Silvia Dionisio Movies

With enough aliases to fill a hotel ledger, this downbeat horror film by Riccardo Fredo focuses on the past and present of Michael Stanford (Stefano Patrizi), a successful actor. His father was knifed to death years ago and now Michael and his girlfriend Deborah (Silvia Dionisio) are going to spend a week-end with Michael's mother. Joining them are the director and crew of a motion picture in the works. Oliver the housekeeper (John Richardson) does not extend a warm welcome to the guests, but that might just be his personality. After everyone is settled in, a deranged killer begins a series of murders. Is the occult at the heart of these killings? Or are Michael's fears about the past starting to come true? ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Well into his maturity, Salomon Landolt, who is the Bailiff of Griefensee, invites five women with whom he has had satisfying relationships to visit him at his castle. Each one thinks she was the only one invited. Flashbacks detail the nature and quality of his encounters with each woman. Near the end of the film, the Bailiff asks the five women to choose a wife for him: she must either be a mature housewife-type, or a maidservant who is both young and a virgin. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

It often seems that Italy is on the verge of total collapse as a nation. Still, that family-centered and nearly anarchic land which its citizens ironically call Il Bel Paese, seems to survive everything that happens to it. In this satirical comedy, Guido Paolo is an oil-rig worker who has saved his earnings and returns to Rome from his Persian Gulf job. He intends to open up a little jewelry shop. Landing in the airport in the middle of a terrorist attack, he is completely unfazed by the bullets flying around him, or the elaborate security arrangements at his sister's apartment. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

The second of two horror films shot in a single production term and bearing the name of pop-art icon Andy Warhol (whose participation pretty much ended with the use of his name), this film is slightly superior to its higher-profile predecessor, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein. Direction is credited to Warhol factory filmmaker Paul Morrissey, though there still exists a very vocal camp who insist that the real credit should go to Italian director Antonio Margheriti. Euro-horror leading man Udo Kier assays the title role, playing the count as a pale, anemic-looking blood junkie with an overwrought accent. Finding the supply of "weer-gin" blood diminishing rapidly in Romania, Dracula is forced to seek a fix in a predominantly Catholic Italian province, where he is certain a few virgins still exist. He travels with his assistant (Arno Juerging) and his coffin-sealed sister to the decrepit, crumbling mansion of the financially-strapped Marquis DiFore (a tour-de-force performance from Bicycle Thief director Vittorio de Sica) who welcomes the affluent Count with open arms, hoping to marry off any one of his four daughters. Dracula clearly has other intentions for the girls... but his plans are rudely thwarted by beefy, socialist handyman Mario (Joe Dallesandro), who has been dutifully divesting the young maidens of their -- ahem -- virtue, thus tainting their blood and making it unsafe for vampiric consumption. Very unsafe, it turns out -- as we are treated to protracted scenes of the death-pale Count vomiting up gallons of blood. Rated "X" at the time of its release (and subsequently re-rated "R" ten years later), this outrageous catalogue of depravity features wildly campy performances, inane dialogue and an outrageous climax. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi

This bunch is none other than the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest and their feisty leader, Robin Hood. This is a '70s release of the often-played Robin Hood story. ~ Rovi

Plenty of campy humor enlivens Antonio Margheriti's tame giallo thriller about murders at a prestigious girl's boarding school. Mark Damon (The Fall of the House of Usher) is the studly riding instructor having an affair with one of the students (Eleonora Bron), an heiress who is the killer's primary target. Michael Rennie (The Day the Earth Stood Still) investigates the crimes, as women are murdered in showers, thrown into pits of quicklime, and terrorized in aviaries. Other than copping out by featuring yet another overly obvious transvestite killer, it's not half bad. Genre stalwarts Luciano Pigozzi and Marisa Longo also appear. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi