The Naples Connection

A back street sleaze job: someone is putting the frighteners on the Rocco clan by wasting their menfolk. The victims are found with their balls pricked by the needle of a syringe. Meanwhile an epicene bum-boy prances around in his redundant church dance studio with nothing on save a jockstrap. A bathetic script provides some unsavoury delicacies - 'let's take a walk in the drains'; 'the awesome vagina'; 'let's make hate' - and Harvey Keitel's gangster comes to a spectacular end. But at the conclusion, Wertmüller's ingenuous fem-moral cop-out fails to redeem this violent slapdash. As in all soft porn, the prurience is ultimately prudish, but even so this dip into depravity, with its druggery and buggery, its flirtations with lesbianism and transvestism, has something for everyone. Only dog-lovers will be disappointed.