... aka: Police Want Help, The
... aka: What Have They Done to Your Daughters?
Directed by:
Massimo Dallamano
Originally, blandly titled La
polizia chiede aiuto ("The Police Want Help"), this middle-of-the-pack
giallo / poliziottesco (police procedural) was released stateside under the title The Coed Murders.
(Great poster, huh?) It was also titled What Have They Done to Your
Daughters? at one point specifically to recall director Dallamano's slightly
better-known What Have You Done to Solange? (1971). Both films fall
into the then-popular 'troubled schoolgirl' sub-category, which were made
pretty much for audiences to thrill at the prospect of underage girls
(well, older actresses pretending to be them, at least) being sexualized
and murdered. When compared to, say, the Dallamano-co-scripted Enigma
rosso aka Trauma from a few years later, which featured a
tasteful plot-line involving young girls being dildo-raped to death, or
even the aforementioned Solange, which involved young girls being
stabbed to death in the vagina, this seems much more tame and classy. The
gore, violence and nudity are fairly minimal in this one and, though
there's some pretty crude dialogue describing the seedier aspects of the
story, most of the time is spent on the police investigation.
One thing hoping to separate this from the pack is its casting of Giovanna Ralli as assistant district attorney Vittoria
Stori. Since the detectives in these films from this time were almost
always male, it was somewhat novel (at least in concept) to have a female
leading up the investigation. Unfortunately, the execution sadly downplays
this angle. Nearly every character on the male-dominated police force
doubts her capabilities at doing her job simply because she happens to be
female, her gender is constantly addressed and everyone acts like it's big
of her to be able to enter a crime scene with a dead body present and not
faint or something. Now this would have been OK if the film had not made
such a big fuss about her gender to begin with or if Vittoria had been
allowed to be the heroine or otherwise prove her worth, but the writing
strictly forbids her from becoming a brave Jodie Foster-in-The Silence
of the Lambs type. And when all is said and done, she herself is
eventually reduced to the 'victim' role; cowering in the corner and having
to be rescued by a man. Afterward she's all but pushed off to the side so
that the male inspectors can take over the heavy lifting. It's also worth
noting that Vittoria's contributions to cracking the case become less
important as the film progresses.
Things begin with the discovery of the nude, dead body of 15-year-old
Silvia Polvesi ("Cheryl Lee" / Sherry Buchanan) found hanging
in a sublet attic apartment. Forensics reports uncover that she was
murdered prior to being hung. The same reports conclude that she was
something of a whore and had traces of semen found in every orifice except
her nostrils. A team of detectives - led by Claudio Cassinelli as
Inspector Silvestri - hit the city and start to piece the clues together.
They first interview Silvia's parents. Farley Granger plays the
neglectful father in a small, why'd-he-even-bother role. The mom (Marina
Berti) relates a hilarious flashback where she finds her daughter's
birth control pills and confronts her while she's topless in the bathroom.
("Sure, I know I'm still a child but I'd rather not have a kid every nine
months!") From there, they interview Silvia's shady psychiatrist Dr.
Beltrame (Steffen Zacharias), peeping tom Bruno Paglia (Franco Fabrizi), who'd been snapping pictures of Silvia
having sex from a building across the street from where her body was
found, a bunch of secretive schoolgirls and others.
A private detective who followed Silvia around for a few days is later
found dismembered in the trunk of a car and the killer - who's clad in a
leather outfit and motorcycle helmet and carries around a hilariously huge
meat cleaver - goes after the detective's mistress Rosa (Micaela
Pignatelli) in the hospital because she has some incriminating audio
recordings, as well as anyone else who threatens to uncover what's going
on. The motive? Well, it has something to do with a bunch of old perverts
and a teenage prostitution racket. Nothing new there.
This is all pretty by-the-numbers stuff. Lots of characters, lots of red
herrings, lots of silly dialogue (upon entering a bloody crime scene, the
chief inspector notes "That's two dead now... always assuming that this
isn't chicken blood.") and a very typical and very Italian score (a
bunch of young girls going "Nah nah... nah nah... nah nah!" over and over
again) by Stelvio Cipriani. Watchable? Sure. It's reasonably
well-made, has pretty good acting and production values and some neat
camera placements (like behind the handlebars of a speeding motorcycle). A
few of the suspense scenes are good, especially one where Vittoria is
pursued through a parking garage, as are a couple of gory moments (like a
policeman's hand getting hacked off). Sadly, none of that is enough to
overcome a general lack of creativity. Since nothing memorable or even
remotely original happens, this probably would have
benefited from being sleazier than it actually is. I'm also still trying
to figure out why it was acceptable to play audio recordings of underage
girls being coerced into anal sex by nasty old men but the "fuck" in "Go
fuck yourself" had to be bleeped out to protect our sensitive ears.
Giallo regular Mario Adorf (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
[1970], Short Night of the Glass Dolls [1971], etc.) co-stars as a
detective whose teen daughter is also involved. Dallamano also made the
interesting Dorian Gray (1970) and The Night Child (1975).
★★1/2
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