This film opens with a bizarre disco dancing troupe acting like robots while holding glittery table tennis rackets. I'm not even sure if that looked cool at the time.
Luc Merenda is a cop with a gambling problem who is knee deep in pussy, both the feline and the female versions, but that doesn't mean he's not out for a little more. When Janet Agren turns up in his office, Luc raises one of his draught-exluder sized eyebrows and agrees to take on her case. That case being the suspected murder of her rich millionaire brother who was previously though to have killed himself. Janet suspects her brother's trophy wife Carla, who remarried within one month of the guy dying.
Tied in with all this is a spate of robberies being carried out by amateur criminals, including one at a racecourse Luc frequents, and another at an office where Luc gets in a good car chase before one of the robbers smashes his brains out on a truck. Eventually the convoluted plot begins to straighten out as the guy who married the dead guy's wife turns out to be a loan shark making people carry out crimes to repay their debts, and don't get me started on the giallo-like twists at the end!
What starts out as a possible comedy turns slightly dull in the middle and then becomes good in the final third, as the bad guys kill Luc's cat, and his girlfriend Luciana Paluzzi, but especially the cat. There's another appearance by those crappy disco dudes, someone gets mauled to death by dogs and most strange of all, Luc goes to a shooting range full of robots. The sight of Luc shooting people in bad wigs pretending to be robots comes out of nowhere, makes no sense, and has nothing to do with the plot.
Much more fun than Prosperi's Last House on The Beach, Deadly Chase still shows that the Eurocrime film's plot of a maverick, unorthodox cop who does things his way, doesn't take orders from the Man, and still takes time to bed every woman he meets is only good the first hundred times you see it.
I'm digging the disco soundtracks from this era, however.
