Giovanni Lombardo Radice Movies

A woman making her way back to sanity finds herself living in a house with a history of madness in this thriller. Lei (Laura Morante) is a woman who has spent fifteen years in a mental hospital; eager to start her life over again, she's decided to put her life's savings into opening a restaurant. Muller (Burt Young) is a real estate agent who tells Lei he has the perfect location for her eatery -- Snakes Hall, a large mansion in Davenport, Iowa that's been vacant for several years and can he had for a reasonable price. Lei buys Snakes Hall, but it's not long before she begins hearing strange noises late at night, and a priest (Treat Williams) warns her that the mansion has a terrible past and she should get out while she can. Lei ignores the warnings, but Paula (Rita Tushingham), a local historian, also insists that evil dwells in Snakes Hall. Lei discovers that the mansion was once a home for the disturbed run by a iron-willed nun (Angela Goodwin), and one night three patients were killed while another two disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Do the ghosts of the murdered women walk the passages of Snakes Hall? Il Nascondiglio (aka The Hideout) also stars Peter Soderberg and Yvonne Brulatour Scio. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A guy finds himself living most men's fantasy, only to learn it isn't as much fun as he imagined in this offbeat Italian comedy. Alberto Colombo (Maurizio Nichetti) has spent 20 years working an insignificant desk job with a large multinational corporation, and he not only has little to show for his efforts, but like most of his co-workers, he fears he could be fired at any moment. What's worse, the heads of the firm have insisted that their Italian employees learn to speak English in the name of efficiency, which only makes things more difficult and annoying for him and his co-workers. Colombo gets little respite at home, since his wife Margarita (Maria de Medeiros), who manages a fast-food restaurant, has decided they should speak English at home as well. Colombo thinks he's reached the end of the line -- both personally and professionally -- when he's sent on assignment to Melancias, a small Latin American community where several employees have disappeared in the past while searching for oil reserves. Colombo assumes the worst, but once he arrives, he discovers most of the workers sent to Melancias are alive and well and stayed there by choice; it seems that the town is populated almost entirely by beautiful women, and no man who arrives there will ever want for romantic attention. But Colombo soon discovers that even paradise can have a downside, as he learns it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Honolulu Baby was directed and co-scripted by leading man Maurizio Nichetti; the picture was shot on 35 mm film, then transferred to digital video for post-production work, including special color manipulation. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This crime drama features a computer expert who is bilking the casinos in Vegas by hacking into the computers that run the slot machines. This way, he's able to tell when each machine is about to spit out a jackpot. His girlfriend Kathy (Marcia Clingan) goes to Vegas, plays the machines, and brings home a tidy sum each week-end. Before he can start enjoying the good life, the hacker is tortured and killed and Kathy is kidnapped by the murderers. Then a crooked cop (Bo Svenson) and his buddy (Fred Williamson) get involved and the competition for the illicit software is on. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

This gruesome horror film from cult director Lucio Fulci posits a priest's suicide opening the gateway to Hell, freeing bloodthirsty zombies to roam the town of Dunwich. The main attractions are startlingly explicit special effects by Franco Rufino, including two of the horror genre's most memorable deaths. One involves perennial victim Giovanni Lombardo Radice (also known as John Morghen) having his head run through with a power-drill, and the second is the notorious scene of a woman vomiting up all of her internal organs in a nauseating torrent of blood and guts. Fulci does manage one nice moment of splatter-free horror, as hero Christopher George struggles to free a woman who has been buried alive. As his pick-axe enters the coffin repeatedly, it comes ever closer to her face, causing the audience to wince with each strike. Aside from these scenes, though, Fulci's direction is somewhat plodding, as he substitutes slow pacing and clouds of fog for real suspense. Horror fans will still want to seek this film out, however, if only for the effects work and a familiar cast including Catriona MacColl, Janet Agren, Carlo de Mejo, Antonella Interlenghi, and Daniela Doria. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

Half zombie epic, half cannibal gorefest, this unusual blend of two popular Italo-horror subgenres results in a high-octane thriller that delivers the gory goods. The story involves a group of former Vietnam POW's who contract a bizarre disease in captivity which compels them to eat human flesh. Needless to say, this makes assimilation into post-war American life rather difficult as the gestating disease takes hold on the returning veterans, whose cannibal instincts eventually fight their way to the surface. One such victim is commando Norman Hopper (John Saxon), who is bitten by one of the POW's during a rescue mission and carries the gestating contagion back home. When the soldier who bit him (John Morghen) is released from a veterans' psychiatric hospital after apparently being cured, he makes brief phone contact with Saxon before succumbing to an immediate relapse, leading to a gory rampage and subsequent shootout with police. When Saxon begins feeling the urge to munch -- first developing an appetite for the teenage cupcake next door -- he springs his fellow cannibals from the hospital, leading to another bloody confrontation with the police -- this time in the city sewers. Director Antonio Margheriti (alleged ghost-director of Andy Warhol's Blood for Dracula and Flesh for Frankenstein) manages to fuse crime-thriller conventions with gory cannibals-in-the-streets horror without losing viewers' interest, although the drastically-edited video version (under the title Invasion of the Flesh Hunters) suffers badly from the absence of Gianetto De Rossi's chunk-blowing makeup effects. The dialogue, while better than the average Italian post-dubbing job, is so overloaded with profanity that it becomes unintentionally hilarious. Released under a dozen titles, the best-known being Cannibal Apocalypse. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide