I worked in a pizza joint for about 6 years, and I discovered something almost cult-like about the industry. If you work for a major company that is franchised or corporate owned, you are kind of like a sell-out. Your pizzas are mass-produced using measuring equipment and charts to record dough count. Employees come and go, and the turnover is staggering. However, if you are privately owned and operated, and you are in the vicinity of other privately owned and operated stores, you are protected by an unspoken "private industry code". If you run short of straws or napkins, you can bum a box off the guy three blocks up and he won't give you a sour look or worry about how it will effect his books. Pizza joints stick to their own, and if you are working hard and not selling out, someone will have your back. And even if your food isn't the greatest looking concoction on the block, it is still appreciated and enjoyed for what it is. Italian horror is kind of like pizza.
Of all the crap I have sat through in my undying loyalty to the genre, What Have You Done To Solange? has been the best experience of the bunch. As far as Giallo goes, it doesn't get much better than this.
An Italian Phys-Ed teacher is under suspicion for killing a young girl at a Christian academy. All eyes are directed to him because he is having an affair with a 17 year old student and they were "stealing time together" in the vicinity of one of the killings. This sleazy guy would make a perfect murderer because he has all the unsavoury traits of one : he is a foreigner (the version I saw set the action in England while our lead performer works with a thick overdubbed Italian accent), he is having an illicit affair with a minor, and he has that perfect greasy charm that killers have in these sort of flicks. Actually the actor ( Fabio Testi) resembles a young Sean Connery after a beer or two. I'm sure I might be the only heterosexual male willing to admit that at this point...
So what do we have? We have a series of brutal murders of a bunch of young girls. Each is found with a hacking knife lodged in a more than uncomfortable place (is there actually a comfortable place for a knife to be inserted?). We have the usual suspects: the aforementioned Phys-Ed teacher who is playing hooky with a student, the seedy-looking principal, the stick-up-the-ass uber-bitch wife, a priest or two with a mischevious gleam in his eye. You get the idea. Something is rotten in this part of the world, and the police aren't a hell of a lot of help. After a few more killings (some filmed at a jarringly fish-eyed P.O.V angle) a strange plot begins to unfold. It turns out that these girls being killed have more in common than just being girls at an academy. They all had a secret, a terrible secret... one that concerns a former student named... well, figure it out.
Solange came out in 1972 at the height of the Giallo movement. It's production values are superb, and look incredible on the dvd transfer. The music has that perfect pitch and melody needed for movies of this type - it's pretty enough and able to be easily looped for editing purposes yet irritating enough to be stuck in one's head for an extended period after the film has been turned off. We have the great Italian composer Ennio Morricone ( A Fistful Of Dollars, The Untouchables) to thank for that little mental treat the morning after a viewing. If you take a little time and let yourself sort of "sink" into the movie, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how it transcends the typical depths of schlock and drivel that one usually culls from these places. Sure, the plot turns out to be rather typical. Sure, the killer is revealed the way they always get revealed, with a flourish and a "oh... THIS is how I did it" explanation that comes a wee bit too late from those involved. But you know what? This movie stayed with me the way "legit" films do. For some reason I was reminded of The Deer Hunter and The Last Picture Show when I was thinking of it the next day. There is a soul to What Have You Done To Solange? that transcends it past the schlock and poor voice dubbing (and oh my friends and neighbours do we get that in spades on this one) and gives the viewer a real feeling of grime and seedy goings-on in a small academy town outside of London. I liked it, and recommend it heartily.
It should bear mentioning that I only picked this one up because I saw that it featured actress Camille Keaton ( I Spit On Your Grave) as the title character. Why this actress didn't go on to become a bigger scream queen is beyond me. Her facial features alone encompass the poise of Nicole Kidman, the depth of Meryl Streep, and the passion of Jodie Foster. I'm assuming that Grave forced her into a pigeon hole. Bummer. |