ITALIAN HORROR BLOGATHON: What Have They Done to Your Daughters?

Posted as part of the Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies 4th Italian Horror Blogathon.

Okay, I’m probably stretching it a bit including this in the Italian Horror Blogathon, since it’s more of a polizia than anything else, but it was marketed strongly as a giallo and contains enough elements of that genre that you can just about make a case for it. As usual with 70s Italian exploitationers, the English language title isn’t an exact translation. It was released in Italy as ‘La polizia chiede aiuto’, i.e. ‘The Police Ask for Help’, which makes it sound more like one of “Milano” polizias – Lenzi’s ‘Milano odio: la polizia non puo sparare’ (retitled as ‘Almost Human’ for foreign distribution) or Martino’s ‘Milano trema: la polizia vuole giustizia’. The sleazier, more suggestive ‘What Have They Done to Your Daughters’ (hereinafter ‘WHTDtYD’ in the interests of brevity) suggests that it’s a sequel to Massimo Dallamano’s earlier, traditionally structured giallo ‘What Have You Done to Solange?’ It isn’t, but there are similarities. 

‘WHTDtYD’ starts in urgent style with Inspector Valentini (Mario Adorf) kicking down a door and finding a department store mannequin the naked body of a schoolgirl hanging from the rafters. He’s there on an anonymous tip-off and within minutes a peeping tom from an adjacent building has given the police their first break. Apparently, the guy’s been spying on the young lady question – swiftly identified as Silvia Polvesi (Sherry Buchanan) – for some time now, and taking pictures.

The post-mortem on 15-year-old but sexually precocious Silvia reveals “semen in the vagina, anus and stomach”. It’s a pull-no-punches line of dialogue, delivered with almost callous detachment, and it sets the scene for much of what follows. ‘WHTDtYD’ soon reveals itself as a sordid drama about the lengths high-profile individuals will go to cover up their involvement in a schoolgirl prostitution ring.

Let me just repeat that last bit: schoolgirl prostitution ring.

At this point in the review, I wouldn’t blame you if you’d formed an opinion of ‘WHTDtYD’ as on par with ‘Strip Nude for Your Killer’ or ‘The Sister of Ursula’ in terms of grubbiness, seediness and all-round venality. But with the exception of one topless scene from Buchanan, Dallamano keeps the underage nookie offscreen relying on the discovery of some audio tapes to provide the details of what the girls are coerced into.

The first half of the film is a fairly standard procedural. Once the post-mortem confirms that Silvia was killed elsewhere and the hanging was staged to approximate a suicide, Valentini is joined in the investigation new-to-the-job DA Vittoria Stori (Giovanna Ralli) and cynical old-school cop Inspector Silvestri (Claudio Cassinelli) – leading, as they variously take centre stage or fade into the background, to a never-resolved uncertainty as to who the actual protagonist is. Valentini has a daughter of Silvia’s age who turns out to have a level of involvement that suggests Valentini going off on a personal quest for the truth a la George C Scott in ‘Hardcore’; however, this potential dramatic development is left unexplored.

Bracing Silvia’s parents – Marina Berti and a long-in-the-tooth Farley Granger – our dogged investigators learn that Mrs Polvesi, frustrated at her daughter’s blithe attitude to promiscuity and refusal to tell her parents who she’s seeing, has hired a private eye to keep tabs on her. Said gumshoe is discovered in a car boot, neatly vivisected and wrapped in plastic bags. This occasions one of the film’s starkest images, after his less than grieving widow ignores the pathologist’s admonition that she should only look at the face. “Take the sheet off, I want to see how the cheating bastard died,” she responds. The sheet is yanked back: his corpse is arranged in a grisly pattern, like one of those 3D jigsaw puzzles. But with viscera.

From the severed shamus, Silvestri backtracks to his hospitalised secretary Rosa (Micaela Pignatelli) and all of a sudden ‘WHTDtYD’ gets its giallo funk on and the rest of the film is a race against time – or rather a race against a hatchet wielding nutjob in biker leathers and an identity-obscuring crash helmet – to link the clues and interview the witnesses before they’re despatched in bluntly violent fashion.

