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All you need to know about Duke Mitchell's Gone With The Pope is contained in the poster image to the left.
The job: Kidnap the holiest man in the world.
The ransom: A dollar from every Catholic in the world.
Soon to screen as part of Danger After Dark, Gone With The Pope looks to do the whole grindhouse revival thing right. It's cheap, trashy, openly exploitative, and funny in all the right ways without any of the smugly superior, "Aren't I clever?" winking at the audience that kills most of these projects. And you know why? Because, by all appearances, this isn't a deliberate throwback but an actual lost film, Mitchell's only other credit being 1978's The Executioner. Thank Sage Stallone for helping pull this one out of obscurity.
The job: Kidnap the holiest man in the world.
The ransom: A dollar from every Catholic in the world.
Soon to screen as part of Danger After Dark, Gone With The Pope looks to do the whole grindhouse revival thing right. It's cheap, trashy, openly exploitative, and funny in all the right ways without any of the smugly superior, "Aren't I clever?" winking at the audience that kills most of these projects. And you know why? Because, by all appearances, this isn't a deliberate throwback but an actual lost film, Mitchell's only other credit being 1978's The Executioner. Thank Sage Stallone for helping pull this one out of obscurity.
Check the very definitely NSFW trailer below!Duke Mitchell was an Italian Rudy Ray Moore, a popular nightclub performer, singer, actor, and self-proclaimed "Mr. Palm Springs" whose long-running Martin & Lewis-style comedy act with partner Sammy Petrillo was featured in BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA. Mitchell went on to use his talents and show business connections to produce two of the most entertaining films of the Seventies, which he wrote, directed, produced, scored and starred in.
GONE WITH THE POPE stars Duke Mitchell as Paul, a gangster with an unholy scheme: to kidnap the pope and charge "a dollar from every Catholic in the world" as the ransom. Shot in 1975 as KISS THE RING, GONE WITH THE POPE was unfinished at the time of Duke Mitchell's death in 1981.
Sage Stallone and Bob Murawski of Grindhouse Releasing rediscovered GONE WITH THE POPE in 1995 and vowed to save it from obscurity. Academy Award-nominated film editor Murawski (THE HURT LOCKER, SPIDER-MAN 1,2 & 3) spent 15 years completing GONE WITH THE POPE from the surviving film elements.
Finally! I've been waiting years to see this. Hopefully this means that Massacre Mafia Style (Executioner) is on it's way to a long promised DVD.
That's a nice one sheet for the film too.
I saw this a few weeks ago. It's an offensive dirtbag masterpiece. That trailer is a bit deceptive, though.