Rabid Dogs
Rabid Dogs is an Italian film directed by Mario Bava. It was made in 1974 but the film was seized by the courts during the final stages of production when the producer went bankrupt after the main investor in the film died in a car crash. It was not released until 1998.
Filmed originally as Semaforo Rosso (translation: Red Light), the film was released in 1998 on VHS as Rabid Dogs / Cani Arrabbiati, and re-released in 2007 (in a slightly reedited form) on DVD as Kidnapped. The original Italian title referred to a key scene in the film in which the characters make a fatal stop at a traffic signal, an occurrence that triggers all of the events of the plot, which involves a group of bank robbers and the hostages they take who they order to drive them from Rome to another location.
Plot synopsis
Four ruthless criminals wait outside the gates of a pharmaceutical company to steal the pay wages from an armored truck which will arrive at the gated complex. Upon the truck's arrival, the heavily armed thieves hold up the truck, killing a number of people in the process. But during the getaway, the thieves' car is riddled with bullets from the company's security guards which kill the getaway driver, and damage the car so that it's leaking fuel. The clean-cut, cunning leader of the group, known only as Doc (Maurice Poli), and his two vicious and scruffy cohorts, the knife-wielding Blade (Aldo Caponi) and the hulking seven-foot tall Thirty-Two (Luigi Montefiori) are overjoyed at the stolen cash they now have. But when their car stalls in a downtown part of Rome, they are forced to flee on foot into an underground car park, pursued by the police. The criminals grab two women as hostages, and when Blade accidentally kills one, the police, seeing the other female hostage Maria (Lea Lander) in danger, back away, allowing the criminals to steal her car and make an escape from the car park.