos of pure heroin. Testi is thrown into jail together with a junkie named Gilo. Later we learn that Testi is an undercover cop put in jail in purpose to break out and let Gilo lead him to big boss Wolfgango Soldati.

Castellari is one of the most competent action directors of the kind working in Europe, I think that's fair to say, and true to tradition Heroin Busters has lots of well-staged fight scenes and shoot-outs linked together by another great synthesizer score by Goblin. But although Castellari does his best to speed up the pace at the end, with Testi jumping from cars to motorcycles to aeroplanes to everything that moves, the concluding aeroplane chase is, though well made, incredibly boring. Easily the worst part of the film and definitely subject for the fast-forward button. But where the film lacks in pace or originality, it benefits from the solid performances by the two leads. David Hemmings is a good actor (as in Deep Red and now Gladiator) and he is rather amusing as the dedicated captain who refers to his inferiors as his "zombies". Fabio Testi, on his side, is always good in this type of films. Actually I hadn't realised how much I liked him until I watched him here. He certainly look stupid in the clothes he's wearing (irritating suede boots and silly cap), which I guess is the intention. Considering the success Tomas Milian had around the same time with his similar films about the funny dressed-cop Nico Giraldi, this may be an attempt at reaching the same audience. Thankfully the comedy has been erased and while Milian too often is an overacting nightmare, Testi has an actual stage presence, often resembeling that of Keith Carradine, and obviously has a ball with his part. He may not be particularly inspired in slower parts (like in all those TV soap operas he appears in these days), but he is extraordinary well-cast as the good guy in movies such as this or Tonino Valerii's Streets of Blood or Lucio Fulci's The Naples Connection.

To assist the two leads there's also a good deal of amusing supporting characters, as it should be in any good movie, such as a funny Indian grass guru ("You're all sons of bitches, trust me, I'm also one!") and Romano Puppo (also in the above mentioned Fulci crime film) as another hitman with fancy haircut. But the part of Gilo's girlfriend, played by usually beautiful cult-actress Sherry Buchanan (the one who ended up on Dr. Obrero's operation table in Zombie Holocaust) is notably ungrateful as she mostly walks around half naked, barely conscious, before taking an overdose. Actually, there's plenty of annoying footage of junkies shooting up, presumably due to the French Connection 2 (in which Gene Hackman became a junkie) source for inspiration. And typically for a film trying to satisfy everyone's taste, there's also a totally gratuitous lesbian love scene involving Buchanan and leggy Patrizia Webley (Play Motel). The nudity clause is fulfilled, but Enzo is no director of erotic films. But he knows action better than any of his country fellowmen and Heroin Busters is a somewhat forgotten but no less essential reminder of that. See it soon.

© The Inzomniac's Movie Madness Review.