Luca Sportelli Movies
- 1977
This slapstick Italian sex comedy actually looks far more expensive than it really is, as it used the sets left over from the 1980 spectacular Caligula. It can't quite make up its mind, though, if it's a comedy (the emperor Claudius is a doddering, stuttering, impotent old fool), a sex film (with much nudity and several orgy scenes), or a slasher/gore picture (in a scene where soldiers invade an orgy and starting dismembering and decapitating everyone in sight -- which, incredibly, is treated as a slapstick scene!), and winds up being not much of anything. ~ Brian Gusse, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Vittorio Caprioli, Gian Carlo Prete, (more)
- 1964
Cult Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci's second "Franco & Ciccio" comedy of 1965, this science fiction-themed farce casts popular comedians Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia as a pair of bumbling Russian cosmonauts aboard the spaceship Popov. Their ship loses contact with base, and Soviet space program officials are loathe to face the international humiliation of losing two astronauts, so they send up a second spaceship, a twin of the first. Locating a pair of Italian thieves (also played by Franchi and Ingrassia) who are dead ringers for the lost cosmonauts, the Russians kidnap them and send them up in the duplicate rocketship. Upon their return, the thieves are welcomed as the real thing by their wives and families, but that's when the confusion begins, as the original spaceship returns with the real cosmonauts, setting up a number of farcical situations. Monica Randal and Linda Sini co-star with Enzo Andronico, Maria Silva, and Lino Banfi (credited here as "Pasquale Zagaria," perhaps to fulfill contractual obligations in the Italian-Spanish co-production). The boys returned under Fulci's direction a month later in I Due Parà. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
