Carambola (Ferdinando Baldi, 1974)

[Mickey13]

Copied from the Spagvemberfest 2022 thread:

@Mickey13

I do not know what I was expecting prior to watching this, I merely viewed this just to strike it out of my watchlist and forget about the whole thing, the sooner the better. The film’s biggest issue consists in that the work is simply nowhere nearly as funny as intended and there is just not enough chemistry between Paul L. Smith and Antonio Cantafora to make this work anyhow. You can tell certain scenes are intended for laughs and the gags are supposed to provoke wild laughter, to no avail though. Oddly enough, the movie pales in comparison even with mid-tier spaghetti comedies in that it fails miserably at being funny.

Generally speaking, the stolid execution and the bovine narrative thwart much of those aspirations and render the effort completely fruitless, not to mention the jokes are not that good to begin with. I do not understand how Smith’s crushing glasses filled with milk is supposed to be funny, but it happens to be one of the primary attractions of this humorless Trinity rip-off. With its repetitious musical score, the film seems occupied with plumbing the depths of lazy emulation, copycatting as much as conceivably possible without a shred of originality to animate the sorry endeavor. It is over before it even begins, the fact that it goes on for as long as it does is offensive in and of itself. Ridiculously fucking boring.