Monday 28 September 2020

No.325 : What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (1974)

 



Well if nothing else, at least this Italian effort secures the ‘Longest title’ award from this long running blog - eat that ‘W.’!

I found this on Amazon Prime and for all intents and purposes it looked like a badly dubbed exploitation flick and, to a great extent, it was. It did however try to veer into social commentary; moral high ground that crumbled somewhat when you have a look at that poster!

The film opens with a caption saying that the film serves as a reconstruction of the facts - the implication being that all the brutal murders and teenage nudity are nothing to do with them, but are due to those bad folks who wrote the script. They just made the film you understand.

The film’s stall is immediately set out as some policemen burst into a flat to find a naked teenage girl, who has been hung from the rafters. We meet Detective Silvestri, who is a dead ringer for Henry Cavill and new to the job lady DA Stori who has a bit of Sophia Loren about her. The death initially looks like a suicide, but after some fortunate detective work involving a peeping Tom, they decide the girl has been murdered.

The grisly death is soon all over the papers including a full frontal front page of the dead girl hanging from the rafters, despite her being only 15 - at least the actress was 20 at the time, but is was still unnecessary.  The girl gets identified and her mother reveals, in a naked daughter flashback, how she discovered the teen was taking birth control pills. Mum engaged a private eye to watch over her wayward daughter, but this lead cools when the cops find his car complete with his body in several pieces. These are comically put back together by the boys in the morgue with his wife insisting on a full look before screaming the place down.

All is not lost though as an audio tape is found that reveals lots of teenage girls are part of a prostitution ring that involves some influential people. Soon a motorcycle riding, cleaver wielding nutter is on the scene and every girl - and the cops are in danger. Who will survive the chopper onslaught?  And how high does the conspiracy go?

This film was a decent bit of exploitation slasher nonsense for the first hour, but it ran out of puff towards the end with the big finale looking daft and staged - well the big crowd behind the barriers was a clue!

Closing captions revealed that 8,000 girls go missing in Italy every year and nothing was being done. How kind of the producers then to make this kind of risible nonsense that would appeal only to the kinds of people they were looking to decry? Teen girls jumping around in the buff between scenes of gory, and at times comic, murder made for an unsettling viewing experience.

The main cast were decent albeit badly dubbed. The detection angle faded badly as the film progressed with the cleaver baddie being identified when they checked who had bought motorbike tyres recently, with one purchaser being listed as a butcher. Didn’t know Goodyear needed your CV to sell you a couple of tyres!

There were a couple of half decent chases but the villain was pretty ineffective and there was no real mystery or scares.

As a moral piece the film floundered badly, and as an entertainment it failed miserably. There were a couple of unintentional lighter moments but these were lost in a morass of suspect subject matter and unconvincing body parts.

Best Bit : Let’s Put This Guy Back Together  ‘W’ Rating 10/23




No comments: