Sam Panico Lisa and the Devil was shelved after a negative reception at the Cannes Market. A Bay of Blood was a box office disappointment. So Mario Bava decided to do something unlike any of his other films - developing a "poliziotteschi" film.According to Roberto Curti's Italian Crime Filmography, 1968-1980, poliziotteschi films "generally featured graphic and brutal violence, organized crime, car chases, vigilantism, heists, gunfights, and corruption up to the highest levels. The protagonists were generally tough working class loners, willing to act outside a corrupt or overly bureaucratic system."Bava filmed the entire film in chronological order, but the shoot was filled with issues. Original star Al Lettieri (The Getaway) was replaced after three days, mostly for showing up drunk. The replacement, Riccardo Cucciolla, spoke no English and had to read his lines from a script hidden inside the car (so Wikipedia says, but my copy is n Italian, so I have no idea why this was an issue).Additionally, Bava's son Lamberto, who was the assistant director on the film, has claimed that producer Roberto Loyola bounced all of the checks to the crew, who still finished the film within three weeks. All that remained were some cutaways and a pre-credit sequence, but Loyola went bankrupt and the film was lost in the courts.There are numerous versions of this movie that were released in the mid 1990's. For the interests of this article, we'll focus on the Anchor Bay release of Kidnapped that was assembled by Alfredo Leone and Lamberto Bava.After four crooks rob an armored truck, their getaway car is damaged and one of them is killed. The three that remain - Doc, Blade and Thirty-Two (George Eastman! Do I really need to tell you how much I love every movie this guy is in? Our site is literally his entire IMDB catalog, with movies like Stage Fright, Blastfighter, Hands of Steel, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Warriors of the Wasteland and more) - run into an underground garage, kill a woman and kidnap another named Maria (Lea Lander, Blood and Black Lace). They then steal another car driven by Riccardo (Cucciolla), who is trying to get a sickly child to a hospital before its too late.The criminals force the man to drive them to their hideout. The film grows incredibly tense as Maria is on the verge of mania as she's kept under gunpoint the entire way. Somehow, Ricardo remains calm. The heat is on, meaning that both the cops are on their tail and that the city is in the middle of summer. Doc forces the windows up on the car, keeping the nerves inside high.Maria tries to escape after asking to be allowed to relieve herself outside, which leads to Blade and Thirty-Two capturing her and forcing her to do the act in front of them. It's due to dogs, wandering the streets and barking, that she is caught (someday I have to do an IMDB list of movies that have dogs randomly wandering the streets).These are base, horrible men who only know evil acts. After stopping for food and drink, Thirty-Two becomes drunk and attempts to rape Maria, an action that causes other motorists to notice the car. Doc replies by shooting his partner in the neck. The criminal lives, but now cannot move and is even more trapped than everyone else in the car.The car stops to refill at a small town gas station, where the owner won't even wait on them until his lunch is up. Doc tries to threaten him, but the old man has a gun at the ready. Blade finally resolves the situation by showing the sick boy inside the car and the old man decides to get back to work. However, a hitchhiker shows up and asks for a ride. As she gets in the car, the old man sees Thirty-Two's bloody body, but he simply shrugs. It's not any of his business.The hitchhiker will not shut up, annoying everyone. When she removes the blanket and reveals Thirty-Two, Blade killing her feels like a relief. Doc asks Riccardo to pull over and they dump the body. And Blade carries out his friend Thirty-Two's body and finally puts him out of his misery by shooting him.Finally, they reach the group's hideout, where Doc has another car and the papers that will allow he and Blade to leave the country. Then he reveals that he planned to kill Riccardo, the child and Maria. Riccardo begs for the boy to live, but Doc refuses and asks him to get him from the car. As Riccardo holds the boy, he pulls the gun he had inside the blanket all along, killing Doc and Blade, whose machine gun burst kills Maria. He takes Doc's car and money, then leaves, only to reveal that he had been a kidnapper all along, holding the child for