Italy

Synopsis
Tinto Brass scored his first major international success with this shocking but stylish tale of decadence in the Third Reich, inspired by a true story. Madame Kitty (Ingrid Thulin) is the proprietor of one of Berlin’s most luxurious brothels, where many members of the Nazi high command are her regular customers. Kitty is approached by Helmut Wallenberg (Helmut Berger), an S.S. official who orders her to shut down her business and act as his partner as he founds a new bordello, which will exclusively cater to the elite of the Nazi Party and the German military. Unknown to Kitty, Wallenberg’s brothel has been staffed entirely by women recruited by the S.S. for their loyalty to the Reich, and each room has been equipped with secret recording devices, which will allow Wallenberg and his staff to not only gather blackmail material against troublesome officers, but to discover who might be expressing disloyal thoughts about Hitler’s regime when their guard is down. Margherita (Teresa Ann Savoy), a pretty young prostitute working for Kitty, is especially devoted to both her job and her country, but when she falls in love with Biondo (John Steiner), a German officer and frequent customer who has grown disillusioned with both the war and National Socialism, she discovers the true purpose of “Salon Kitty,” and sets out to destroy the operation, with Kitty’s help. Both a scandal and a success in Europe, Salon Kitty initially played the exploitation circuit in the United States in an edited version titled Madame Kitty, though the shorter version still earned an X rating.
~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
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The widow Rosaria moves to Milano from Lucania with her 4 sons, one of whom is Rocco. The fifth son, Vincenzo, already lives in Milano. In the beginning, the family has a lot of problems, but everyone manages to find something to do. Simone is boxing, Rocco works in a dry cleaners, and Ciro studies. Simone meets Nadia, a prostitute, and they have a stormy affair. Then Rocco, after finishing his military service, begins a relationship with her. A bitter feud ensues between the two brothers, which will lead as far as murder… Written by Kornel Osvart Read More »

Description: “Though today he is revered for his graphic horror films, writer-director Lucio Fulci got his start in comedy. With this in mind, The Eroticist makes perfect sense — it continues the delirious stylistic inventiveness of ‘Perversion Story’ and ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’, yet its bawdy humor fits in perfectly with his origins in the cinema. The nonsensical English title implies that the film is a cash-in on William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, yet the film — originally titled The Senator Likes Women! — dates from a year before the American blockbuster. Make no mistake about it: this is as far removed as imaginable for the horror genre, at least in terms of content, although the sharp satirical barbs at the Catholic Church and Italian politics fits in comfortably with many of his better known works.Read More »

IMDB user review:

Mattei’s trashy sexual “pseudomentary”
9 July 2006 | by Scott-from-Modesto (United States)

Libidomania is great for what it is, an ambitious and exploitive attempt to categorize and critique every manner of paraphilia in graphic detail, but it all has no shock value as most of the movie is comprised of dramatizations of different fetishists in action and different extreme angles on sexuality from around the world. You get some nice gory dramatizations such as a penile dismemberment (a great effect that beats the one in Cannibal Holocaust hands down), a sex-change operation, and a gut-slicing necrophiliac plus a woman wearing a prosthetic penis to stand in for a transsexual. Figure in some sleazy historical scenes like a nun getting head from a bishop, too. At least Mattei keeps it sleazy.Read More »

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In first century Rome, two student friends, Encolpio and Ascilto, argue about ownership of the boy Gitone, divide their belongings and split up. The boy, allowed to choose who he goes with, chooses Ascilto. Only a sudden earthquake saves Encolpio from suicide. We follow Encolpio through a series of adventures, where he is eventually reunited with Ascilto, and which culminates in them helping a man kidnap a hermaphrodite demi-god from a temple. The god dies, and as punishment Encolpio becomes impotent. We then follow them in search of a cure. The film is loosely based on the book Satyricon by Gaius Petronius Arbiter, the “Arbiter of Elegance” in the court of Nero. The book has only survived in fragments, and the film reflects this by being very fragmentary itself, even stopping in mid-sentence.
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The New York Times review, Published: October 16, 1972

Roger Greenspun wrote:
“Fellini’s Roma” is perhaps three-quarters Fellini and one-quarter Rome; a very good proportion for a movie. Although an appreciation of the city informs every part of the movie, Rome is not so much the subject as the occasion for a film that is not quite fiction and surely not fact, but rather the celebration of an imaginative collaboration full of love and awe, suspicion, admiration, exasperation and a measure of well-qualified respect.Read More »

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Lucio Fulci and Edwige Fenech? Yep, that’s right. Like so many other Italian directors of the time Fulci did a lot of sex comedies so perhaps it was inevitable that at some point he would have crossed paths with one of the leading actresses. In La Pretora (the French release title translates as The Judge and the Whore) Fenech plays twin sisters, one a judge and the other a porn star. Enemies of the judge devise a plan to confuse the two and create problems. Or at least that’s what seems to be happening since there’s no subtitles and they would be helpful in parts. It’s a bit slow going at first but there’s a good bit of Fenech later in the film (the screenshot of Fenech combing her pubic hair kept being deleted by the image host so I left it out). For Fulci fans this is only for completists because it’s not very Fulci-ean and has zero horror elements. It could have been done by numerous directors. Fenech fans, though, will consider it a must.Read More »

Basically a good murder mystery, ‘The Right Distance’ brings in contemporary issues like anti-foreign prejudices, marriages arranged with Eastern European women online, kids with computer smarts adults lack, and how these changes disrupt life in a little town. A beautiful young woman named Mara (Valentina Lodovini) comes to replace a schoolteacher in the Po Valley. Trouble ensues. One person in town doesn’t miss a trick: 18-year-old Giovanni (Giovanni Capovilla). He is highly motivated to become a journalist and has persuaded Bengivenga (Fabrizio Bentivoglio), an editor at a big city paper, to allow him to work as a low-profile stringer in the town. His job is to keep his eyes and ears peeled without anybody finding out that he’s a reporter. Naturally, he’s good with the Internet. He helps Mara set up her connection and in the course of dong so finds out her email password. Giovanni checks in on it from home and starts reading the accounts of day to day experiences she emails to her best girlfriend back home. Thus over time he finds out that she’s attracted to the local bus driver, Guido (Stefano Scandaletti), and that Hassan (Ahmed Hefiane), who runs the garage he himself works in, is attracted to her–and is stalking her outside her house in the dark. He also knows that Amos (Giuseppe Battiston), the tobacconist who’s making a fortune taking people fishing, went out in his boat with Mara and made some moves on her. It’s Amos who has the Romanian wife chosen from an online “catalog.” Hassan is an older (but handsome) Tunisian man. He has family members in the area but isn’t married. He has been in Italy a long time.Read More »

The young, pretty and shy Angela Duvall is jailed for murder in some Latin American country. In the prison she gets brutally “initiated” by the other inmates. The nice, honest and handsome prison doctor believe she’s innocent and tries to help her out.

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Covering for her brother, who killed a Brazilian drug lord, Angela Duvall is sent to a women’s prison. Trapped behind bars, Angela’s beauty excites the passions in her fellow prisoners and the guards alike. Unfortunately, she also catches the eye of a group of inmates who work for the man her brother murdered. In order to live long enough for her brother’s confession to arrive, she must escape with her fellow prisoners into the dark Brazilian jungle!Read More »