La polizia chiede aiuto

Second in Dallamano's schoolgirls-getting-killed trilogy, it's not as good as Who's Next? (Solange) but not bad in its own right. The killer is someone who rides a motorino (hey, it is Italy!) and never takes off his/her riding helmet, ala Magnum Force, the 2nd Dirty Harry film. This one's more exciting than scary, as the police hunt down this maniac. He's one of the cooler villains in film history though, because unlike the traditional drag-ass killer, this guy never speaks and just RUNS at you with a machete. He really SPRINTS at top speed, which is actually very scary, especially to a jaded horror buff used to the Michael Myers/Jason/zombie method of ambling on over to their victims, who usually have to trip in order to be caught. And there's one scene involving a light switch that will make you jump out of your undies. Stelvio Cipriani's score is again top-notch (he later reused part of it for Tentacles), the dubbing tolerable.

While the original Italian title – THE POLICE ASKS FOR HELP – clearly pigeonholes this one in the then-popular (and incredibly prolific) poliziottesco genre, the English title under which it is better known around the world – WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? – implies a giallo in the same vein as Dallamano’s best-known film, WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO SOLANGE? (1972). In any case, while both elements are effectively present – a hatchet-wielding murderer is the subject of the climactic manhunt – the police procedural themes are more prevalent.

The film deals with a teenage suicide which eventually uncovers a child prostitution ring which, as usual, includes not just the petty sleazy oddballs (here personified by Franco Fabrizi) but also high-profile professionals (a celebrated doctor) and high-ranking government officials (a Minister). The cast is surprisingly good for this type of genre effort: Claudio Cassinelli (as the investigating Police Chief), Giovanna Ralli (unusually cast as a female D.A.), Mario Adorf as the policeman who finds the first body and also discovers that his own teenage daughter was once a “victim” of these perverts, the afore-mentioned Fabrizi and Hollywood veteran Farley Granger in a smallish role as the first victim’s father.

As usual for Italian genre movies, the music score is an asset and here it is provided by Stelvio Cipriani whose motif, while simple and repetitive, is extremely effective given that it involves children singing gibberish (and thus commenting on the main theme of the movie itself even through its performers). Alarmingly, the end titles claim that every year in Italy, 8000 teenagers run away from home but only a small percentage returns to the fold – the majority are never found!

From the director of the excellent what have you done to Solange, Massimo Dallamano, here is a strange Italian giallo, more a police procedural (an a really lurid tale, a ring of teens used as prostitutes by people in very high places - that was the time, in Italy, when several directors and scripwriters tried their hands on very hot subjects, like this one) than an Argentian thriller (but it is scary enough in a few places and also very gory). It starts with the false suicide of a very young girl, hanged nude under a roof and then proceeds with a lot of cars and bikes chases (the killer is always covered by a motorcycle helmet until the very end - it is possible that the director of Night School took from here the idea of the killer masked with an helmet), almost always running without pauses. Tense and scary enough, good almost till the end (a lot too Dillenger for my tastes).

Although the 'Giallo' genre officially began with Mario Bava's 'Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo' (aka 'Evil Eye', or 'The Girl Who Knew To Much') in 1963, continuing with the same director's 'Sei Donne Per L'Assassino' ('Blood and Black Lace', 1964), it wasn't really until the commercial success of Dario Argento's 1969 debut, 'L'Uccello dalle Piuma di Cristallo' ('The Bird With the Crystal Plumage') that it really got underway to become a staple of Italian cinema in the 1970's. The films essentially were bloody thrillers in which the primary thrill was in watching pretty young girls being stalked and dispatched by anonymous, leather-gloved assassins. Stylistically these films forced the audience to identify with the killer, featuring lengthily protracted and elaborately staged sequences of women in terror strung together by a convoluted whodunnit plot along the lines of those of early twentieth century British crime-writer Edgar Wallace.

In fact, director Massimo Dallamano's previous film, 'Whatever Happened to Solange?' ('Cosa Avete Fatto a Solange?' 1972) was based on an Edgar Wallace novel. The follow-up takes it's cue from the same film by also setting itself within a girl's school, giving us a whole host of young nubiles around which to build the plot. The film opens with a rousing score courtesy of Stelvio Cipriani, a big-band romp through 70's flower-power accompanied by shots of the young girls getting on and off of their boyfriends scooters outside the school gates. This is followed by the discovery by the police of a young girl swinging naked from the rafters of an attic in a nearby deserted house after an anonymous tip off.

As the Italian title 'La Polizia Chiede Aiuto' (The Police Ask For Help) suggests, and what sets this apart from its predecessor and most of the Giallo films of the period, is that a lot of time is devoted to the police's detective work and the milieu of the police themselves as opposed to those of the potential victims, bringing the film more in line with the policier drama than pure 'Giallo'. For the most part the film follows these investigations from suspect to suspect, with each plot point highlighted by a lengthy flashback. A motorcycle chase forms one of the action set-pieces alongside the usual suspense scenes, including a taut sequence in which the female detective (Giovanni Ralli) is stalked by the leather-clad, helmeted killer with a meat cleaver. The gorier pay-offs mainly occur towards the end, once the cleaver has made its initial appearance, but along the way we discover a mutilated body in the back of a car, and the blood spattered bath in which it was dismembered.

If all this sounds rather perfunctory so far, it is the sheer bleakness of the film that distinguishes it. The initial murder is linked to the discovery of a school girl prostitution ring, and this central concept pretty much summarises the whole tone of the film. With a potential political scandal hinted at, and a scene in which the Claudio Casinelli's police investigator lies to the press to buy more time, the general milieu invoked is a corrupt and sordid one, where corruption and vice are masked by the superficially angelic innocence of the girls involved. The deadpan and po-faced narrative includes lengthy scenes of the police listening intently and repeatedly to tapes made of the call-girls' meetings, and graphic post-mortem descriptions of the victims. Salacious tit-bits like these are so deeply engrained within the complex plot that forces one is forced into a particularly bizarre and twisted perspective of the world by the accumulation of such elements.

Director Dallamano was a cinematographer turned director who had worked on a number of spaghetti Westerns in the 60's including Sergio Leone's 'Per un pugno di dollari' ('Fistful of Dollars', 1964). Prior to this he had made a number of films including adaptations of Oscar Wilde's 'Dorian Gray' (1970) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 'Venus in Furs' ('Le Malizie de Venere', 1969)

'La Polizia Chiede Aiuto' also sports features an undistinguished supporting role from former Stranger on a Train, Farley Granger (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951). It is competently made, fast moving and gripping in places. It's worth checking out, but a maybe a little too serious in both its sleazy theme and its approach to prove a major crowd pleaser.

This movie's pretty blunt and straight to the point, so I can keep it brief.

What Have They Done to Your Daughters? Is an Italian crime/horror movie that follows a group of characters trying to catch a serial killer who's targeting teenage girls. It's the kind of premise that's been done to death, but it's the way it's done here that's interesting. It's fast-paced, surprisingly well-shot, memorably bloody, and also features some great music. In fact, it's the music that cancels out the bad dubbing, really, because while most Italian movies from this time don't have very good dubbing, this one kind of goes one step beyond, because it's really bad at points.

I can see these crime/horror/thriller movies from Italy in the 1970s being the next genre I hyper-fixate on, as I've done with kaiju movies, samurai movies, and martial arts movies. There's something really interesting about them (I'd call them Giallo movies, but I'm not entirely sure yet whether this particular movie counts as Giallo).

So overall, What Have They Done to Your Daughters? Isn't anything new when it comes to its story or characters, and it's kind of sleazy in parts, but it's well-made and consistently engaging, making it a pleasant surprise to watch, because I wasn't expecting this to be of a moderately high quality.