Rabid Dogs

Mario Bava’s many passionate fans are in no doubt about his status as a major auteur. He is one of the few named filmmakers whose works guarantee huge sales in new home entertainment formats, promoted under umbrella titles like The Mario Bava Collection. His work is shown at retrospectives across the world, and of course this screening of Cani arrabbiati (Rabid Dogs, 1974/1998) at the Melbourne Cinémathèque is part of a Mario Bava retrospective, not a season of Italian cinema, say, or ’70s crime thrillers. Decades in the making, Tim Lucas’ encyclopaedic Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (2007), funded by devoted subscribers and well over a thousand pages long, is surely the greatest single monument to a filmmaker in the history of film criticism.  

Auteurism in its basic, unreconstructed form involves tracing the themes, motifs, and stylistic traits of a filmmaker over a corpus of work. But in the case of an Italian genre filmmaker like Bava – whose output included horror films, Westerns, sex comedies, spy capers, mythological epics, and the distinctively Italian crime thrillers known as giallos – what exactly are the films to be studied? Like those of his colleagues in genre, few if any of Bava’s films exist in a discrete state. Many were cut or reedited by distributors adapting product to local needs. Films exist in different dubbed languages, with different soundtracks and different titles. Far from controlling his texts like a literary author, Bava was usually at the mercy of unscrupulous producers and distributors, most notoriously in the case of the film he made before Rabid Dogs, Lisa e il Diavolo (Lisa and the Devil, 1974). Conceived as Bava’s most personal work, this modernist ghost story set in an aristocratic Spanish townhouse was a commercial and critical failure on its original release. Producer and co-writer Alfredo Leone took control of the footage, responding to the global success of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) by adding extra scenes about exorcism and possession and released the result as La Casa dell’Exorcismo (House of Exorcism, 1975). Contemporary critics ignorant of the film’s history assumed that this was a tongue-in-cheek gesture on Bava’s part.¹

Bava conceived Rabid Dogs as a response to this betrayal. It would be a return to zero-degree filmmaking: a no-frills, realistic, narrowly focused crime movie that would dispense with the Bava brand of lavish camera movements in elaborate sets, supernatural and psychological mystification, and the use of filters and other special effects. The film would focus on a heist and its fallout in a modern Italian city and its environs, it would feature ‘real’, distinctly unglamorous protagonists, and it would be charged with ‘real’ violence and excess profanity. It would be ‘gritty’, take place in real time, and would be a response to the scuzzier but enormously profitable genre films of the era like Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) that were rendering Bava’s Gothic romanticism redundant.

Not for the first time in Bava’s career, the best laid plans soon gang aft agley. The producer went bankrupt before shooting finished and the cans were seized by creditors. About 15 years after Bava’s death in 1980, one of the film’s actors, Lea Lander,² acquired the surviving footage of Rabid Dogs. With few resources, she restored the film with German promoter Peter Blumenstock and presented it as Semaforo rosso (“Red Traffic Light”) at the 14th Brussels International Festival of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Thriller Films in 1996. Cost-cutting meant that a new score was not an option, and what Lucas calls Stelvio Cipriani’s “crude” and “unfinished” demos were used.³ Bava’s son and frequent assistant Lamberto was not involved in this restoration and criticised its deviation from Bava’s alleged intentions. Alfredo Leone gained control of the film’s rights in 2000 and initiated a new restoration that included Lamberto’s direction of additional scenes. This version, titled Kidnapped, premiered at an American Cinematheque Bava retrospective in Los Angeles in 2002.⁴

How does the Bava aficionado set about identifying the Bava factor of a film that was unfinished and now exists in several posthumous editions over which the filmmaker obviously had no control? The first thing to say about Rabid Dogs and Kidnapped is that neither version is radically different from the other. Each is roughly the same length. Produced with more resources, the image of Kidnapped is glossier, where that of Rabid Dogs is characterised by murky grain and lens flares. While Rabid Dogs remains claustrophobically focused on the car holding the surviving criminals, the woman they have taken hostage, and the driver whose car they hijack as he takes his sick son to the hospital, Kidnapped opens this scenario up by repeatedly cutting away to the wider context – the dispatch room monitoring events, the police cars and helicopters pursuing the criminals, and the unexplained phone calls of a distraught woman who appears to have a connection with someone in the car. This ‘opening up’ tends to slow down and dissipate the tension of the Kidnapped narrative.

Rabid Dogs hurtles with non-stop urgency from the credit sequence onwards. Kinetic images from the film are processed by an optical printer while Cipriani’s score – rhythmic, abrasive, and propulsive – spills over into the opening sequence, generating a breathless atmosphere that does not let up for the first reel. Kidnapped, by contrast, begins leisurely with tasteful credits in serif font on a black background. The horrible, slap bass music (also by Cipriani) is like something that might have played in a ’90s café bar and militates against viewer immersion. The use of a power ballad over the end credits makes a mockery of the film’s last-minute twist and its implied horror.

