If Mario Bava’s career were a wine cellar, Kidnapped (aka Rabid Dogs) would be that dusty bottle tucked behind the vintage giallos and the glowing Gothic reds, labeled “opened once in 1974, drank warm in 1998.” It’s an anomaly—a lean, grimy crime thriller from a man known for stylish horror. Gone are the colored gels, fog machines, and statuesque women screaming in haunted castles. What we get instead is a sweaty, claustrophobic road movie, half of which takes place in a car filled with armed lunatics and a child with the world’s worst timing.
Some call it Bava’s lost masterpiece. Others call it a cinematic hostage situation. I call it 96 minutes of existential carpool karaoke with body odor and murder.
🚗 The Premise: Bad Guys, Worse Plans
The plot kicks off like a stick of dynamite someone forgot to light. A botched robbery leads to a dead body and three violent crooks on the run: Blade (the brain, and by “brain” we mean the least drool-soaked), 32 (the horn-dog maniac), and Riccardo (the obligatory loose cannon). These three geniuses take a woman hostage in a parking garage and hijack a car with a man and his sick child inside. From there, it’s a ride to nowhere, with stops at moral decay, vague threats, and the occasional roadside murder.
The rest of the film is a tense road trip through the Italian countryside, but not in the “Under the Tuscan Sun” way. More like “Under the Gun While Pissing in a Jug.”
🔫 The Criminals: High on Testosterone, Low on Brain Cells
You know you’re in trouble when the calmest person in the car is the six-year-old in the backseat. These aren’t professional crooks—they’re walking temper tantrums with sideburns. Blade barks orders like he read a pamphlet on hostage-taking in a dentist’s office. 32 spends most of the movie drooling over the female hostage like he’s trying out for Last Tango in Naples. And Riccardo is so erratic he makes a shaken soda can look stable.
They’re all terrible at their job. They argue constantly. They screw up every plan. They stop in the middle of nowhere to kill witnesses for no reason other than to fill the runtime with something besides aggressive mumbling. If Quentin Tarantino ever watched this movie, he probably lit a candle and whispered, “So this is what it looks like when criminals are boring.”
👩 The Hostages: Screaming, Sweating, and Silent Trauma
Lea Lander plays Maria, the kidnapped woman, and bless her—she puts in the work. She’s assaulted, threatened, and screamed at for nearly the entire film, yet still manages to maintain more dignity than anyone else onscreen. She doesn’t get many lines, because most of her performance is silent terror or restrained disgust, which might also be the audience’s reaction.
The man driving the car (Riccardo Cucciolla) plays a mild-mannered father with a sick son who’s allegedly on his way to a hospital. He’s the embodiment of “unshaven European decency,” which in this case means trying to reason with people who think a good decision is whichever one involves screaming louder.
🎥 The Direction: Bava’s Grime-Stained Experiment
What makes Kidnapped interesting—if not always enjoyable—is how un-Bava it feels. Gone is the visual decadence of Black Sunday or Blood and Black Lace. This is stripped-down, shot on location, and filmed mostly in real-time inside a sweltering car. It’s almost documentary-like in its commitment to misery.
Bava’s normally operatic flourishes are gone, replaced with tight framing, low-budget grit, and a focus on emotional suffocation. It’s admirable in its restraint—like a painter using only black, white, and sweat.
But it’s also repetitive. Once the car starts rolling, the movie shifts into neutral and never really climbs out. We watch the same cycles of yelling, threats, and awkward silences again and again. There’s no real suspense—just the inevitability that everyone in the car is either going to die or wish they had.
🎭 The Tone: Grim, Bleak, and a Bit of a Downer
The whole movie feels like a punch in the kidneys administered slowly over 90 minutes. It’s not fun. It’s not exciting. It’s not clever. It’s just brutal, relentless, and bleak. Which is maybe the point.
Bava trades horror for hopelessness, but doesn’t quite give us the layered psychology of a true noir. The bad guys aren’t fascinating—they’re just jerks. The hostages aren’t deeply drawn—they’re props with pulse rates. The ending, when it comes, is a twist—but not a satisfying one. It’s the kind of ending that makes you feel like the movie just called you stupid and walked away.
🔄 The Twist Ending (Spoilers, but whatever)
Yes, there’s a twist. The “mild-mannered dad” turns out to be… not so mild. In fact, he’s a cold-blooded killer who executes the crooks after using them to escape his own crime. Surprise! Or it would be, if you weren’t already too emotionally drained to care. It’s a bleak punchline to a joke no one told, and instead of making you rethink everything, it just makes you want to take a shower.
🍝 Final Thoughts: Cold Spaghetti Cinema
Kidnapped is like finding an old spaghetti Western left out in the sun: tough, crusty, and vaguely unpleasant. It’s technically impressive, emotionally hollow, and morally bankrupt. There are flashes of brilliance, like Bava remembering mid-shot that he’s Mario Bava. But those moments are buried under so much nihilism, you’d need a shovel and a six-pack to dig them out.
It’s a film that demands your respect more than your enjoyment. And like a failed heist, it leaves everyone bruised and no one richer.
Final Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5 sweaty steering wheels)
Because sometimes even genius directors just need to yell at strangers in a car for 90 minutes.