Italian movie star Franco Nero has appeared in almost 200 films. I haven’t seen them all, but I’ve seen enough that I’m confident half could be included in the Shitty Movie Sundays Watchability Index. That’s not a knock on Nero. He wants to work a lot, and he has the opportunity to do so. Good for him. But, such profligacy does have costs. Sometimes, he takes a role in a total dog like Top Line.
Released in 1988, Top Line is an Italian production directed by Nello Rossati, from a screenplay by Rossati and Roberto Gianviti. The movie follows Nero as Ted Angelo, an alcoholic novelist who has just been dropped by his publisher while he’s in Colombia researching ancient civilizations and the age of European explorers.
Angelo acquires a stash of artifacts that is significant enough to rewrite the history of the conquistadores. At the urging of friend and art historian Alonso Quintero (William Berger), Angelo decides to sell the artifacts on the black market to a former Nazi death camp commander played by George Kennedy(!). Yes, that George Kennedy, running away with the 1988 Oscar for Slumming It. If one is wondering how George sounds trying to put on a German accent, don’t bother. He’s dubbed. The casting and the dubbing is a double dose of pure shitty, and does more than anything else to establish this flick’s b-bona fides.
Soon after, Quintero turns up dead, and Angelo is implicated. Meanwhile, he’s off on a trip into the mountains with the local who found the artifacts, hoping for some more loot. Here is where the film takes a turn. They are not looking for an overland expedition that got lost and perished in the mountains. They are looking for an actual Spanish galleon, 
moored in a cave Goonies-style, up a mountain. And that’s not all. Not only do they find the galleon, again, up a mountain, but the cave and mountaintop is actually a crashed alien spaceship, and now Angelo is sitting on the greatest discovery in the history of humankind.
As happens in these kinds of movies, sinister forces in the government are already aware of the spaceship, and want it kept secret. Deadly assassins appear, and Nero, along with Quintero’s assistant, June (Deborah Moore), must evade them long enough to get the news of the discovery to the people. Not only do the people of Earth deserve to know we are not alone, once the knowledge is public, Angelo and June should be safe from assassination.
That’s not a bad set of ideas for a movie. As always, execution is the tough part. A thing common with good movies is narrative consistency. By extension, that includes genre consistency. If a viewer is settled in to see a western, they might react poorly to the film becoming a romcom halfway through. Top Line suffers from a similar problem. There is no indication until Angelo is in an alien spaceship that this is a science fiction story. It was shaping up to be a latter example of poliziotteschi, and Nero fit into that. His character is little different than any number of gritty characters he’s played in the past, right down to the substance abuse and the willingness to slap around bit players.
It’s not necessary to spoil what’s coming early in the film, but sudden left turns into different genres have to be handled delicately. Rossati and company do not do so, and, in fact, the sci-fi stuff disappears again as soon as Angelo leaves the cave, the movie going back to being a thriller. It isn’t until near the end that the film jumps right back into sci-fi. Even with the sci-fi elements, this movie is never stylistically sci-fi. It merely flirts with the genre, which is curious considering how central to the plot aliens turn out to be.
This is a bad movie, though, so holding it to high standards is futile. Production values look quite strained, with the bulk looking as if it went to the mockup of the galleon. That’s the sole bright light when it comes to sets, and even that looks like something the kiddies would be climbing on at SeaWorld.
Nero may have been playing a familiar trope, but that doesn’t mean he did it well. His lines fall out of his mouth just short of being flubbed, and his professional demeanor cracks at times. He doesn’t seem all that enthused to be there. And yet, he’s still the best performer in the movie, with everyone else, except for the jarring George Kennedy, being anonymous.
Top Line is one of those shitty movies that is a relic. It’s objectively bad, not all that watchable, and soon to be lost to time. The gulf separating the film’s ideas and its execution is as wide as one will see, and Rossati struggled with pace.
That said, there is a wild and hilarious vehicle chase in the middle of the movie, featuring a pair of drunken chicken farmers who lack all sense of self-preservation. It needs to be seen to be believed, especially since it ends in a fiery tumble for the bad guy. During the chase the baddie was driving a late 1970s Dodge truck, but when Rossati filmed him going over a cliff, the model changed to a 1940s Ford. That was the cherry on top of a truly absurd sequence.
Other highlights include a foot chase with a low rent terminator, and a final special effects reveal that must have represented the very last of the movie’s cash reserves.
The experience of Top Line is very up and down. Had the outrageous moments in the movie been more consistent and constant, it would have shot up the Index. But, there’s just too much drag elsewhere. For the curious, there are numerous prints out there in the tubes, but those are all digital transfers from very worn VHS tapes. Should one be willing to pony up some cash, Cauldron Films released a 2K restoration on Blu-ray. Top Line moves into the #333 spot in the Index, displacing The Blackout.