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

The dog behind a Three Supermen trilogy

Bruno Mattei is the director who cast his own dog in three different roles across one trilogy. The dog was Micio, and the films were the three Supermen adventures: offbeat Italian capers that moved from criminal chaos to the Wild West and then to an Inca-gold quest. Mattei credited his canine companion with a fresh screen identity each time, turning an ordinary production shortcut into part of the joke.

That kind of detail rewards the irreverent, forensic approach of Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts. Mattei’s films are all velocity: chase scenes, crude sets, wild dialogue and gross-out turns. The Micio cameo also asks a serious question. When a director treats his own pet as an actor while rewriting the character for every instalment, is he saving money, building a private joke or revealing how genre films manufacture their own worlds?

A canine credit across three resets

Bruno Mattei was an Italian director who worked across spaghetti westerns, war movies, martial-arts pictures and cheerful exploitation cinema. He often received the nickname Uncle Bob because of his association with American western films, even though his own background and sensibility were thoroughly Italian. His career moved between large outdoor landscapes and situations where dialogue, timing and physical action had to carry almost everything.

Micio was Mattei’s dog. The animal appears in each of the Three Supermen films, but the narrative circumstances are reset. In the first adventure he shares the frame with the trio and their various adversaries. In the western, he becomes part of the frontier environment. The Inca-inspired third film places him around the expedition and its clashes. The canine may bear one name in the credits, yet staging and surroundings give him a different function each time.

That flexibility makes Micio more useful than a conventional mascot. A bark, a suspicious look or an animal crossing the frame can create comedy without competing with the actors. Mattei appears comfortable letting a real dog behave like a dog, then using whatever the performance offers. The joke depends partly on viewers recognising the trick while pretending, for a moment, that it belongs inside the story.

Three films, one elastic playbook

The sequence begins with Three Fantastic Supermen in 1967, followed by Three Supermen in the West and Three Supermen and the Gold of the Incas in 1968. Each film follows the same broad trio of adventurers, although the business changes around them: criminal schemes in the first, frontier conflict in the second and a treasure adventure in the third. The films borrow the collective title of circus strongmen while presenting heroes more likely to improvise, panic or cause another accident.

Their tone resembles a live cartoon. Slapstick violence expands into property damage, dialogue leaps between incompatible idioms, and characters escape situations through coincidences that would be absurd under stricter storytelling rules. Mattei treats genre conventions as materials rather than rules. A showdown, a robbery, a rescue or a search for treasure becomes a starting point for jokes about bodily danger, reputation and the incompetence of organised authority.

The English-language versions add another layer. Export titles can change, dubbing can flatten a performance and regional video editions may contain different material. Under those circumstances, Micio becomes a useful fixed point. The dog is visually and behaviourally real, while the films around him can be dubbed, retitled or reshuffled. It is an ideal detail for listeners who enjoy discovering how one filmmaker’s recurring obsessions survive across a loose trilogy.

Why Micio belongs in the frame

Micio’s appearances illuminate Mattei’s priorities as a director. He was less interested in polished continuity than in immediate action. A performer enters, reacts, falls over or crosses the set, and the edit can turn that action into something larger. A trained dog offers the same useful spontaneity: it completes a movement, produces a reaction and then leaves the performers to solve the resulting problem.

The casting decision also reflects the productive awkwardness of low-budget genre production. Resourceful crews could treat an animal as an extra without requiring a conventional character explanation. Micio could be positioned near the action, made conspicuous by editing or handed a reaction that makes the humans around him look even more confused. The audience may suspect the behind-the-scenes joke, but the film never needs to explain it.

That mixture of calculation and accident runs through Italian exploitation cinema more broadly. The same producer might move quickly from horror to war movies or westerns, carrying actors, props and habits from one production to the next. Mattei’s trilogy makes that process unusually visible. The worlds change, the genre rules change and the star remains a dog who happens to live with the director.

From rough trade to cult afterlife

Mattei’s career extended well beyond the Supermen films. His work includes The Last Hunter, Cannibal Apocalypse and Endgame, films that pushed exploitation in different directions while retaining his preference for physical action and tonal disruption. These productions now occupy an affectionate corner of cult cinema, appreciated for their audacious plots, thriftier effects and refusal to polish every rough edge.

The podcast’s willingness to place such films beside better-known genre work is one of its strengths. Further background on the show’s critical approach appears on Mike’s author page. Mike and Iris listen for the details that make an aggressive film memorable: a doomed stunt, a hilariously unsuitable sound effect, a performance that should not work or a production decision nobody had the nerve to remove.

With nearly 200 episodes covering Euro Horror, Bruceploitation, sexploitation, zombies, martial-arts cinema and other neglected corners, Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts approaches genre history without sanding off its rough texture. Micio fits perfectly within that method. A minor casting detail opens a door to production practices, family filmmaking and the cheerful disorder of movies made to move quickly in search of an audience.

A viewing route for Australian cult listeners

Start with the films in release order, because the escalating settings make Mattei’s looseness easier to appreciate. Keep the English dubbed versions in mind, but leave room for different edits and alternate titles. The trilogy works best when the audience accepts that continuity is a loose agreement rather than a sacred text.

Several practical choices can improve the experience:

For Australian collectors, the search itself can become part of the entertainment. Specialist sellers, online catalogues and surviving international editions often tell their own stories about how a film travelled. A rare Australian VHS may contain a television edit, while a European DVD could preserve a dubbed version no longer widely available. Keeping an eye on format and region makes the hunt less frustrating and can prevent an imported disc from duplicating a release already sitting on a local shelf.

Make Micio your next double feature

Micio’s three appearances reward close watching, but they do not require a lecture on film history to be enjoyed. Notice how often the camera waits for a reaction, how the surrounding performers treat the animal as part of the scene and how Mattei turns a practical choice into recurring comedy. The trilogy’s rough surfaces become more interesting when the creative decisions inside them are visible.

Subscribe to Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts, choose one of Bruno Mattei’s strangest Supermen films and give it a proper home-cinema night. Then invite a fellow genre fan, point out the dog and start comparing notes.