Dallamano has already established a pacy rhythm to the film – even the office-based scenes are sharply edited montages of information being ripped off teleprinters, phones slammed down, doors yanked open, and quick-march walk ‘n’ talk exposition as coppers negotiate corridors; that, or whip-pan camerawork during terse Q&A scenes. With the appearance of the biker/killer, Dallamano pulls out the action stops, and delivers a tense pursuit through a hospital which ends with a graphic use of the aforementioned cleaver; a motorcycle chase that takes in the urban sprawl, open three-lane highways, a quarry and a railway tunnel; and a white-knuckle sequence where the killer stalks Vittoria through an underground car park. Granted, this last steals heavily from ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’, made four years earlier. Having said that, ‘WHTDtYD’ was happily ripped off a year later when the black-clad biker-as-killer iconography was recycled by Andrea Bianchi in ‘Strip Nude for Your Killer’.

It’s fair to say, in fact, that there isn’t much going on in ‘WHTDtYD’ that’s remotely original – and the denouement is a tad anti-climactic. True, it makes a salient point about people in high places being essentially inviolate, but it hardly does so with the élan of, say, ‘Chinatown’. Still, ‘WHTDtYD’ crackles with energy, exercises commendable stringency where it could easily have lapsed into outright sleaze, and remains a highly entertaining genre hybrid. It also boasts a score by Stelvio Cipriani that is magnificently inappropriate, in its soft romantic sighings, to absolutely every single thing that happens onscreen.

ITALIAN HORROR BLOGATHON: Dellamorte Dellamore

Posted as part of the Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies 4th Italian Horror Blogathon

It would be fair to say to Michel Soavi has something of a pedigree in Italian horror. At the age of 25, he was second unit director on Argento’s giallo classic ‘Tenebrae’. A year later, he was assistant director to Lamberto Bava – another Argento protégé – on ‘A Blade in the Dark’. At 28, he directed the feature-length documentary ‘Dario Argento’s World of Horror’, and two years after that made his first feature film, the hyper-stylised but incredibly accomplished ‘Stage Fright’ (aka ‘Aquarius’, aka ‘Bloody Bird’). Over the next seven years, he made three more terrific horror movies: ‘The Church’, ‘The Sect’, and this evening’s consideration, ‘Dellamorte Dellamore’.

He then withdrew from the film industry for a decade to care for his son, who was suffering from a debilitating illness. His most recent work has been for Italian television, plus second unit duties on Terry Gilliam’s ‘The Brothers Grimm’ (he’d worked for Gilliam in a similar capacity on ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’, back in the day when studios would happily give Gilliam large chunks of money to bring his imaginings to life).

‘Dellamorte Dellamore’ – which is both the protagonist’s surname and his mother’s maiden name, as well as a literal evocation of death and love – is based, nominally at least, on Tiziano Sclavi’s ‘Dylan Dog’ comic series. It sets out its stall in fairly generic, but entertaining fashion: Francisco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) is the caretaker at the Buffalora cemetery, where he is assisted by Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), a morbidly obese simpleton who can only communicate in grunts and whose puppy-dog adoration of mayor’s daughter Valentina (Fabiana Formica) is demonstrated by barfing over her. Francisco’s relatively content with his lot in life, since the job – self-admittedly the only one he’s been able to secure – comes with living accommodation. Moreover, it’s better than living in town, where the local motorcycle gang take the piss out of him and spread rumours that he’s impotent. The only real downside to his life is that the dead have a habit of coming back to life five days after burial, whereupon Francisco has to shoot them in the head and re-inter them.

So far, so comedy horror. The humdrum routine of Francisco’s life is spelled out with beautiful economy in the pre-credits sequence where he alleviates the dull routine by chatting to his friend Franco on the phone while casually blasting the cranium off a shuffling zombie attempting to break into his living quarters. Everett’s deadpan performance is comedic gold, and perfectly in keeping with a film that’s generally played straight (apart from some slapstick involving Gnaghi).

Soavi makes the first of several narrative swerves with the introduction of a young widow (Anna Falchi). Francisco inexplicably bumbles his way into her affections – his persona veers between bored, louche, Byronic anti-hero and nervous teenager in these scenes – and they get down to a pretty hot and heavy bit of consummation on her dead husband’s tombstones. Or rather, undead husband, since his zombified corpse chooses this exact moment to stage its resurrection.

