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Another in the series of Italian films released by the apparently barmy MYA label - quite who do they think their market is for this stuff! - A Policewoman in New York is a 1981 sex comedy starring Euro-exploitation favourite Edwige Fenech.
Here’s one I reviewed a while back for The Eurospy Guide, but seeing as a new, fan-dubbed version has become available here, it seemed like a good opportunity to give it another look…
Here’s a new crime drama from Italy, directed by one Carlo Fusci and starring Tony Sperandeo, Antonella Ponziani, Andrea Iervolino and Ciro Petrone (the geeky looking kid who plays with guns on the beach in Gomorrah). Oh, and also in the cast are a couple of old favourites: Franco Nero and Angelo Infanti!
The plot goes [...]
Primitive Love is a bizarre combination of slapstick comedy and mondo movie, made in 1964 by the late Luigi Scattini and starring Jayne Mansfield
Director Luigi Scattini has apparently died.
Edith Peters was one of the many black performers who complemented their careers in the popular nightclubs and revues of the time with the occassional bit part roles on screen.
Here’s a new Italian film that looks like it could be of interest. It’s just come out in Italy this week, and is being shown in 20 cinemas, not a huge amount, but not unusually small for domestic product that isn’t a comedy.
I’d never seen this before, but Ottaviano Dell’Acqua, aka Richard Raymond, one of the famous Dell’Acqua family of cinecitta stuntmen and a fixture of 80s Italian horror films, has his own website.
Ottavio Poggi may not be a name that you are familiar with. There’s certainly very little biographical information about him anywhere. But he was actually one of a band of little known - but very important - producers who fuelled the whole explosion in the Italian film industry in the 1950s and 60s.
This little-known spy film Mexican Slayride was financed by three important production companies in the world of low-budget cinema during the late 1960s.
Apparently Bekim Fehmiu has died… according to news alerts:
Belgrade - Well-known Yugoslav actor of Albanian descent Bekim Fehmiu was found dead on Tuesday in his apartment in Belgrade, Serbian state television RTS reported. He was 74.
Fehmiu is best known for his role in a 1967 movie Skupljaci perja (I Even Met Happy Gypsies) which won [...]
This was a TV adaptation of the popular Daphne Du Maurier novel Rebecca (which had actually already been adapted by the Italians in 1946).
Known in English language countries as The Headless Woman, Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza is really more of an Argetinian film than anything else…
Someone who has always intrigued me is Gloria Paul, an English actress who ended up acting in films in Italy during the 60s. I associate her primarily with comedies and spy films, a glamorous, exotic lady who wouldn’t fit in so well with the more grimy productions made during the 70s.
Here’s an interesting sounding new Italian film. It’s had a somewhat limited release, showing on just 8 screens, and the takings have been rather low so far, but the plot sounds intriguing and the word of mouth around it is generally very positive. It wouldn’t be the first time an impressive film has fallen by [...]
Daniele Luchetti, who made the acclaimed Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother is An Only Child) a few years back, has a new film out called La nostra vita (Our Life). It stars, among others, two of the more prominent Italian dramatic actors around today,
Raoul Bova and Elio Germano, which is probably one of [...]
Women of Devil’s Island is a 1962 film written and directed by Domenico Paolella, a former critic who specialized in low-but-not-no budget historical adventures and peplums.
Fernando Piazza was one of the more obscure black actors to ply their trade in Cinecitta in the 60s. His first credited performance, as far as I can make out, was in Domenico Paolella’s entertaining historical adventure The Women of Devil’s Island
I’m a bit late in posting this one, but Massimo Sarchielli died on the 12th May.
Sarchielli was a busy actor who appeared in both Italian and international films from the 1960s onwards. He was in several spaghetti westerns (such as the superior Requiescant and Bandidos (both 67)), a number of arthouse favourites (Giulietta degli spiriti [...]
Antonio Bonifacio’s Il monastero and Michele Sinesi’s Bumba atomika
Pietro Germi’s 1953 film Gelosia isn’t perhaps one of his best known or even more accomplished works, but it’s still a well constructed and extremely moving production that stands head and tails above much of the Italian cinema being made at the time.
Here’s the first part of a quick look back at the Italian horror films of 2008. It’s a pretty motley bunch, to be honest, with none of them gaining anything much in the way of international (or even domestic) distribution. But it does no harm keeping up with what’s going on in the way of contemporary genre cinema in Italy.
Hey, Claudio Fragasso has a new movie out that’s just hit the cinemas in Italy. Called Le Ultime 56 Ore, it’s a kind of drama / crime / thriller type thing, and it’s showing on 189 screens; a decent amount for an Italian production (and especially an Italian production that’s not a comedy). It just [...]
Le sette vipere, aka Le sette vipere: Il marito latino, is an obscure Italian film from 1964 which should be of interest to European cult cinema aficionados thanks to the people involved if nothing else. As well as being directed by Renato Polselli, who garnered something of a following with his sexy horror films, it was written and stars Vincenzo Cascino, a shadowy figure who made two of the weirdest eurospy movies going, Sette donne d’oro contro due 07 (66) and Le sette cinesi d’oro (67).
James Sampson was a familiar face in Italian exploitation films of the 1980s. He never had big roles, being more the kind of actor who would pop up for thirty seconds before dropping out of the picture…
This one sounds interesting, La fisica dell’acqua, directed by Felice Farina. It’s a drama / thriller, apparently inspired by Hamlet. The cast includes Claudio Amendola and Stefano Dionisio, both of whom are pretty big names in Italian cinema, and it’s being released into 40 cinemas throughout Italy this weekend (not a huge amount, but still [...]
Malizia is another in a trend in Italian films from the early seventies to feature a sexy young woman arriving in the household of a supposedly bourgeois family and arousing all sorts of uncivilised passions (see also La nipote etc etc). It’s a kind of erotic melodrama with comic moments, but all done in a very artful, elegant fashion, with few of the more exploitative elements that characterised these kinds of productions.
The Italians seem to have a bit of a thing for football hooligan films at the moment, I guess in the same way that we do here in the UK with productions like The Firm and The Football Factory. Secondo tempo, by novice director Fabio Bastianello, very much falls into this grouping.
Dear oh dear. If you want to see the depths to which Italian genre cinema had sunk by the mid to late 1980s, you could do a lot worse than checking out Claudio Fragasso’s Zombie Flesheaters 3, a film so amateurish and imbecilic it makes the likes of Ratman and Patrick Lives Again look like veritable masterpieces.
More sad news, the hugely influential Italian scriptwriter Furio Scarpelli has died. Scarpelli was best known for his comedy films, mainly written in collaborationwith Agenore Incrocci, but he also had a hand in the script for the Good, the Bad and the Ugly as well.