Achille Manzotti Movies

Two well-known directors each adapt stories by Edgar Allen Poe in this horror drama. George Romero's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" tells how the wife of an elderly, wealthy man and her lover--who also happens to be the husband's private physician--scheme to control his assets. Dying before they can carry out their plans, his soul is caught between life and death while they freeze the body to finish their work. In the Dario Argento-directed "The Black Cat" a crime photographer, known for his photos' gruesome content, kills his girlfriend's titular pet and then his girlfriend. Soon he gets a good look at what he's done. ~ Kristie Hassen, All Movie Guide

Before Penny Marshall brought Big to the big screen, an Italian director, Franco Amurri, released this body-changing movie. In his story, Marco (Ioska Versari) is a bedwetter whose mother scolds him one time too often, and his classmates tease him one time too often. The finishing touch is that his father neglects to bring him a Lego set for his birthday. He promptly puts all his heart into wishing he were big and not subject to these indignities. The result is that he bursts through his clothes in the guise of a middle-aged man (Renato Pozzetto) and seeks refuge in the house of his former schoolteacher. Mentally, he is still eight years old, and it's a puzzle what to do with him until someone discovers that he has an uncanny rapport with children. Then he becomes a full-time babysitter -- at least, until he is suspected of abducting the by-now long-missing child Marco. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In this pretentious erotic thriller an American forest ranger heads for Rome to search for his sister, a model who has mysteriously disappeared and later turns up murdered with a pair of scissors. The police know it is the work of a serial killer, but they have few leads. The young brother begins his own investigation and slowly solves the murder. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This sometimes confusing erotic drama about the incestuous relationship of a mother and daughter is based on the autobiography of Italian theater actress Piera Degli Esposti though it focuses more on her mother Eugenia (Hanna Schygulla). The liberated Eugenia and her spaced-out, husband (Marcello Mastroianni) -- a professor -- live in a small provincial Italian town, where Eugenia is noticed as she zooms around on her bicycle and chats up strangers at the train station. While still no more than a grown child, Piera -- in tight dresses -- goes with her mother for a threesome when she engages in sexual relations with other men and subsequently suffers both from poor health and the lack of a normal home. The shadow of the future already clouds the household when Eugenia is committed again and again to the psychiatric clinic. By the time Piera has become an adult, both of her parents are in separate mental hospitals -- and both (even the father) are still sexually eccentric, to say the least. (Hanna Schygulla) won the "Best Actress" award at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival for her portrayal of Eugenia. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

This ineffably bizarre drama stars Ben Gazzara as an American cartoonist who sees a beautiful woman named Nicole (Ornella Muti) being saved from drowning while he draws on the beach. He offers her a blanket, beginning a strange relationship with the obviously unbalanced woman which ends when she shaves her own head and walks into the ocean to die. Muti carries the film with an engagingly peculiar performance as the disturbed Nicole, who strips for bellboys, exposes herself to passing tourists, hallucinates insects in her bathroom, and goes into a coma after being raped in a mental institution. Mimsy Farmer co-stars as Gazzara's ex-lover and William Berger appears briefly as a bartender. Despite being blighted by a distracting Riz Ortolani soundtrack and a fundamentally lurid approach, Muti and director Pasquale Festa Campanile imbue this film with enough interesting touches to make it worthwhile. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

Adept at dissecting marriage as an essentially no-win institution, Luigi Comencini applies his directorial scalpel here through the viewpoints of ten-year-old Eugenio (Francesco Bonelli) and his parents. Giancarlo (Saverio Marconi) is a father who loves his wife, Fernanda (Dalila Di Lazzaro), and his son, but what he wants out of life is not necessarily compatible with the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood. Likewise, Fernanda is torn between a more liberated existence and what she understands to be social restrictions. After Eugenio is abandoned on a road in the middle of nowhere by an irritated friend, a sequence of events is set in motion that highlights the underlying problems in his family. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The Italian La Patata Bollente (Hot Potato) casts some light on the intolerances of those involved in "liberal" Italian political and labor organizations. Popular comic-actor Renato Pozzetto plays an ill-tempered "old line" communist union organizer. One evening, he rescues a homosexual (Massimo Ranieri) from a gang of hooligans. The communist allows the poor man to spend the evening in his apartment -- a wholly innocent set-up that is misinterpreted by the communist's girl friend (Edwige Fenech). When word gets out that their leader and the gay man are "shacking up," the members of the allegedly progressive union and their political cohorts are more vociferous than anyone in their condemnation of his "sins." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this slapstick comedy, almost a vaudeville revue, the Italian side of World War II is affectionately re-created, while the cream of Himmler's German troops, the dreaded Stormtroopers, consistently make fools of themselves. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide