Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, they say, and Diamond Connection’s prologue tells us why: “We lust for them to the point of madness for their power to solve all of life’s problems.” I’ll take your word for it, Diamond Connection.
In this confounding Italian adventure from In the Folds of the Flesh director Sergio Bergonzelli, a French airliner goes down in a storm, killing all passengers except an attorney with a briefcase of diamonds intended to swap for automatic weapons. While he’s suffering from amnesia and his head wrapped in bandages from emergency plastic surgery (“I hope you like your new face, Mr. Ferguson!”), various people thirst to get their grubby mitts on those presumably sunken gems.
There’s Ferguson’s daughter (Oya Demir), race car driver Alan Roberts (Lorenzo Bonaccorsi), hospital physician Karen (Barbara Bouchet, The Black Belly of the Tarantula), someone named Mark from Amsterdam and Sammy, a professor who’s “a great deep-sea diver and a smart fellow all around.” There are others whose names I didn’t catch and you won’t, either.
In fact, I have more questions: Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? Who’s chasing whom? Where do their allegiances lay? Why is a little boy wearing a penile novelty nose and what purpose does he serve? I still don’t know. Keeping it all straight is, as Alan says, “just like looking at a needle in a mud stack.” (Another: What’s a mud stack?)
But I do know William Berger (Sabata) is in it, as are a goofy fight at a discotheque (partly involving a broom), a literal upskirt shot, karate chops traded aboard a docked boat, fisticuffs on moving trucks, stock footage of sharks, a shitload of helicopters, double-crosses, a parade, a car chase, a speedboat chase and a desert trek with camels. It’s as if Bergonzelli sought to adapt the poster without connecting any dots. Arrivederci, logic. —Rod Lott