And here we come to the next narrative curveball. Events that I don’t intend to spoil for those new to the film leave Francisco in a state of emotional meltdown. This is juxtaposed with an hilariously bad taste accident that kills one of his biker antagonists, Valentina, and a coach full of boy scouts. Francisco’s abject loneliness and rapidly loosening toehold on sanity plays out against Gnaghi’s romantic idyll with Valentina’s reanimated but decapitated corpse, a romantic subplot that manages to be as poignant and delicately handled as one could reasonably expect from an amour fou between a slobbering man-child and a severed head.

Meanwhile, a killing spree in town leads a detective more stunningly incompetent than any copper in any giallo to the cemetery, the mayor dies after discovering the truth about his daughter’s affair with Gnaghi, and his replacement turns up for a meeting with Francisco with his personal assistant (Falchi) in tow. Another romantic entanglement ensues when she confides to Francisco that the rumours of his impotence are a turn-on due to her phobia of the erect penis.

Did I mention that ‘Dellamorte Dellamore’ goes into some odd territory?

I usually distrust and try to avoid the ‘X’ is like ‘Y’ meets ‘Z’ school of film writing, but ‘Dellamorte Dellamore’ almost begs for it. So here goes: ‘Dellamorte Dellamore’ is kind of like ‘Night of the Living Dead’ meets ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’ while sitting down to write a love letter to ‘Vertigo’ and casually presupposing the utterly unreliable protagonist/narrator of ‘Fight Club’ as it cheerfully reworks one of the best absurdist set pieces from ‘The Phantom of Liberty’ and blithely helps itself to a key image from ‘Citizen Kane’ by way of its joltingly disorientating (but played fair: the clues are there) final scene.

It didn’t find much favour on its original release, either in Italy or the English speaking territories (Everett’s star wasn’t high enough at the time to guarantee it any real audience), but it’s endured. ‘Dellamorte Dellamore’ is frankly bonkers – its absurdist touchstones might be very specifically yoked to the work of Luis Bunuel, but there’s a strong evocation of Monty Python – and also, in places, genuinely creepy. The swirl of ashes from a bonfire that coagulate into the Angel of Death is a potent image, and the zombie boy scouts, all clacking teeth and earth-caked uniforms, make for an unsettling vision. Soavi’s conjuration of imagery is boundless: a sex scene shadowed by a carved angel that rivets together the death and love of the title; Valentina’s severed head starring in her own show in the interior of a functionless TV set; an office overflowing with files like something out of Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’; the riffling pages of the telephone directories in which Francisco crosses out the names of the deceased; a waterlogged necropolis lined with skulls; a road that terminates above a seemingly pre-historic landscape.

The humour is equally gnarly, particularly in Francisco’s attempt to convince a local doctor to castrate him in order to satisfy the mayor’s assistant’s sexless demands, spectacularly backfiring when a bit of rough sex from her employer cures her phobia, plays out like the tragic misunderstandings of the last act of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as if reimagined by the ‘Carry On’ team. Elsewhere, the erstwhile mayor tries to maintain a sense of hierarchy after death, only to learn the perils of loss of office; a hospital visit escalates into multiple murder; and the last scene – nay, the very last line – slams home an almost unpalatable final joke.

‘Dellamorte Dellamore’ is a curious, chaotic piece of work, arguably a little too packed with ideas and satiric sideswipes for its own good, but it’s one of the most unique and offbeat offerings Italian horror cinema has produced, and I will go to my grave – and quite possible come lumbering back from it – maintaining that it represents Everett’s finest hour and three quarters.

Italian horror blogathon

There are some dates on the film blogger’s calendar that are basically unmissable. The Italian horror blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies is just such an occasion. From 24 – 31 October, the blogosphere will be alive with the sound of screaming. And yours truly will be in on the act.

And on the subject of all things dark and nasty, the fourth annual 13 For Halloween season will be kicking off tomorrow right here on The Agitation of the Mind. Everyone’s welcome. Bring your own pumpkins.