Since having read a while ago that Swedish director Arne Mattsson has recently been re-evaluated as the "creator" of the Giallo sub-genre thinks to his 1958 feature Mannekin In Red,I was thrilled to find this 1973 movie,which would give me the chance to see the creator of the Giallo at work.The plot:Being locked in her bedroom as an attempt to make her go "cold turkey",Lotta finds the pain of wanting a final "hit" incurable,and ends up committing suicide by jumping out of her bedroom window.Getting to Lotta's "rehab" building just a bit to late,Lotta's brother Stefan is devastated to discover that all the drug dealers who feed Lotta's habit have finally led to her taking her own life.Calecting the few artifacts in his sister's possession,Stefan discovers a reel to reel tape containing audio of Lotta talking to some of the cities biggest drug dealers.Liserning to the tape,Stefan hears his sister call some of the drug dealers by their full names,which leads to him deciding to go on a hunt for them,in order to get revenge for the fatal damage that they did to his sister.View on the film:Although screenwriter Olov Svedelid is mostly known for a series of Nordic Noir novels based around a cop called Roland Hassle, Svedelid surprisingly only includes a few brief Giallo/mystery moments, (such as the reel to reel tape) and instead goes for a revenge-drama plot for most of this fun film's running time.Disapointingly revealing the voices on the tape pretty early on, Svedelid regains some ground from that lost potential by focusing on the wonderfully deranged,seedy gangsters,with two of the best ones being one who has a dummy in his mouth the whole time,and the other one wearing razor gloves which would leave a scar on Freedy Kruger's face.Showing some smooth stylish flashes with a film projection light being used to create a "flickering" effect in a room,director Mattsson makes some of the movies stupider moments go down smoothly thanks to displaying a real relish of being in on the joke,which is extremely noticeable in scenes where Mattsson shows his ruthless gangsters to be slipping on ice all over the place.

After his drugged-out sister jumps off a building, the son of a wealthy judge, along with his journalist friend and his girlfriend, decide to go after the gang who was using the innocent girl as an "angel" to sell drugs to other innocent kids. Starting with a babbling audiotape his sister made while high, he traces the drug source to a gangster with the unfortunate name of "Harry Balski" (Heinz Hopf). The gangster in turn repeatedly tries to kill him and kidnaps his girlfriend. . .This is a 70's Swedish crime thriller. It obviously owes a lot to American and Italian crime thrillers from the era, but compare to those the violence here is much more oblique. And unlike the more notorious Swedish crime film "Thriller--a Cruel Picture" (which was actually banned in Sweden and pretty much everywhere else) there is not a lot of graphic sex (where American and Italian films often used graphic violence to compensate for a lack of explicit sex, Swedish films often used graphic sex to compensate for a lack of violence). Still, this is a worthwhile film. It still has a very perverse and depressingly sleazy atmosphere. It's also very realistic in a way. The protagonist does not immediately turn into a tough guy when his sister gets killed--he usually gets his butt kicked, and survives only due to luck and the incompetence of his opponents. The mob boss, rather than being pure evil, is actually rather adverse to violence and has little control over his crazed, drugged out, and generally incompetent crew. One would-be assassin only pretends to kill the protagonist and then tries to extort money from the boss. Another hood is a babbling junkie who draws all kinds of attention to himself as he and his partner attempt to dump the tied-up, unconscious hero into the bay.Actor Heinz Hopf played more sinister creeps in other Swedish exploitation films like "Exposed" and the aforementioned "Thriller". He is intentionally somewhat sympathetic here, trapped between his own crazed and incompetent underlings and the truly corrupt, powerful people who are behind him. Swedish director Arne Matson had a career as a "respectable" Swedish director, but eventually started dabbling in more exploitative fare like the Franco Nero lolita-sploitation film "The Girl" and this. He certainly knows what he's doing, and that really comes through, even with the low-budget and hacky English dubbing.

This Swedish film was a commercial and critical failure at its release in Sweden in 1972. Perhaps the time was not mature for this type of strange crossover film. SMUTSIGA FINGRAR is a mix of police thriller-filmnoir-sleaze-(unintentional comedy). It is modeled after American thrillers of the time, yet the screenwriter seem slightly ignorant of the genre. The characters are very stereotyped to the point of being caricatures. Yet this doesn't matter as the film becomes an explosive mix of thriller and comedy.To be best appreciated, one needs to know Swedish, as the hilariously funny lines said doesn't translate well into English, lines that were made to sound hip and tough at the time, but come out as awkward and cheesy: "Släck fanskapet" (in English it reads something like: 'Put the jerk out'). Someone wrote in an review that the lines sounded as if they were taken out of a 1940's film, which is not that far from the truth.The film is crammed full of thriller clichés: The bad-guys are headed by an psychopathic,suave,elegant,almost aristocratic master criminal who uses quotes in French like "Il est mort" (he is dead). His henchmen are of very low intelligence,sadistically brutal,and psychotic. Their adversaries, the two good guys of the plot are girl-photographers that are both quite naive yet do their best to unravel the crime and its instigators.The jazzy music score by Georg Riedel is very good, slightly reminiscent of the Seventies Blaxploitation flicks, with good use of brass. The cinematography is quite good and well-lit, and lovers of colorful Sixties/Seventies Pop Art Design get their share here. SMUTSIGA FINGRAR may fail to be taken seriously as a drama/thriller, yet it is the most entertaining film of its kind I've seen. Suspense,drugs,murder,sex,abuse,nudity,torture,car chases and badly staged fist fights. Also see if you can spot sex starlet Marie Ekorre who appears briefly in a bordello scene.If you're tired of boring Hollywood thriller, then this Scandinavian gem is for you. It is a genre rarity that is not to be missed!!

This movie is pretty lame.Interesting story but boring.Heinz Hopf who plays one of the main crooks is as good as always but the rest of the cast is nothing to cheer about.I didnt like this movie at all.No suspense and no real action.Only reason to watch this movie is because it is Swedish and very hard to come by.I will never watch it again.