Ida Di Benedetto Movies

The baroness may have plenty of money on her hands, but political changes in Italy have significantly altered her place in society. Rather than be snubbed in Rome, pleading illness, she has retreated to a villa in the countryside that has fallen almost into ruin, accompanied by only one other companion, her poor cousin. The cousin is soon involved in an amorous relationship with a handsome priest. However, a con-man soon arrives on the scene, scheming for the fortune the baroness is alleged to possess. Using his sexual allure to entangle the baroness, her cousin, and the priest, he then employs his intimacies to drop a word here and another there, inspiring the two women to get together in a plan to murder the priest. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

This is a drama about a mother's determination to save her daughter from a life of prostitution. Eva (Ida Di Benedetto) is working hard in a factory in Turin when she gets word from her mother in Naples that her 15-year-old daughter has disappeared. Actually, the daughter intends to enter a bordello and live independently as a prostitute. Eva immediately heads home to find her; what follows is a series of trials and tribulations, beatings and threats and involvement by the mob. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In this series of multiple vignettes for a teen audience, director Salvatori Piscicelli switches between two nights of concerts under an enormous tent, and the myriad romantic liaisons and dreams of a wide range of musicians and fans. One of the musicians, in-between his times on stage, romances a recalcitrant girlfriend (Marina Suma) and fends off attempts by organized crime to buy him out. In the meantime, his girlfriend is also fending off demands from the Mafia to buy "protection" for her business, a beauty salon. Other musicians, singers, and groupies strike up relationships, or end them, in this continual series of love, music, sex, and drugs during a brief Naples concert tour. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The real-life tragedies wrought by organized crime are mirrored in this fast-paced, suspense-filled action thriller by Damiano Damiani about Mario (Michele Placido), a young man from a Sicilian family who runs a pizza place in Brooklyn. All seems normal until Mario is called to Palermo by the Mafia, and his role as a hitman is revealed. On the way to his assassination job, Mario stops by his impoverished family's home and cunningly tries to manipulate his brother Michele (Mark Chase) into joining him. Unlike Mario, Mark has an extreme aversion to killing anything, not even the colt in a field that his brother wants him to "practice" on. But the love of Michele's young life, Cecilia (Simona Cavallario), a 14-year-old teen forced into prostitution by her mother, needs to be saved from her degrading existence -- and so Michele is vulnerable to making some quick cash against his better judgment. The results of his decision and Mario's hit are not the standard gore and violence otherwise seen in action thrillers, but a more human and humane look at the real effects of murder on the innocent, and the not so innocent. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Giuseppe Fava and Vittorio Sindoni created a series of fictionalized television programs in Sicily that include scenes of poverty, deprivation, and unemployment as well as exposés of the Mafia's activities on the island. Sindoni culled excerpts from these programs to create this one-hour film. Fava plays the part of a reporter who interviews people from all walks of life, an apt role for him since he was a journalist (who focused on exposing the Mafia, in fact). Fava was murdered in 1984, making this docudrama a tribute to his heroism and an important film for viewers who care about those who fight pollution, in any form. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The body count notches upward in an unrelenting progression in this horror comedy that features an unbalanced hunchback experimenting on lab animals, a countess, her two bodyguards, and a prostitute. These characters are in the middle of an unending series of bloody killings in which the victims are cut apart, put in a garbage bag, and burnt in the municipal incinerator. As bags dot the streets waiting to be picked up and disposed by the garbage trucks, survivors wear an amulet that shows the three Japanese monkeys (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil) and either keep silent or are killed. Humor, in this case, may depend on the age and/or inclinations of the beholder. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In back-to-back stories that are unrelated to each other except through a few shared stabs at sexual and social morés, director Nanni Loy and the two featured stars (and co-writers) Renato Pozzetto and Nino Manfredi have fun with some "taboo" themes. In the first story, Don Emidio (Pozzetto) is actually a Catholic priest who suffers amnesia while on a train and ends up falling for an attractive Milanese woman (Mara Venier), leading to a joyful and uninhibited celebration of their romantic natures -- at least for several blissful days. In the second story, a widowed father is a brash construction worker whose favorite hobby is bragging about his son's great accomplishments as a soccer player. Dad's world is about to be jarred into another dimension when his macho son finally tells him about his true sexual orientation. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

An impoverished young man from Sicily travels to Wolfsburg, West Germany to find work. He takes a job in the Volkswagen factory after he travels through Northern Italy by train. The young man is arrested after he kills two Germans with his knife when they question his honor. The third part of the film follows his subsequent trial and deals with justice denied and the attitude of many Germans who resent the influx of foreign labor. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide