What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (1977)

Pretty Good

Great Film overall

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I picked this up at a second hand convention, only for the reason it was full uncut and it was a giallo. But from the first minute I was already left with a bitter feeling. The girl hanging on a rope was clearly not a real person. So i thought this wasn't to be what I expected from it but I noticed that it was well shot by the director Massimo Dallamano who of course knew his stuff as a cinematographer from Italian classics like a few spaghetti westerns directed by Sergio Leone.This flick did have it's elements straight from a giallo like the black leather gloved killer and we do have young girls being abused and killed but it do involves a lot of talking too which made it somewhere between a thriller and a giallo.The soundtrack on the other hand is sublime. But it's the story itself that gave this flick a bit of perverted look. It's all about 15 year old girls being abused by older men. And we do have to listen on tape what they are doing with the girls. But one scene makes it kinky when we go back to the mother of Sylvia (Sherry Buchanan) discovering that her 15 year is taking anti-conception. When Sylvia comes home she goes bare breasted before her mother and confronted with the pil see easily says, better that then giving birth to a child. The fact that she is already sexual active at 15 back then and is showing her breasts gave this flick something to talk about. Sherry went further as main lead in Zombie Holocaust (1980)Lovers of the genre must see this but for many horror buffs this will be low on blood and horror, as I said in my summary, somewhere between a thriller and a giallo.Gore 0,5/5 Nudity 0,5/5 Effects 1,5/5 Story 2,5/5 Comedy 0/5

Rather than featuring an 'everyman' protagonist caught up in a bizarre mystery, as is often the case with a standard giallo, the central characters of Massimo Dallamano's 'What Have They Done To Your Daughters?' are Police Inspector Silvestri and Assistant District Attorney Vittoria Stori, who are called to the apparent suicide of a teenage girl which, upon investigation, becomes a murder case. As they delve further into the victim's life, Silvestri and Stori uncover her secret life as a teenage prostitute, a shocking discovery that leads to the discovery of more bodies and which makes them the next targets of the vicious killer.This merging of two extremely popular genres of '70s Italian cinema—the 'giallo' and the 'poliziotteschi'—is very entertaining whenever it's adhering to the giallo formula or delivering the sleaze, with a decent killer (clad in motor cycle gear and brandishing a huge meat cleaver), teenage nudity, bloody violence, an uncomfortable moment featuring a tape recording of an underage hooker with her 'john', and a very gruesome scene where a victim's dismembered body is reassembled like a jigsaw; sadly, the film is nowhere near as much fun during the police procedural content, which, barring a cool car/motorcycle chase scene, is extremely hum-drum stuff. The finale is also disappointingly weak.Overall, this flick offers enough good stuff to make it worth a go, but don't expect it to be anywhere near as good as Dallamano's similarly titled 'What Have You Done to Solange?'.

The lifeless body of an attractive teen girl is found in a dusty attic. She's hung and everything points in the direction of a suicide. Closer investigations, however, points out that the girl has been murdered elsewhere before dragged into the attic. The discovery of the corpse slowly unravels a network of teen-prostitution in which several eminent civilians are involved. This hardens the police investigation while the killer (on a motorcycle and carrying an authentic butcher knife) is still on the loose. `What Have They Done to Our Daughters' is kind of like a sequel to `Solange' (or fully entitled: What have you done to Solange'). The stories don't follow each other but they handle about similar events: young schoolgirls caught in a web of unsettling and sleazy affairs. Both films are above average gialli, with an incredibly high tension-level and killer musical scores. Even though `Solange' upholds the mystery longer and more efficiently, this film contains a little more action. Best example to state this is the extended police car versus motorcycle chase through the beautiful streets of Italy. The budgets, however, are low so don't expect blood-soaked murders like the ones featuring in Dario Argento gialli.

Although the 'Giallo' genre officially began with Mario Bava's 'Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo' (aka 'Evil Eye', or 'The Girl Who Knew To Much') in 1963, continuing with the same director's 'Sei Donne Per L'Assassino' ('Blood and Black Lace', 1964), it wasn't really until the commercial success of Dario Argento's 1969 debut, 'L'Uccello dalle Piuma di Cristallo' ('The Bird With the Crystal Plumage') that it really got underway to become a staple of Italian cinema in the 1970's. The films essentially were bloody thrillers in which the primary thrill was in watching pretty young girls being stalked and dispatched by anonymous, leather-gloved assassins. Stylistically these films forced the audience to identify with the killer, featuring lengthily protracted and elaborately staged sequences of women in terror strung together by a convoluted whodunnit plot along the lines of those of early twentieth century British crime-writer Edgar Wallace.In fact, director Massimo Dallamano's previous film, 'Whatever Happened to Solange?' ('Cosa Avete Fatto a Solange?' 1972) was based on an Edgar Wallace novel. The follow-up takes it's cue from the same film by also setting itself within a girl's school, giving us a whole host of young nubiles around which to build the plot. The film opens with a rousing score courtesy of Stelvio Cipriani, a big-band romp through 70's flower-power accompanied by shots of the young girls getting on and off of their boyfriends scooters outside the school gates. This is followed by the discovery by the police of a young girl swinging naked from the rafters of an attic in a nearby deserted house after an anonymous tip off.As the Italian title 'La Polizia Chiede Aiuto' (The Police Ask For Help) suggests, and what sets this apart from its predecessor and most of the Giallo films of the period, is that a lot of time is devoted to the police's detective work and the milieu of the police themselves as opposed to those of the potential victims, bringing the film more in line with the policier drama than pure 'Giallo'. For the most part the film follows these investigations from suspect to suspect, with each plot point highlighted by a lengthy flashback. A motorcycle chase forms one of the action set-pieces alongside the usual suspense scenes, including a taut sequence in which the female detective (Giovanni Ralli) is stalked by the leather-clad, helmeted killer with a meat cleaver. The gorier pay-offs mainly occur towards the end, once the cleaver has made its initial appearance, but along the way we discover a mutilated body in the back of a car, and the blood spattered bath in which it was dismembered.If all this sounds rather perfunctory so far, it is the sheer bleakness of the film that distinguishes it. The initial murder is linked to the discovery of a school girl prostitution ring, and this central concept pretty much summarises the whole tone of the film. With a potential political scandal hinted at, and a scene in which the Claudio Casinelli's police investigator lies to the press to buy more time, the general milieu invoked is a corrupt and sordid one, where corruption and vice are masked by the superficially angelic innocence of the girls involved. The deadpan and po-faced narrative includes lengthy scenes of the police listening intently and repeatedly to tapes made of the call-girls' meetings, and graphic post-mortem descriptions of the victims. Salacious tit-bits like these are so deeply engrained within the complex plot that forces one is forced into a particularly bizarre and twisted perspective of the world by the accumulation of such elements.Director Dallamano was a cinematographer turned director who had worked on a number of spaghetti Westerns in the 60's including Sergio Leone's 'Per un pugno di dollari' ('Fistful of Dollars', 1964). Prior to this he had made a number of films including adaptations of Oscar Wilde's 'Dorian Gray' (1970) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 'Venus in Furs' ('Le Malizie de Venere', 1969)'La Polizia Chiede Aiuto' also sports features an undistinguished supporting role from former Stranger on a Train, Farley Granger (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951). It is competently made, fast moving and gripping in places. It's worth checking out, but a maybe a little too serious in both its sleazy theme and its approach to prove a major crowd pleaser.