Illustration : Enzo Sciotti

Top Line
 

Nello Rossati | Italy | 1988

Behind this bland and non-descript title hides one of the most preposterous and whacked-out films of the 1980’s. Director Nello Rossati (who’d earlier teamed up with Franco Nero in the previous year’s Django Strikes Again) confidently directs from his own script, creating a multi-flavoured, multi-coloured, delirious cocktail of a movie.

Failed writer, the sweaty and boozed-up Ted Angelo (Franco Nero) is in Columbia trying to write a history of the Conquistadors; whilst there, he’s offered the chance to get his hands on a cache of Spanish treasure found by a local fisherman. Looking for a potential buyer, he turns to his friend Alonso (a ravaged William Berger) who advises that a local antique dealer might be able to help by putting him in touch with art collector and Nazi war criminal, Heinrich Holzmann — ‘The Butcher of Treblinca’ (George Kennedy).

When both Alonso and the antique dealer are found dead – murdered — the un-phased Angelo goes it alone and forces the fisherman to show him where he found the treasure: located in a mountainside cave deep in the jungle. Arriving there, the pair discovers a hidden wall, and breaking it down, are amazed to see not only a deteriorating 15th century Spanish galleon but a huge crippled alien spaceship, hidden inside the vast cavern as well!

At this point, the film takes on a life of its own, and before its 90-minutes are up, it will have squeezed such quixotic delights as a bare-footed chase through a cactus field, CIA and KGB subterfuge, a Terminator style android and mutating aliens, secretly bent on control of the world…incredible! 

 

 

 

The feature was issued twice in early 1989 by the sizeable Trans-Global Pictures UK label under their Trans-Global International brand, appropriately (given the mercurial nature of the plot) with two different titles and two different BBFC ratings.

Initially released with printed-on ‘18’ certificates under the correct title of Top Line, enhanced with artwork painted by prolific Italian maestro Enzo Sciotti — no doubt trying to capitalize on the success of Romancing the Stone with a whiff of Indiana Jones thown in for good measure. Later that year, this time with new artwork by compatriot Renato Casaro, the film was re-packaged, re-catalogued and re-titled as the science-fiction oriented Alien Terminator. Curiously, this release with its double-sided sleeve, was rated ‘15’, the officially sanctioned certificate, as passed uncut by the BBFC.

A note of trivia: the rear sleeve synopsis erroneously credits Franco Nero's character as Ted Archer — the pseudonym used by director Nello Rossetti for Django Strikes Again.

An alternative release can be found here.

 

aka : Alien Terminator

cast : Franco Nero, Deborah Barrymore, George Kennedy, Mary Stavin, William Berger, Shirley Hernandez, Larry Dolgin, Robert Redcross, Rodrigo Obregón, Steven Luotto, Domiziano Arcangeli