Carlo Lizzani breaks the silence on THE TEENAGE PROSTITUTION RACKET, on Blu-ray from Raro Video USA.

After her father is killed in a factory accident, Rosina (Cinzia Mambretti, SEASON FOR ASSASSINS) turns down the marriage proposal of one of her father's friends and travels from Sardinia to Milan in search of work. Rooming with her cousin Elsa and her husband Sonny, she is put to work at their home business of manufacturing pirated music cassettes. Going out to the disco with her co-workers, she meets Salvatore (Nicola De Buono) – nicknamed "Velvet" supposedly for his good manners – and gives her virginity to him after a couple dates. When he is called back to Puglia to attend to his ailing father, he tells her that the only way he can stay is if she "makes sacrifices" for the both of them by streetwalking. She is naïve enough to agree to it, and then to work as a call girl to kinky clients. When she realizes that she is not the first of Salvatore's "fiancées", she seeks help from social workers but is forced back into prostitution by Salvatore and his gang whereupon she tries to escape back to Sardinia. Exasperated by her conservative mother's obsession with her purity and marrying her off to a successful man, daddy's girl Gisella (Cristina Moranzoni, Dario Argento's THE FIVE DAYS OF MILAN) attends a party thrown by her friend's older sister and flashy boyfriend Alberto (Sandro Pizzochero, THE SLASHER IS A SEX MANIAC). She is tricked in being photographed naked during a party game and Alberto uses the photographs as blackmail, putting her to work for a couple who ironically are also obsessed with her virginity as they cater to clients with a particular fetish. When not working for them, their other call girl Daniela (Annarita Grapputo, HALLUCINATION STRIP) gets her kicks out of playing the virgin and faking her first times. Tired of waiting to be discovered by her hypocritical father after she overheard him talking about his conquests with underage girls, she decides to bring her parents and her employers together for a summit. When couple Carmelo and Tina cannot sell off just-off-the-bus pregnant, fifteen-year-old Antonietta (Anna Curti, LIKE RABID DOGS) and discover it is too late for her to get an abortion, Tina finds a new bedmate when the girl is not servicing clients with a fetish for pregnant girls. The operation is threatened, however, when she reveals the identity of the baby's father (and it's not The Pope). After being raped by a hospital administrator, novice nun Albertina (Daniela Grassini, PLOT OF FEAR) discovers that she can only get turned on by having sex in dangerous places from shop changing rooms to telephone booths to elevators. She winds up in a reformatory run by nuns and becomes friends with Laura (Lidia Di Corato), a girl who escaped her poor family when her chauvinist father would not let her continue school. When her supposedly free-thinking modern boyfriend reveals his inner caveman by dumping her after taking her virginity, she signs up with an employment agency that turns out to be a front for a call girl service. Developing a hatred of men, she puts her trust only in her fierce protector of a dog until she discovers the pleasures of the lesbian sex. Interspersed throughout these stories is a comic relief subplot in which an elderly woman (make-up artist Bianca Verdirosa, SCREAM OF THE DEMON LOVER) and her thirteen-year-old granddaughter hitch along the interstate with the young girl servicing motorists while pursued by a gang of street thugs who want a cut of the business.

Inspired by a groundbreaking report on teenage prostitution, director Carlo Lizzani (KILL AND PRAY) weaves together vignettes dealing with how teenage girls can be lured or drawn into the prostitution racket and how difficult it can be to get out. Although it was known as STREETWALKER REPORT in Germany, TEENAGE PROSTITUTION RACKET – known as STORIES OF LIFE AND CRIME (RACKET OF CHILD PROSTITUTION) in Italy – avoids the "educational" framework, approaching the episodes not as documentary but in a sort of Neorealist fashion of cinematic reportage with quick and dirty photography, flat lighting, subdued colors, and blunt editing. The English dub track may make the story a bit campier than intended, but the addition of hardcore inserts shot by co-writer/collaborating director Mino Giarda (FOR A FEW DOLLARS LESS) on the other hand only adds to the grimy ambiance. The only girl who does get out of prostitution does so because she wants to hurt her loved ones, and it is implied that her outlook on sex and love is permanently warped by a cynicism born out of her experience with clients who she sees as emblematic of all men. The film does not moralize nor does it propose any solutions, and even the surviving participants in the disc's featurette suggest that little has changed in Italy since other than the nationalities preyed upon. While not the most grim Lizzani film, viewers expecting an Italian variation on the SCHOOLGIRL REPORT films are in for a downbeat evening.

Never released in the United States, TEENAGE PROSTITUTION RACKET was popular in the UK before the Video Nasty crackdown garnering four VHS releases: two simultaneously-released editions as THE PROSTITUTION RACKET and PROSTITUTE running just over ninety minutes with the same company releasing another version possibly only available in adult shops as BLUE DEEP THROAT, followed by a later edition under the PROSTITUTE title while an English-dub running 115 minutes was released in Greece with the hardcore inserts. The original Italian running time clocked in at just over 120 minutes while the version with hardcore inserts ran 128 minutes. The former version was released on DVD by Raro in Italy with Italian audio only and a non-anamorphic transfer while Germany's X-Rated Kult Video first released a German version running ninety-seven minutes followed by the longest edit at 122 minutes (PAL speed). Raro's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray runs 115:01 and appears to be either the original export version or the longest assembly of the film that could be done with just English audio without hardcore inserts. I have not seen any earlier English editions so I am not sure if the pre-credits sequence in the Italian version was always moved until after the first scene in the train station but the DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track clips the beginning of Morricone's title theme to do it (the credits are in Italian). The image looks flattish and drab, partially due to the cinematography that DP Lamberto Caimi (GANG WAR IN MILAN) called "visual seediness" and partially due to Raro and rights owner Minerva's HD mastering standards.