Weapons Of Death

In Mario Caiano's 1977 poliziottesco Weapons Of Death (Napoli Spara!) the new sheriff in town, police Commissario Belli (Leonard Mann), hunts the vicious camorristi Santoro, played with psychopathic stillness by Henry Silva.

The film open with a violent bank robbery that is unconnected to the main plot. The cops turn up and manage to arrest the criminals without much incident, carting them and the ill gotten gains off in an unmarked car. Then Commissario Belli and his squad turn up only to discover that they have, supposedly, already been at the scene. After the crooks and fake cops are caught the main plot starts.

In the outskirts of Naples, with wanton disregard for human life, Santoro pulls off a train heist. Crashing the train and terrorising the fleeing passengers with automatic gun fire, he and his crew proceed to blow the door off the mail-car and shoot dead the stunned security guards. Caiano's expertise at directing action in westerns really comes to the fore. He really can shoot a gunfight, but he can also shoot running crowds. The way that he uses the passengers spilling out of the train, the way they run in curves carving up the image, makes the scene. What looks like chaos is structured, choreographed. The dynamism is layered through the depth of field. He does this on wide open landscape of a deserted rail yard, an urban sierra with leading train lines.

The driving narrative in the film is rather short, but is spaced out with vignettes of crime. Some paint Naples as dangerous, crime ridden; others, featuring the street kid Gennarino's (Massimo Deda) [1] comic delinquency, lighten the tone. A highlight comes when the kid takes a red '74 Lancia Stratos Stradale on a joyride round the city streets. Much of the ensuing car chase is shot from the kid's perspective, unable to see over the steering wheel. What you can't see heightens the drama and the comedy.

Weapons Of Death has had certain criticisms aimed at it. The first is that it is a bit of a mishmash. The short plot is padded with seemingly unrelated elements and the film is tonally inconsistent lurching from brutal violence to comedy with a hefty dose of le môme Réglisse. But the film works. The vignettes all serve a purpose, introducing characters and defining the environment. The comedic ones relieve the tension and are the reason that the film's passing works. Those featuring Gennarino eventually intersect with the main plot and set up the tragic ending.

Secondly, Caiano's direction isn't stylised in the way that the directors of other poliziottesco was. I find that strange looking at the way he uses the colour palette for transitions. The palette is mostly muted yellows, tans and light blues but in almost every shot or sequence of shots there are bright red objects. Some objects appear on both sides of cuts. This is not Kubrick's bone to spaceship match cut from 2001 but it provides a visually logical connection between disperate scenes. He uses both to physically move the viewer's eye and to foreshadow. A car chase: pursued, a moped speeds through crowded market streets. At the edge of the shot is a vegetable stand, at its centre bright red tomatoes. The eye flicks to it and you know where the moped will end up. Caiano, a director of westerns, also brings a mastery of open space and action to the film.

The final one is that Mann didn't fit the expectations that people have for the part of a hard boiled policeman. He is the new guy, he hasn't been in Naples long, he hasn't had the time to become the ground-down cynical cop. That is why the tragic ending works.

The things that are seemingly wrong with Weapons Of Death are actually its strengths. Caiano doesn't quite play by the rules of the genre and makes a highly watchable film.

[1] Johnny in the English dub.

Reviewed on: 19 Jul 2026