ransom. And the boy? Now he's inside the trunk.While this film has none of Bava's trademark magic camerawork, it's still taunt and well made. For example, in the scene where Doc shoots Thirty-Two, Bava uses tight close-ups of Doc and Riccardo's faces, as well as the gun that Doc holds, then cuts to black as the car enters a tunnel. In that moment of no light or color at all on the screen - such a contrast to the dynamic hues we expect from the master - we simply hear the report of the gun being fired, stopping Thirty-Two's rape of Maria. As we return to reality, Blade deals with his rage against Doc by screaming at his friend, only to discover that he is still alive. The flashbacks are relayed to us via voiceover instead of some dramatic camera move. Again - out of character, but this proves that Bava was not all special effects and tricks. He is filming the story as it should be filmed. The action inside the car is claustrophobic. And it had to have been even more so as it was filmed, as there's real background zooming past behind the actors, so the camera was inside the car.Also, this is a movie where you notice the acting so much more than in other Bava work. He takes a backseat to the true sense of dread and terror that his actors tell with their performances. I know that I'm a big Eastman fan, but he's great in this film, a gigantic man child devoted to the id, barely restrained by the adult in the car, Doc.Following this film, Bava would only work on one more film, 1977's Shock. He would also do special effects work and uncredited direction on Dario Argento's Inferno before his death in 1980.

Leofwine_draca RABID DOGS is an Italian thriller of the 1970s, directed by master of horror Mario Bava, and perhaps better known for the unfortunate production wranglings surrounding it than for being a top thriller in its own right. The movie's producer died, money dried up, and RABID DOGS never saw the light of day until after the director died in 1990. Since then, Bava's son Lamberto did his own version, KIDNAPPED, which was by all accounts an inferior work, and a French remake of the same name came out in 2015 which is probably better known than the original film.Thankfully, Marc Morris and the team at Arrow have finally put together Mario Bava's original movie and released it onto a stunning Blu-ray which no doubt took a lot of blood, sweat, and painstaking work to achieve. The result is an edge-of-the-seat thriller that throws the viewer into a real-time story of crazed robbers and their hostages in exceptionally harrowing way. This low budget film is set in the interior of a car for most of the running time and yet the suspense never lets up. It's very adult, very gritty, and downbeat too; the performances of the larger-than-life characters are quite electrifying. The first twenty minutes of this film are as well directed and stylish as anything else I could mention. Elements of the movie are inspired by Wes Craven's LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, but Bava's palm-sweating style is all his own.

FilmCriticLalitRao Italian director Mario Bava's cult classic 'Cani Arrabbiati' is a study of criminal minds in closed spaces. 'Mad Dogs' was considered to be lost but due to its leading lady Lea Lander's efforts, its glory has been restored enabling fans of horror and exploitation cinema to discover a lost classic. Director Bava shows the wickedness of criminals in closed spaces where they tend to be more vicious as there is no possibility for them to vent their anger through any outlet. As a heist film with utter disregard for human life, highest limits of cruelty are reached in 'Mad Dogs' when two criminals deliberately choose to unleash a fury of sexual violence against the lone woman occupant of a moving car. It is with bawdy jokes and sickening violence that ruthless criminals are able to subdue a weak woman. The film also raises a lot of questions about the inadequacy of police forces in Italy as three hoodlums are shown to have taken the entire city to ransom. Although the film boasts of a solid beginning and a fairly decent middle part, its ending was a huge disappointment as the 'dénouement' didn't match at all with what was being shown to viewers. In 'Rabid Dogs', something is fishy with the way the film progresses can be guessed immediately after the beginning of the film if an observant viewer chooses to watch with attention how the driver seemed to be utterly lost in his own preoccupations. Lastly, one must wait till the end of the film to find how the end as well as the beginning of this film were closely related.

