What Have You Done to Solange?
                        (Redemption VHS)
                                  (1971) 
                                    review by Krug Stillo

SPOILERS ALERT!!!

It is unfair and tragic that this classic giallo does not receive the
attention and reverence it deserves. It raises way above the following
installments (What Have They Done to Your Daughters? and Red Rings of Fear)
in the trilogy involving pubescent female misbehaviour leading to murder in
girls-only schools.

Set in London (a fresh location change to begin with) an Italian teacher,
named Enrico (played by cult favourite Fabio Testi, star of Contraband, Red
Rings of Fear and Fulci’s Four of the Apocalypse and many more). He is bored
with his sexually repressed German wife so decides to indulge in an affair
with a pretty young student, Elizabeth (Galbo, who played Edna in Living
Dead at Manchester Morgue). Soon she is murdered along with a group of other
attractive females, all sexually violated with a knife (Bird with the
Crystal Plumage hints at similar violent sexual acts).

It transpires after Testi has had to defend himself as prime suspect in the
mystery that the Dean is the glad-in-dark-raincoat and fedora, black-gloved
murderer (an idea imitated, but done with less class in Juan Piquer Simon’s
Pieces). His daughter, Salonge was given an illegal abortion, hence the
knife found between the victim’s legs, and never recovered from the trauma.

It all sounds typical of the giallo films of the period, but What Have You
Done to Solange? Raises way above the typical efforts. Its story, mood and
good performances are engaging. Even the stab at the rekindling relationship
between Enrico and his wife is poignant. The cinematography by Aristide
Massaccesi (Joe D’Amato is only one of his many pseudonyms, director of the
gore films, Beyond the Darkness, Antropophagous: The Beast, Absurd and
many Emmanuelle rip-offs; like Mario Bava who was also a cameraman turned
director, but that’s where the similarity ends) is extremely elegant. The
music by Ennio Morricone is dulcet and unsettling. The film overall has the
nasty, enduring punch that refreshes you in places only Argento, Bava and
Soavi s epic giallos can reach.