Interestingly, gutsy Italian director Massimo Dallamano's adrenaline-spiked 'Colt 38 Special Squad' is both a bravura, prototypically high octane example of the increasingly popular Poliziotteschi film cycle from the mid-to-late 70s, but expresses far less overtly reactionary sensibilities of the more rumbustious, Gung ho Umberto Lenzi titles, as in this specific instance the hero cop Inspector Vanni (Marcel Bozzuffi) certainly doesn't employ the hyperbolically violent, fists-of-lead approach of a fiesty Franco Nero, or moustachioed maniac Maurizio Merli, Vanni is merely a stolid law man now uncomfortably forced by severe circumstances to head a specially trained elite squad of daredevil, motorcycle riding cops in a attempt to stem the bloody swathe of violent crime currently terrorizing the city, only to discover they remain wholly ill-equipped to cope with the gruesomely genocidal modus operandi of brutal psychopath 'The Marseillaise' (Ivan Rassimov), his meticulously merciless bombing campaign very soon threatens to bring the beleaguered Turin to its knees! Maestro Dallamano robustly invests 'Colt 38 Special Squad' with the very same white-knuckle exhilaration as his grisly Giallo hybrid 'What Have They Done To Your Daughters', and while many Poliziotteschi concern the bellicose B-Movie retribution of a maverick 'Thug-Trashing Cop', there is a bleaker, nihilistic tone to Dallamano's doom-laden crime thriller, following the increasingly desperate travails of greatly oppressed inspector Vanni, ultimately being overwhelmed by the sheer atrocity of The Marseillaise's monumentally murderous scheme to hold the entire city to ransom endows 'Colt 38 Special Squad' with an altogether more misanthropic coda, and the exciting film's brusque climax isn't so much a catharsis as prescient food for thought, as maniacal zealots only blow up civilians in the movies, don't they?