Witchfinder General 666 The great Mario Bava is mainly known as the supreme master of Gothic Horror Tales as well as the inventor of the Giallo. With the two aforementioned sub-genres being my favorites in the Horror genre, it is not surprising that Bava ranks among my favorite directors ever in motion picture history. Out of all Horror directors, Bava is arguably the one responsible for the most masterpieces - the man simply directed so many ingenious films that it is hard to pick out favorites. If I had to choose a favorite, it would be "La Maschera Del Demonio" aka. "Black Sunday" (1960), but there are various other flawless masterpieces in this brilliant man's repertoire that no Horror fan, no, no lover of film in general, could possibly consider missing, such as "Blood And Black Lace", "Kill Baby... Kill", "Black Sabbath", "The Girl Who Knew Too Much", "The Whip And The Body, or "A Bay Of Blood", just to name a few. Or this ingenious film. Even when dabbling outside of his most familiar Horror genre, Mario Bava outshines the rest, as "Cani Arrabbiati" proves. Bava obviously was in for something different with "Cani Arrabbiati" aka "Rabid Dogs" of 1974, and the outcome was an incomparably breathtaking mixture of stunning Crime/Heist flick and sadistic thriller. Even though violent crime flicks were immensely popular (and many of them immensely brilliant) in Italy of the mid 70s, "Rabid Dogs" is somewhat unique. Without exaggeration, the film, which runs by several aka. titles, such as "Semaforo Rosso", "Wild Dogs" and "Kidnapped" must be one of the most uncompromising, breathtaking and purely adrenaline-driven masterpieces ever brought to screen. Sadly, this ingenious film remained unreleased to the public for over 20 years. Due to the producer's bankruptcy, the completed film was withheld by courts until it was finally released in the late 90s, years after Bava's death.After a robbery, three criminals, their leader being a cold thinker called The Doctor (Maurice Poli), the other two sadistic psychopaths named Thirtytwo (none other than exploitation-cult-actor Greorge Eastman) and Balde (Don Backy), brutally murder a woman and take another woman hostage, in order to escape from the police. In order to obtain a new car they also kidnap a man named Riccardo (Riccardo Cucciolla), and the sick child that he was about to bring to hospital... I am not going to give away more, but I can assure that the film is absolutely stunning. The tension and constantly menacing atmosphere never pauses for even a minute, and, at times the film gets quite shockingly sadistic. While Bava's goriest film is doubtlessly "A Bay Of Blood", this "Cani Arrabbiati" is easily his most disturbing one. All three of the gangsters are despicable characters, but while the leader is merely interested in getting away, Blade and especially Thirtytwo are mainly psychopathic. The acting performances are entirely great. Riccardo Cucciolla is excellent in the lead (if one can call it that, as the film is mainly set in a car, and all the characters have almost equal screen time). All three gangsters are brilliantly displayed as despicable as possibly imaginable. Maurice Poli, who plays the leader, had already worked with Bava in "5 Dolls For An August Moon" as well as in a small role in "Baron Blood". George Eastman enjoys a deserved cult status for starring in and co-writing various exploitation classics (most memorably Joe D'Amato's gruesome "Antropophagus" and the equally shocking follow-up "Absurd"), "Cani Arrabiati" is arguably the greatest film he was ever involved in. Don Backy is equally sadistic as the knife-specialist Blade, and Lea Leander is just great as the female hostage Maria. Leander does an outstanding job with her very realistic portrayal of the fear and distress of a hostage. The camera-work is ingenious, and Stelvio Cipriani's brilliant score holds the tense atmosphere up for every second. I could go on praising "Cani Arrabbiati" for a long time, but I will just finish with the statement that it is a true must-see for everyone even remotely interested in 70s genre-cinema. This masterpiece was lost for many years, and while it is unfortunate that it never got released in Mario Bava's lifetime, it is more than great that it is available now. This may not be a typical example for Mario Bava's great repertoire, but it ranges among his most brilliant films. A true must! 10/10