Cop Dave Speed (Terence Hill) has gotten into a sticky situation: he is on Death Row for murder and wondering how he will get out of his upcoming execution. Mind you, he has managed to evade being killed on three separate occasions over the past few days and as he is led to the electric chair he thinks back on the events which brought him to this point. It all started when he was in the swamps and trying to serve a traffic ticket on an Indian, unaware that there was a NASA experiment being conducted in the air which knocks him to the ground and gives him superpowers...
For a surprising amount of people Supersnooper, or Super Fuzz as it was also known, is their favourite Terence Hill movie even above his light hearted spaghetti westerns. It's a cheerfully unpretentious science fiction fantasy that could have sprung not so much out of the pages of a comic book, but more out of the screen of Saturday morning television with its daft action sequences and broad humour. Although Italian it was shot in Miami with largely English dialogue and a number of American actors in supporting roles.
One of those actors was star Ernest Borgnine in the Bud Spencer role, playing the demoted sergeant Willy Dunlop reduced to driving around in a patrol car with Officer Speed and acting as the straight man to all this wackiness. In typically endearing form for his comedies, Borgnine gets to speak his lines at the top of his voice and act incredulous at the fantastical sights he is witnessing, although for much of the movie he refuses to believe that Speed has any superpowers at all.
Assisting Dunlop in this opinion is the fact that, like Superman, Speed has a kryptonite-style weakness and it's the colour red due to the scarlet hue of those cosmic rays which gave him his new abilities. So with amusing regularity whenever he is trying to prove himself something red will hove into view and he ends up in a slapstick situation: for example, he leaps from his boss's window to demonstrate his invincibility not realising that there is a bright crimson post box below and he breaks every bone in his body, landing him in hospital covered in plaster, just like in a kids' comic (Speed could easily have been a character in The Beano).
Lucky he has healing powers as well, eh? But what's a superhero if he doesn't have villains to fight? Speed does not get an equivalent superbaddie to combat, so instead is pitted against a gang of counterfeiters led by hoodlum Marc Lawrence. In an odd twist, he is assisted by Dunlop's favourite movie star, Rosie LaBouche (Joanne Dru in her final role), who is more of a threat than his bumbling underlings and keeps sending Speed red items while he is incarcerated so he cannot survive, although she is continually foiled. If you were being unkind you could call Supersnooper relentlessly stupid, yet it actually comes across as puppy dog likeable, not wishing for anything other than to entertain with its daft jokes and unambitious special effects. It certainly sees Hill at his most amiable; and Borgnine too, for that matter. Music by Michelangelo La Bionda (dig that crazy theme song).
Great fun this. Isn't it weird how the director of the most violent spaghetti westerns spent the last twenty years of his career cranking out slapstick comedies? Often with a fantasy element, check out his I Am A Paranormal Phenomenon (1985) starring the Italian Peter Sellers, Alberto Sordi.
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