Lamberto Bava claims that Kidnapped is closer to Bava’s intentions as represented by conversations and written documents, and it has become the canonical version of the film (it was Kidnapped that was included in Kino Lorber’s Mario Bava Collection). As Lucas points out, however, Bava’s handwritten notes “were a chart of his ideas during production, not necessarily a list of changes he was determined to make.”⁵ They should not be seen as binding documents. Whether by accident or design, Rabid Dogs is a more coherent artistic experience than Kidnapped. Its creators are sensitive to motifs within Bava’s oeuvre, not least the motif of the circle that traps characters in space and time. Unlike Kidnapped, which opens straightaway with the heist, Rabid Dogs begins and ends with the ambivalent figure of Riccardo the driver (Riccardo Cucciolla), thereby initiating a narrative loop that contains, rather than is generated by, the heist, and implies larger forces than that event. We first see Riccardo at a car wheel; he ends the film by dialling a rotary telephone. Clocks, eyes, car wheels, and the toy that spins beside the murdered shopper in the underground car park are often sardonic variations on this image. Characters repeat gestures that become uncontrollable tics. The film’s score is maddeningly repetitive, circling as if pacing a cell, unable to develop – like the kidnapped Maria (Lea Lander) on the lookout for but failing to find an escape route. The film’s primary movement sees the car moving away from the city but then turning back, and wide shots emphasise circular roads and motorway bends. As with many of Bava’s films, Rabid Dogs presents an infernal vision; characters often refer to “hell”.  

This cosmic perspective warns us not to take Bava’s apparent embrace of modernity and rejection of period artifice at face value. Indeed, Rabid Dogs has more in common with his previous works than at first appears. The protagonists may be ‘ordinary’ compared to Bava’s usual vampires, superspies, witches, and serial killers. Bisturi (Aldo Caponi) admits that the thieves are losers whose lives will be transformed by their booty, and there is a class dynamic in the tensions between educated mastermind Doc (Maurice Poli) and the two feral subordinates he often chastises as children. As usual, however, Bava imbues these characters with resonances of Biblical narrative and classical mythology. There are provocative – and, in the context of a Catholic Italy led by the Christian Democrats since the end of the war – near-blasphemous allusions to the Christian story. Examples include the Flight of the Holy Family into Egypt (the kidnapped woman who looks after the baby is named Maria and dressed in a Marian blue blouse) and the Crucifixion – when a dying Trentadue (Luigi Montefiori) is dumped unceremoniously and ‘put down’ like a dying animal amid the rubble of the motorway, a cross-like telegraph pole can be seen in the distance. Classical narratives of voyage and return, such as The Odyssey and the Argonautica, are ironically invoked, while the series of stops that mark the fugitives’ drive ironically recall the Stations of the Cross or the episodic adventures of Ulysses.

Trentadue and Bisturi may be childlike, but they also embody figures from classical culture such as satyrs and bacchants, or the phallus-wearing figures in ancient ritual and theatre. After the distressing sequence where the pair chase a runaway Maria and sexually humiliate her, Trentadue lifts her up in an echo of artistic representations of the Apollo and Daphne myth, whereby a sexually delirious god pursues a resisting nymph. Trentadue and Bisturi are emblematic figures – oversized Trentadue (Bava’s camera in the car struggles to fit him in the frame), named after his giant phallus and with an uncontrollable libido, embodies Sex, while Bisturi, with his permanently exposed flick-knife (bisturi means scalpel or blade), is Violence. Both embody irrational energies that have been repressed by contemporary society and are brought to the surface – a familiar theme of the horror genre with which Bava is most associated.

The city where the heist takes place is deliberately unnamed, but the film was shot on the motorway between Florence and Rome, and Florence’s distinctive cathedral can be seen at least once in the distance from the car. Florence and Rome were the twin sites of the Italian Renaissance, that period central to Western culture when scholars and artists rediscovered the classical era and reinterpreted it for the present. If the film presents a flight from Florence, perhaps Bava – whose training as a fine artist placed him within this tradition – is calling time on the progressive Renaissance project and signalling a return to a new Dark Ages. After all, the kind of violence we see enacted in Rabid Dogs was commonplace in the Italy of the time, due to Mafia wars and the militant campaigns of left-wing groups like the Red Brigades. Where the Renaissance dreamed of restoring the ‘Golden Age’ of classical Greece and Rome, Italians of the 1970s lived through what was known as the Years of Lead. From the New Humanism to a world where human life was cheap.

Of course, there are many other critical approaches to Bava and cinema in general besides the auteur theory. The theory has long been out of favour in academia, although it continues to be a useful marketing tool for cinephiles, as confirmed by the recent blockbuster success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026). Regardless of ultimate authority, which version we prefer, or whether we consider all realised and hypothetical versions as one collective text, Rabid Dogs surely ranks among the highest achievements in that contested body of work we call for convenience ‘Mario Bava’.

Cani arrabbiati/Rabid Dogs (1974/1996 Italy 96 mins)

Prod: Lea Lander, Peter Blumenstock Dir: Mario Bava Scr: Alessandro Parenzo Phot: Emilio Varriano Ed: Angelo Marzullo Mus: Stelvio Cipriani

Cast: Riccardo Cucciolla, Maurice Poli, Aldo Caponi, Lea Lander, Luigi Montefiori 

Endnotes