Strong and Moving!

An Exercise In Nonsense

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

This Italian suspenser seems to take the American film DOG DAY AFTERNOON as its main source of inspiration, as after a hit-and-miss first half it turns into a tense hostage drama with a restaurant (!) replacing the more typical bank-and-cashiers scenario. The structure of the film is unusual, to say the least, as there is no definite beginning, middle or end. The film just carries on until a logical conclusion and presents the "facts" in a cold, realistic fashion. Once again, as with Umberto Lenzi's polizia films, the theme is of the young, oppressed working classes taking revenge against the middle and upper classes by torturing, raping and murdering them. Only to make matters more complicated, one of the two criminals is himself a member of the upper class elite, turned over to the dark side (as it were) via drugs and easy persuasion.The film opens as a static social drama and takes about twenty minutes to become focused. This is the genuinely shocking moment when an innocent young girl and her middle-aged neighbour are brutally raped by the pair of doped-up thugs and the older woman ends up being gruesomely stabbed to death. The pair flee and then embark on the usual anti-social activities; beating up folk, stealing, and generally causing a disturbance. The film really comes together during the initial hostage situation which then becomes drawn-out overnight. What follows is a tense, gripping drama which becomes increasingly harder to watch as various hostages are killed, suffer and are subjected to sexual intimidation by the two anti-heroes. The police presence - led by a moustachioed inspector - talks a lot and negotiates, but their efforts prove to be a failure on the most part.Although the trappings of the polizia genre are present and correct, this is by no means a typical crime thriller. Instead it fits into the small sub-genre of hostage/negotiation movies and stands as a well-made and suspenseful example of such. Technical values are a plus, with great filmography and a wonderful exciting piece of music which pops up occasionally. Although short on action sequences, the film has plentiful bloody violence and nudity to appeal to the exploitation market. The acting is generally of a high standard, especially with the two leads Mario Cutini and Marco Marati who manages to develop their characters convincingly into three-dimensional human beings instead of being stock bad guys. DAY OF VIOLENCE is a mainly forgotten film these days, which is a shame because it ranks as one of the stronger examples of adult Italian cinema, treading the fine line between being shocking and in bad taste.

Once you get hooked to the Poliziotteschi genre - like I am - there are literally heaps of obscure titles to discover, but in all honesty and fairness a lot of them only contain two or three great sequences while the rest of the film is dull and disappointing. Not coincidentally, the vast majority of these obscure and disappointing movies are written and directed by unknown Italians. If you want guaranteed euro-crime top quality material, you better stick to the works of guys like Umberto Lenzi, Fernando Di Leo, Stelvio Massi, Enzo G. Castellari and perhaps two or three others. The writer/director of this "Day of Violence" is named Luigi Petrini and he clearly isn't one of the more successful names in the industry. The screenplay contains a handful of bright ideas and the film features a few interesting highlights, but most of the running time I was bored and too easily distracted. The good aspects include that the themes of Petrini's script effectively criticize the contemporary Italian political & social circumstances (desperate youth, unemployment, economic recession and revolt against the upper class…) and that the events of the entire film take place during one and the same day. Two twenty-something and sexually frustrated blokes meet each other outside a private party. One got kicked out just before he could have sex with the daughter of the house and the other one couldn't perform when he had the chance. Driven by anger and drugs, they decide to go the girl's apartment and "finish what they started". They rape the poor girl but also murder their neighbor and descend further into madness. The next brilliant decision they make is to invade a fancy restaurant and take all customers hostage at gunpoint. From then onward, you'd expect "Day of Violence" to turn into a blatant imitation of "Dog Day Afternoon" but it doesn't really. The Al Pacino classic was a harsh parody about the influence of the media, but here the action primarily remains indoors and reverts to dreadful clichés like Stockholm Syndrome etc. There's a lot of talking but very little action and even less violence. The acting performances are mundane and the sleaze is unpleasant, but the good news is that the soundtrack is exhilarating and the climax is short 'n' sweet!

Day of Violence is a little bit different from the usual Polizi flick; and if it wasn't for the fact that Sidney Lumet's masterpiece Dog Day Afternoon was released two years earlier; I might say that this film was quite original. Still, in spite of being another Italian rip-off - this film is not bad at all. The film takes the basic idea of two men holding a bunch of people hostage and gives it a much more exploitative theme and the film does have a 'Last House on the Left' vibe running throughout which ensures that the atmosphere is always nasty and overbearing. The plot focuses on two men who decide to rape a woman. Not long after the rape, the cops are out looking for them and they decide that the only way they can get out of the mess they are in is to go to a high class restaurant and take the customers hostage. So, they set out and buy a couple of guns and walk into the restaurant before announcing that nobody is to leave! The cops soon turn up on the scene and we watch the action from the inside as the criminals interact with the hostages.The main point of Dog Day Afternoon was to show how a media circus can be created. This film doesn't follow that point or any other really, although there is some reference to the lack of jobs going in Italy at the time. Day of Violence is an extremely rare film and hasn't got itself the fan base of some of the Italian rip-offs of more popular films, which is a bit of a shame as this film is likely to please many genre fans. Day of Violence was obviously shot on a budget and the production values are not particularly impressive; although the film is actually fairly well directed and while nobody in the cast will win any awards; the ensemble of performances comes off quite well also. The film adheres to the template set out by Dog Day Afternoon fairly closely and the only real difference between the two is that this film is a bit nastier. There's not a great deal of violence in the film, which is a bit disappointing considering the title and the rest of the genre that it comes from and that is a bit of a failing point for the film. Still, if you can find a copy of this one; it's well worth a look!

A better than average Italian crime thriller for two reasons: firstly the story happens during one day, which creates dramatic tension, and secondly there aren't too many characters to follow.Also the motivations for the protagonists are carefully construed from social and psychological issues such as poverty and masculinity. Apart from all this the film still delivers on the level usually expected from Italian seventies genre films: lots of unnecessary violence, often sexual, and nudity too.Recommended for fans of the genre. Released on video in Finland in the early eighties.