Massimo Sarchielli Movies

Director Dario Argento, best known for his stylishly bloody horror films, revisits the style and themes of his early directorial efforts in this tense crime thriller. A prostitute (Barbara Lerici) discovers one of her customers has a taste for much rougher sex than she's willing to give him; trying to sneak away from her john, she accidentally walks off with one of his scrapbooks, from which she discovers her client apparently committed a series of unsolved murders almost 20 years earlier. The john tracks down the prostitute and murders her to insure her silence; this awakens in him the desire to kill again, and soon he's once again leaving a bloody swath across Italy. Ulisse Moretti (Max Von Sydow), the police detective who investigated the earlier wave of killings, is brought out of retirement when clues link the new murders to those committed in the early '80s, and the aging cop finds his sometimes foggy memory jolted back to recognition by the growing number of bloody victims. Meanwhile, Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi), whose saw his mother being killed by the murderer as a boy, learns that the killer is back at work, and sets out to investigate the case on his own. Non Ho Sonno features an original musical score by the rock band Goblin, who also wrote music for a number of Argento's best-known films. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Marco (Claudio Bigagli) is an insurance adjuster who must travel all over Tuscany in order to investigate and settle claims put through by his firm's various branches. This brings in a tidy sum of money, and he has every reason to expect that he will continue to prosper in his work. He manages quite successfully to organize every event in his own life, but he can't manage the lives of others. His tidy and reasonably satisfying world comes unglued when his mother's extramarital affair causes dissension between her and his father. The tidiness of his life is also undone when his former girlfriend actually gets married, and his current girlfriend dumps him. Soon he is irritated even by his work, and then the real hysteria sets in. The only thing he can think to do is to opt out of having such a tidy, predictable, yuppiefied life, and this is what he does. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

The story of Italian horror maven Lucio Fulci's made-for-television gore-a-thon concerns a creepy dark house inhabited by a dotty old couple, Victor and Sarah, and their uptight maid, Maria, who is soon impaled (complete with close-ups of guts pouring from the wound) when she discovers the couple's nephew and his wife dead in the basement. Three young crooks decide to break in and rob the isolated villa, killing the handyman (Pier Luigi Conti) and the old couple before being trapped inside by vicious Dobermans in the yard. The house is filled with clocks, which all stop when Victor dies. Even the sand in an hourglass stops pouring. Then the clocks begin moving backwards and time follows suit, resulting in bizarre phenomena and eventually reviving the old couple, who get gory revenge. Soon the whole house is full of reanimated zombies, leading first to a bloodbath and then to a quirky and ironic conclusion which plays with the stereotypical "dream ending" in amusing ways. Karina Huff gets a knife jammed through her hand and there are chainsaws, throat-rending zombies, impalements, and numerous gaping stomach wounds. Keith Van Hoven co-stars with Paolo Paoloni, Bettine Milne, and Peter Hintz. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

The Story of Boys and Girls is about a rural Italian girl who invites the family of her rich Bolognese fiance over for a 20-course banquet at her home. Over the course of the meal, both families talk about many different topics, revealing a number of secrets along the way. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Movie Guide

Luciano Odorisio's Italian-made exploitation film La Monaca di Monza travels into the deepest and darkest recesses of a Catholic convent, where a nobleman (Alessandro Gassman) and a nun (Myriem Roussel) engage in a passionate love affair. Little can they foresee the dangerous and calamitous consequences that this will yield -- consequences involving betrayal, vengeance, and homicide. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

This is an Italian comedy about a runaway, incognito Pope who makes his way to a village for a temporary stay and tries to bring a few good works to fruition while there. After Pope Leo XIV gets locked out of the Vatican garden one day, he opts for taking off on a small escape from official and bureaucratic burdens. Since he is not in his robes, who's to know? He heads for a remote village in the south of Italy that has no priest. He finds shelter with a former hooker and her mute daughter and then sets to work overcoming the local thugs and repairing a broken aqueduct. Meanwhile, back at the Vatican, the Cardinals are wringing their hands, trying to hide the fact that His Holiness has taken a powder. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Salome is a drama that oscillates between Judea in 30 A.D. to a kitsch New York in the 20th century. King Herod (Tomas Milian) is having a hard time. He is worried about the upstart Caesar, he's plagued by bad omens like the wrong birds flying in the wrong direction, and it does seem like term limits may be imposed on them. After all, he and his wife are responsible for their constituents' inability to enjoy sex; they murdered Salome's father (King Herod's brother) which has left the people with a decided lack of libido. Salome herself (Jo Champa) comes along to set things right again, and then grabs her seven veils for a performance down in a basement where the long-suffering Yokanaan (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) is tied-up in chains. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In medieval France, knight Rutger Hauer and lady fair Michelle Pfeiffer both run afoul of evil-bishop John Wood. Through the auspices of bishop's confessor Leo McKern, Hauer and Pfeiffer are placed under a curse. During the night, Hauer takes the form of a wolf, while Pfeiffer assumes the form of a hawk by day. The two lovers can only meet one another as humans at dawn and dusk. The only mortal in a position to rescue Hauer and Pfeiffer from their fate is nebbishy pickpocket Matthew Broderick, who acts as liaison between the lovers. With the help of the guilt-ridden McKern--and a convenient solar eclipse--Broderick endeavors to set things aright. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this pseudo-farce, the heroine Mickey (Margot Kidder) takes two weeks off work to go to Malta and write a mystery novel and finds herself caught up in a series of real-life murders that she weaves into her progressing story. Caught between a parody, a children's film, and a who-dunnit, the overplayed Disney charm of Trenchcoat wears thin very quickly. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Francesco (Francesco Nuti) has had better days (his lover just dumped him) but the 24 hours in this day are still much like those in any other -- he messes up more than once, and when not fouling up on his own, there is always an outside agent to do it for him. At work, he has a go-around with a machine in which the machine definitely seems to have the upper hand, and yet he still manages to cultivate his friendships with young and old -- "old" in this case being Magnifico (Massimo Sarchielli), someone willing to listen to his remembrances of his father, missing for several years now. At the end of the day, just as Francesco thinks he can settle down with his favorite prostitute, he has miscalculated again, and the night is not to be spent as he had blissfully hoped. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Rod Steiger portrays Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in this internationally produced "how the mighty have fallen" biopic. In the waning days of the war, the once-strutting Il Duce hides from his pursuers like a common thief. He's hoping to fall into the hands of his former Axis comrades or the benign Allied troops, rather than suffer the vengeance of the out-for-blood Italian freedom fighters. But it is the latter group who reaches Mussolini first, ignominiously executing both the dictator and his mistress Clara Petracchi (Lisa Gastoni). This strangely cast period piece features Henry Fonda as a German cardinal and Franco Nero as an Italian officer. Originally titled Mussolini: Ultimo Atto, The Last Days of Mussolini was also issued as The Last Four Days. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide