Tasteless, blood-splattered crime sleaze that’s made with real wit and facility by Ruggero Deodato. It’s a film that bites, groin-kicks, tortures, eye-gouges, shoots, twists necks and razor-slashes its way for attention in the crowded Italian exploitation scene.
It kicks off with the best low-budget motorcycle chase ever filmed—a stunt-filled tear through Rome’s busy rush hour (shot with no city permits, so goes the legend)—that ends with gleeful police brutality and then keeps us on the hook wondering how low the morality here will go. Everyone here is a jerk, including our two main character cops (hyper-pretty boys Marc Porel and Ray Lovelock) who treat the job as a license to kill or sleep with anyone they like. They’re the loosest of loose cannons. Every call they answer ends with a pile of corpses. These guys could NOT get away with this in real life (even in the wild and woolly 1970s).
Funny thing is that Deodato treats them less like heroes and more like comical little boys with badges and guns. They live together, even sleep in the same room together. They share their girls, ride together on the same motorcycle, play outrageously dangerous gun target practice games with each other and never, ever argue over their extreme tactics. They are one mind with two guns.
You could read gay subtext into that (many writers do), but I don’t. Everything here is so insane on its surface that subversive readings of it are actually more TAME than the face value. This movie is weirder if these guys are heterosexual. About as far as I’ll go into Theory Land with this one is that beneath all of the violence and ugliness, this movie is really a comedy. For psychos.