In the 60's, The Red Light Bandit (Paulo Villaça) is a famous Brazilian criminal, who uses a red flashlight while breaking into residences in São Paulo, and usually rapes his female victims. The police chases him as a legend, but does not know his true identity.

In the end of the 60's in Brazil, young directors broke with the Brazilian movement "Cinema Novo" (meaning "New Cinema"), and begin a new movement, called "Cinema Marginal" (meaning "Underground Cinema"). "O Bandido da Luz Vermelha" is a milestone of this new current of filmmakers. Rogério Sganzerla presents this movie as if it were a popular police radio chronic of São Paulo and in a very chaotic way, following the worldwide movement of counterculture and the Brazilian Tropicalismo, in the toughest period of the military dictatorship in my country. This movie is the debut of Sonia Braga in the cinema, and her participation is limited to one scene, as a victim of the criminal. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "O Bandido da Luz Vermelha" ("The Red Light Bandit")

Note: On 09 December 2010, I saw this film again on DVD.

What a travesty of film this was! Incredibly awful. What baffles me more was the fact of seeing this garbage on a theater, crowded by the way, and people knowing that it was terrible while watching decided to applaud this mess. Worst: this was on the same week I testified a snob audience stay silent after the ending of the most awaited film of the season, and I know everybody there enjoyed it. So, I don't get my fellow countrymen.

This imitation of film isn't a biography of the notorious Bandido da Luz Vermelha (the Red Light Bandit) that shocked São Paulo in the 1960's with his murders. I don't know if everything presented here was true or it was just a way to take money from viewers back then by fantasizing about the criminal and his acts. His real name is not mentioned and his prison isn't even shown; however, the actor who plays the bandit resembles him a lot. In case you're wondering (because the film doesn't show) the bandit was arrested in 1967, staying in prison for 30 years and after a few months of his release, got into a fight with neighbors and got killed in the 1990's; his murderer wasn't arrested because the justice considered an act of self defense.

Everything about this useless project is bad. Terrible acting, terrible script and direction (if there were one) even worse, and I couldn't believe that my eyes seen the whole thing, didn't walk out of it. It pretends to be like a Godard film, with lots of abrupt cuts and political/social informations given by two annoying voice-overs that echo through the whole thing. It's a cheap production, fine, made in the famous Boca do Lixo whose films were poorly made and with a focus on violence, sex, the underground world and the underground people of São Paulo (if I'm not wrong this is the landmark for these kind of productions, that's why it is so talked about even today), but that's no excuse. Masterpieces can be made with limited resources as long as they have something to show and say, or at least the decency of having a script worth filming.

I won't say this was a complete disaster because it gave me one of the funniest moments I've ever seen in a Brazilian film. It wasn't intentional but it was so strangely made that it was hilarious. Sadly, it appears a few minutes before the end credits, so by then you might have walked out of it. Towards the conclusion, it seems that the cops are pretty close to catch the murderer by making a trap with some electrical cables on the ground, and not only they've got the wrong man but a disastrous chief of police stepped on the trap, shaking and trembling in a strange way then he dies. This scene alone compensated a little for all the time I was hoping that something funny would appear on the screen.

Incromprehensible why such garbage is highly praised by some critics, public here on this site and the crowd that watched this with me (there was some leavings as well), unless those claps were an appreciation to the lowest of the lowest, so it succeed it in being bad. The last ones, indeed, can be the first ones. 1/10

The theme is wonderful, his character would yield a wealth of material for a criminal biography, the form of exposure, narration interspersed with newspaper and radio clippings, and a comical, almost inappropriate dose (considering the macabre tone of violence he used, especially against women women), but the film didn't please me as much as I imagined, let's go for the 2010 sequel...