| Rabid Dogs aka. Kidnapped, aka. Wild Dogs Directed by Mario Bava ( Italy –1974) Despite his reputation as an Italian horror maestro, this taut crime thriller may just be the most intriguing film of Mario Bava’s impressive filmmaking career. It begins with a violent payroll robbery at a small pharmaceutical plant. A gang of semi-professional thieves make off with a hundred million lire in a hail of bullets. Doc is the leader of these rabid dogs. He’s a calm cool and collected professional thief who’s able to keep his head when others are losing theirs. Blade is a sociopath who is overly fond of his switchblade knife. And then there’s Thirtytwo (played by George Eastman). Thirtytwo is both a prankster, and a sexual deviate. The three have just lost their getaway driver to a police marksman, and are forced to flee the scene of the crime in a car with a bullet riddled petrol tank. As the car sputters and stops at a busy city intersection, the fugitive trio retreat into an underground parking station. They grab several female hostages as the police close in. “Take one more step and we’ll cut these bitches” Doc coldly warns the advancing officers. “Goddamn cops! I’ll send the all straight to hell!” Thirtytwo chimes in. The over-zealous Blade nervously jams his knife in the throat of one of the hostages, and the dead woman slumps to the concrete. “My God… that son of a bitch really did it” an officer at the scene gasps. “Back off now, or we’ll make it a matching set” Doc tells the leaderless police officers. As the gang leave the parking garage with their remaining hostage Maria, they carjack a station wagon. The driver is an innocent man called Ricardo. His infant son Tino is wrapped in a blanket on the back seat. The trio and their hostage pile into the wagon, and Doc orders Ricardo to drive. The driver begs them to set he and his son free, explaining that the boy urgently requires an operation or he’ll die. “Our lives are at stake” Doc explains. “And to tell you the truth, our lives are a little more important to me than his”. Maria is sobbing uncontrollably, and asks to be dropped off. Her friend has just had her throat cut, and she’s understandably shaken. Blade berates her. He explains that the getaway driver was his friend, and that minutes earlier he had his friends brains blown all over him. Ricardo has some explaining of his own to do as they weave through the peak hour traffic in the now cramped station wagon . He tells Doc that if Tino dies, he’ll be held accountable. “Look, we’ve already killed four today” Doc points out. “One more or one less doesn’t matter. You can’t serve more than one life sentence”. As the rest of Rabid Dogs unfolds, the genuine suspense continues unabated. Nearly the entire sequence of events take place within the claustrophobic confines of the car. Bava creates such a convincing atmosphere that his audience can almost feel the heat, and smell the sweat within the cramped station wagon. The performances and dialogue in this film are also fairly impressive, which is vital to this film actually working. A bored audience would soon tire of a tedious film that spends most of its time within an automobile. This film is extremely hard to come by these days, which is a shame. It was obviously an influence on a number of more widely known crime films. At times it feels like a prototype version of Reservoir Dogs. The twist ending is a genuinely unpredictable and satisfying one from Bava. Rabid Dogs is a gritty and uncompromising example of Italian crime cinema that will hopefully be dragged from obscurity someday. Entertainment : 4 out of 4 Watchability : 3 out of 4 Overall : 3.5 out of 4 Reviewed by Blake |