There's a long troubled history behind this one, about how it wasn't released until 1996 due to legal problems with the financiers and such like, but the saddest thing is how the world let Mario Bava slip through its fingers as a master filmmaker. How could Alfredo Breschia make five films in 1979, yet Bava had to fire his cinematographer just so he could afford to make this film?
Let's get to the film: Four nasty armed gunmen violently rob a firm of it's wages and during the getaway their driver is killed and car immobilised. After a stand-off with the police that results in a woman being stabbed in the neck, our three remaining bad guys grab another woman for a hostage and in a hurry jump into a car containing a sick child and his father. Get used to the inside of this car because about two thirds of the film takes place in it.
We also get to know our bad guys a bit more. There's the calm, intelligent Doc (Maurice Poli), the not-calm, violent Blade, and the really not-calm psycho and potential rapist Thirty-Two (George Eastman). They want to get out of town avoiding all roadblocks, whereas the man just wants them to leave him and the kid alone. The woman, understandably, is terrified, especially of Thirty-Two and his not-too-subtle sexual innuendo.
You can't write much about a plot like this without spoiling stuff, but needless to say its a horrific road trip full of anger and tension. Don't expect Bava's colour schemes here though, because he plays things one hundred percent legit, letting the sweaty actors scream at each other to keep the mood anxious and unpredictable. The tone is relentlessly nasty throughout. Riccardo Cuicolla is as good as he was in The Case Is Closed: Forget About It, and a good choice to play the man who just wants to protect the sick child he has with him.
This is Bava mind you, so don't think thing play out the way you think they will. After this he only made the creepy Shock, and I've read that film was mostly completed by his son Lamberto. With the right money and recognition, what else could the man have achieved?
