Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts
Your source for exploitation film discussion of B movies.

The Big Racket and the same car explosion in two colours

Some of the most familiar images in genre cinema arrived wearing borrowed clothes. The car explosion that opens Friday the 13th Part 2 looks like a freshly shot American set piece, yet it came from the Italian action thriller The Big Racket. More intriguing, the two films do not present the blast in quite the same colour. The original generally leans orange-red, while the version in Friday the 13th Part 2 appears yellower.

That forgotten Italian action movie supplied the same car explosion in a different colour, turning an ordinary pyrotechnic stunt into a piece of film history that keeps circulating. For Mike and Iris, the hosts of Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts, such details are the ideal meeting point between cinema history, visual effects and the cheerful recklessness of exploitation filmmaking.

A Milan crime caper worth rediscovering

Released in 1972 and directed by Fernando Di Leo, The Big Racket was released in Italy as Milano calibro 9. Richard Harrison plays Rafiki, a calculating bank robber drawn back into a dangerous web involving a scientist named TDI and Commissioner Carter, played by Terry Thomas. The story moves through gun shops, cheap apartments, industrial roads and a criminal underworld where every apparent shortcut carries a threat of violence.

Di Leo gives the action a blunt physicality. Cars are not merely convenient transport; they become targets, traps and weapons. Rifles fire across windscreens, feet stomp on faces and engines growl as punctuation beneath the dialogue. The film belongs to the cycle of Italian exploitation cinema that mixed crime melodrama, blunt comedy, sex appeal and spectacular bloodshed.

Its locations also reflect an era when filmmakers got dramatic mileage from real spaces rather than elaborate studio construction. That practical approach connects with the exploitation-era habit of filming in abandoned asylums, a subject that still resonates in places such as Callan Park in Sydney’s Lilyfield. The old Kirkbride buildings at Callan Park make that history tangible: imposing architecture, empty corridors and the suggestion that something terrible happened just beyond the frame.

The bridge blast and its borrowed afterlife

The explosion associated with The Big Racket takes place on a Milan bridge. A vehicle reaches an exposed section of roadway, the action cuts away, and the car erupts in a huge fireball. The structure behind the stunt is simple and effective. There is no digital debris, glossy compositing or futuristic software. An enormous practical burst supplies the violence, while editing controls how much time the audience gets to stare at it.

Friday the 13th Part 2 borrowed that sequence for the roadside death near the beginning of the film. Its own roadway scene appears self-contained, complete with an ordinary car journey and a sudden blast that makes the film’s supernatural threat immediately tangible. The inserted footage carries traces of its previous life, particularly in its colour and the slightly altered rhythm of the explosion.

Australian viewers may notice the familiar road logic of the sequence. A city bridge can be an anonymous piece of commute, just as it is in the Italian footage. That ordinariness matters. Drive-through bottle shops around Melbourne and Sydney have made the kerbside car a normal part of Australian urban life, so a vehicle stopping beside traffic suddenly becoming a fireball feels both absurdly mundane and deeply threatening.

Why one explosion wears two colours

Film prints are not guaranteed to match. Depending on the laboratory timing stock, masks, grading choices and later transfers, the same flames can shift towards red, orange or yellow without the underlying explosion changing. The best comparisons of The Big Racket and Friday the 13th Part 2 therefore show more than a recycled stunt. They reveal how colour can manufacture a different cinematic object from the same piece of celluloid.

The Italian blast commonly appears more orange-red, while the American film’s copy has often been described as yellower. The difference is easy to miss during a first viewing. It becomes obvious when the sequences are played side by side, with the sound removed and the colour adjusted as closely as possible. What looked like fresh action in Friday the 13th Part 2 is revealed as one physical event travelling through several stages of copying, printing and reproduction.

That circulation was part of the commercial ecosystem surrounding exploitation cinema. Low budgets encouraged the reuse of dramatic material, while international distribution made it easier for striking images to travel without their original context. The result could be inventive or careless, depending on the film receiving the footage. Here it gives The Big Racket an afterlife that its modest reputation at home never quite matched.

A practical viewing checklist for the mayhem

A good viewing session should treat the film as more than an excuse to wait for explosions. Its characters, locations and editing offer a compact lesson in how Italian genre filmmaking turns speed into identity.

These viewing points also place The Big Racket beside Australian genre landmarks such as The Cars That Ate Paris, Dead End Drive-In and Patrick. Those films emerged from different budgets and periods, but they share a talent for treating familiar Australian settings as unstable environments. European city streets may look different from suburban Melbourne or a country road outside Brisbane, yet the underlying appeal is the same: ordinary space becomes hostile without warning.

Where the movie meets the podcast archive

Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts examines one film per episode, with Mike and Iris moving briskly between plots, performances, directorial choices and the strange history surrounding genre productions. Their commentary is irreverent without ignoring craft. That makes the show especially suited to films such as The Big Racket, where an unpretentious stunt carries a surprisingly long shadow across later cinema.

The show’s episode archive contains a nearly two-hundred-entry record of discussions spanning Euro Horror, Bruceploitation, sexploitation, zombie films and obscure martial-arts cinema. It offers a practical route into the kind of connections raised by the bridge explosion: Italian street action beside American slasher cinema, practical effects beside recycled footage and polished genre releases beside their shakier exploitation relatives.

The Australian podcast market is similarly well suited to this form of discovery. Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube are common gateways, while direct downloads help listeners with patchy mobile coverage on regional roads. During an arvo, commuters can sample an episode before the traffic clears; over a bluey, a longer conversation about a plot hole can follow. The informal exchange around these films often matters as much as the formal broadcast.

Bring the forgotten film back into view

Give The Big Racket a proper screening through a legitimate rental, purchase or library collection, then view Friday the 13th Part 2 with the bridge sequence in mind. Keep the phone nearby for a frame-by-frame comparison. Visit the Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts episode archive, choose a related Italian action or exploitation film, and subscribe through the listening platform already used on the daily commute.

The pleasure lies in catching the trail before it disappears beneath polished effects and familiar franchise history. Press play, place the versions beside each other, and watch one filmed explosion become two differently coloured memories.