Super Fuzz aka Super Snooper 1980

Jumping back from covering the most recent superhero film Supergirl, I was browsing through my Prime watchlist and decided that I’d jump back to one of the obscure superhero movies that I’ve had on my list since pretty near the beginning of this site. Even after all this time, the only thing I really knew about this movie was that it was about a cop who got super powers, and I think I remember knowing about his weakness being the color red. I didn’t remember that it was basically a spaghetti superhero movie coming from a spaghetti western director and a mostly Italian cast outside of Ernest Borgnine. While watching it, I could tell that it appeared to be dubbed, and most of the actors had strong accents. But as a comedy, practically none of the jokes landed for me, and as a superhero movie, absolutely nothing made enough sense to be coherent. Outside of a couple of so bad it’s ridiculous moments that made me laugh in the third act, I watched this movie pretty bored out of my mind while I rolled my eyes at the inconsistencies or the nonsensical logic. I’m glad that I finally crossed this movie off my list, but I doubt that I’ll ever be going back to this film again.

While most articles and listings of this movie refer to it as Super Fuzz, it’s currently listed on Amazon Prime as Super Snooper which is also the name of the song that plays incessantly across the entire film as the opening theme song, and basically the main character’s theme song. His name is Dave Speed and he’s a rookie cop who gets super powers on his first solo mission, but the film actually starts out in medias res where there have been 3 unsuccessful execution attempts as he had been found guilty of killing his partner, but he survived the gas chamber, hanging, and a firing squad. Which was such an odd coincidence watching this movie after recently reading about the woman who was given a lethal injection twice and survived. We’re introduced to an actress who claims to be his friend and asks for them to give him roses so he will think of her. Then we flash back to his origin story where he was sent out to collect payment on a parking citation to an indigenous tribesman out in the middle of a swamp where he had to leave his motorcycle and travel by canoe. Meanwhile, there’s this top secret test of a red plutonium rocket that’s supposed to be able to survey below the moon’s surface. And the first section of complete incredulity arrives as the Chief is berating Sergeant Borgnine for sending the rookie into this dangerous situation while the Sergeant argues that he couldn’t have known about it because it was top secret. And yet, the entire tribe had been warned and evacuated before the test so none of it makes sense. And to top it all off, after Speed attaches the ticket to the totem pole inside the teepee, there’s a gator in his canoe. But instead of shooting the gator, he fires a warning shot into the air which hits the rocket and it explodes.

Now he eventually arrives and there’s a relatively slow reveal of all of his super powers, but basically he’s able to do practically anything. Among the powers that he uses throughout the course of the film are: he catches bullets with his gun and his teeth, he survives a 20 story fall, he can see through buildings and trucks, he can predict the near future, he can run faster than a car, he can float, he can walk on water, he has telekinesis, he can heal rapidly, he can make everyone in a crowded stadium disappear, he can hypnotize someone to do what he wants, he can communicate with fish, and he can blow a bubble gum bubble that’s the size of a weather balloon and can support 2 people on top of it. It’s such a ridiculous and hodgepodge collection of super powers that don’t make any sense, and he loses his abilities when he sees the color red. According to another character who just randomly happens to be around during his successful and unsuccessful fall from a building and there is an implication that he had the same powers at some point which he used for a magic and dog ventriloquism act, it’s just a simple thing that causes him to lose concentration. Which does help explain why he can’t see through a bunch of fish stuffed with counterfeit ones because the truck is fully draped in red, but he can read a Superman comic while floating despite seeing his red cape.

The actual story outside of the super powers also makes little sense. Because Sergeant Dunlop sent Speed on that failed mission, he gets demoted and they become partners, but Dunlop is just constantly annoyed by Speed’s various use of his super powers. There’s a mob boss with his 3 Stooges-esque henchmen and his aging movie star love interest which Dunlop is also obsessed with. They have been blanketing the city with counterfeit one dollar bills, thousands upon thousands of them, seemingly ingenious as no one would bother to think twice about checking a single for being counterfeit. And they are smuggling them inside of fish that they bring in from their fishing boat. Speed finds out this information through a convoluted plan of pretending to be a crooked cop by taking a bribe from the owner of a pool hall laundering fake money in order to get a meeting with the mob boss where he uses his telepathic hypnosis abilities to get the boss to spill his entire plan to him. But while he gets the boss to spill the details, there’s never a reveal of a recording of this conversation which would have made the most sense, but instead they get the location and name of the fishing boat they use. And Dunlop is the one who investigates the boat which appears to be deserted, but when he finds all the counterfeiting evidence, he gets locked in the walk-in fish freezer and the goons sink the boat while Speed returns to the mainland to get backup. Upon arrival, the movie star frames him for his partner’s death and there’s a quick confirmation that there’s not a boat anywhere in the water where Speed came from. And on the fourth execution attempt, Speed escapes and finds Dunlop frozen in the cooler but still alive somehow despite the incredulity of him surviving the duration of what should have been a lengthy legal process to get to this point. But it all works out in the end despite another final ridiculous gag of Dunlop jumping off the bubble gum balloon and crashing into Speed which creates a crater that ultimately takes them to the other side of the world coming through in China.

There’s just so much packed into this movie, and yet it feels like it’s constantly spinning its wheels and going nowhere. There’s also the subplot that Speed’s love interest is Dunlop’s niece, but she doesn’t care for Speed’s powers and wants to break up. But Speed uses his powers to freeze her in her tracks and says that she’ll marry him no matter what. It’s presented as persistence, but it feels very misogynistic with a modern eye, though the final gag plays out that she does finally marry him and when he pulls back the wedding veil, she reveals that she has dyed her hair red so theoretically he would never be able to use his powers when he’s around her. The other problem with most of the gags are that they’re presented very few and far between, or they stretch the limits of believability. As an officer, Speed is frequently messing with the 3 henchmen, including one scene where he asks them to step out of their car for a sobriety test which turns into essentially a game of Simon Says where he gets them to flap their arms like they’re flying and then do a literal Three Stooges routine where they are slapping each other. It really isn’t worth putting the time into checking this movie out, which is disappointing to be honest. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.