In a Puglia country, the young seminarian Hercules lives in a middle class family in shambles, as the plant organism that feeds on decaying organic matter, said saprophyte.
Priest failure, he goes for the driver and the sick-nurses in a wealthy family and becomes the lover of the noble Baroness Clotilde …Read More »
A woman becomes obsessed with a man she can’t have, and carries the torch for more than 15 years.
Synopsis:
‘An international co-production with dialogue in both Italian and English, this erotic thriller from writer Lucio Fulci and director Giuseppe Patroni-Griffi stars Tony Musante as Michael Parker, a successful American businessman living in Italy with his girlfriend. When she leaves on vacation, Michael is soon involved in a torrid, passionate affair with Marie (Laura Antonelli), a woman with whom he once enjoyed a one-night stand. This time, however, Marie is not about to let Michael off the romantic hook so easily, exacting horrific revenge on her lover. Further complicating Michael’s love life is Jacqueline, Marie’s nubile preteen daughter, whose attraction for Michael pits mother and daughter against each other in an incestuous love triangle.’
– Karl Williams (Rovi)Read More »
A young girl, Erminia (Agostina Belli) marries a handsome and successful but brutish local butcher, Antonio (Gianni Macchia) at the behest of her countess stepmother, Giulia (Françoise Prévost). The new wife turns out to be frigid on their wedding night, and the couple have a big fight. She leaves the town to stay with her older, married sister Angela (Ewa Aulin), and gets involved with her sister’s jaded swinger friends. The husband consoles himself by picking up prostitutes and carrying on with a sexy, voluptuous wealthy widow neighbor (Femi Benussi)right in his new mother-in-law’s villa. For some reason the mother-in-law considers this a turn-on and becomes sexually drawn to her loutish son-in-law.Read More »
Synopsis:
In A CIAMBRA, a small Romani community in Calabria, Pio Amato is desperate to grow up fast. At 14, he drinks, smokes and is one of the few to easily slide between the region’s factions – the local Italians, the African refugees and his fellow Romani. Pio follows his older brother Cosimo everywhere, learning the necessary skills for life on the streets of their hometown. When Cosimo disappears and things start to go wrong, Pio sets out to prove he’s ready to step into his big brother’s shoes but soon finds himself faced with an impossible decision that will show if he is truly ready to become a man. Read More »
Synopsis:
Sessomatto, or Crazy Love, or How Funny Can Sex Be? is a series of nine short sketches, all of them starring Giancarlo Giannini, and eight of the nine starring Laura Antonelli. They are:
Signora Sono Le Otto. A woman’s butler is in love with her.
Due Cuori E Una Baracca. (Two Hearts and a Shack.) A couple with a bunch of kids live in a shack and fight a lot.Read More »
The film consists of four stories plus epilogue, set in 19th-century Sicily. THE OTHER SON – A mother spends her life waiting for news from her two sons (emigrated to America) while ignoring her third, because he is the reincarnation of the bandit who raped her. MOON SICKNESS – a newly-wed peasant girl discovers that her husband goes mad every full moon. She arranges for a male friend to protect her, but they end up in bed together just as the moon emerges from behind a cloud. THE JAR – a rich landowner hires a master craftsman to repair a giant olive jar, but the craftsman gets trapped inside. REQUIEM – villagers band together in an attempt to force their landlord to let them bury their dead. CONVERSATIONS WITH MOTHER – the writer Luigi Pirandello talks with his aged mother about a story he always wanted to write, but which he never managed to capture in words.Read More »
Before it became possible (in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) to imprison young heirs and heiresses in mental institutions in order to gain control of their inheritances, greedy families had for centuries “given” their daughters to convents without the girls’ consent. Usually, such nunneries were only nominally religious, and their involuntary inhabitants lived a life of relative ease and luxury compared to their genuinely religious (or poorer) sisters. In the film Interno di un Convento, a zealous, handsome priest, who is the confessor for a convent full of such women, encourages the equally zealous abbess of one such institution to enforce the same strict rules on these unfortunate women that are applied to others. In doing so, they uncover a snake pit of sexual couplings, both lesbian and heterosexual, as well as many tools for masturbation. At the same time, a particularly disturbed inmate manages to poison herself and many of the other novitiates in yet another scandal which is covered up by church authorities.Read More »
Quote:
From sun-sparkled Naples to muddy medieval England for chapter two of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life — and with all the cornholing, golden showers, and silent-movie mugging Chaucer left out. The most amorphously anecdotal of the three, it’s also the one where the discrepancy between the movies’ notional life-affirmation and the brackish despairing of their execution emerges most grotesquely, every stab at “joyous” sexuality followed by the self-reflex of grotty degradation. Read More »
Quote:
The poet as scrounger-pimp-saint, his life and death. “Long live us thieves… we always know where to go.” Accattone “the cardboard man” (Franco Citti) in the Roman lower depths of dirty sidewalks and angelic statues, a terrain at once squalid and exalted. He ambles around the slums, soaks in his own thick mythology, is reminded of shame by the wife he abandoned (Paola Guidi), and apologizes to his son with one hand while stealing from him with the other. Madonna (Adele Cambria) at home with armfuls of children and Mary Magdalene (Silvana Corsini) in the streets, beaten up for kicks by idle mugs with peculiarly ethereal voices. In this netherworld of exploitation and debasement, a fair muse (Franca Pasut) and a prophecy (“You won’t even have your eyes to cry with”). If Pier Paolo Pasolini’s first film displays the appearance of neo-realism, it’s only as a launching pad for the harshest, most stylized assembly of the profane and the sacred; if his terse panning shots bring to mind Cimabue and other old masters, it’s only as a way to bend them. (The central image finds the antihero wetting his face in the ocean, grinding it into the sand and offering it to the camera, a grinning fresco peppered with birdshot.)Read More »