The Executioner on AllMovie

This exploitation film oddity, inspired by the success of The Godfather, attempts to create a personalized variant on the mob movie genre. The story, concocted by star/director/producer Duke Mitchell, focuses on the life of Mimi Miceli (Mitchell), the son of a vanquished mafia chieftain who returns to America with the dream of reviving his father's past criminal glory. Teaming up with old friend Jolly Rizzo (Vic Caesar), he kidnaps Los Angeles mob chieftain Chucky Tripoli (Louis Zito) and ransoms him to get back into the California mob. The scheme results in Miceli winning his own piece of the Los Angeles territory, but the tensions he creates in the crime family soon result in an bloody war between Miceli and the rest of the mob. Miceli eventually returns to Sicily to reunite with his father, only to discover that the destiny he discovered in America has followed him home. The premise of The Executioner is the stuff of a promising action-drama, but it becomes something surreal thanks to Mitchell's impassioned yet deranged filmmaking, which transforms the finished product into something that feels like a three-way collaboration between Samuel Fuller, John Cassavetes, and Ed Wood Jr. The end result is strange, to say the least. As a result, The Executioner never found favor with a major audience, but has become an underground cult favorite amongst patrons of bizarre filmmaking.