Giulio Donnini
Good hearted but not very wordly-wise, Dante is happy driving the school bus for a group of mentally handicapped children, while feeling he is somehow missing out on life and love. So he is very excited when after nearly being knocked down by her car he meets Maria, who seems immediately enamoured of him. He is soon invited to her sumptuous Palermo villa, little suspecting that this is part of a plot. He bears an amazing likeness to Maria's stool-pigeon gangster husband and it would be convenient for them if the mobster, in the shape of Dante, was seen to be dead and buried.
The film presents a series of unrelated "pictures": a police commissioner who, faced with four friars stripped by two women, must decide whether they are real or false friars (but he can't); a professor who, suffering from acute dysentery, is dismissed for unworthiness by the Institute Council; a football referee trying to escape the ire of angry fans; an endless marathon in Piazza Navona; a true but crazy producer, a not crazy but fake producer and a group of actors who want to take revenge on one and the other; a "club of toasts" that spends its time toasting to this and that, to elect new members and honorary members; finally, a censorship commission that, aboard an old and very battered car, fails to reach his workplace.
Palermo, Sicily, November 1925. Cesare Mori, the new prefect of the city, soon to be known as the Iron Prefect, begins a ruthless war against the Mafia, a sinister organization that has subjugated the island for centuries, something that the dictator Benito Mussolini and the fascist authorities can no longer allow.
Set during a retreat of Christian Democrat politicians who practice spiritual exercises together, it is an allegory of corrupted power. Disturbing, claustrophobic settings are the background to a series of mysterious crimes.
Suffocated from the strict atmosphere of her high school, Valeria has been experiencing erotic dreams with sadistic motorcyclist rapists, a doctor who decides more than an exam is in order and a torturous priest whipping her in pure delight. After leaving school she finds out that the her bourgeois family setting has something to do with her recurring dreams and suppressed desires. She idealistically seeks out romance and love, but falls short time and time again...
A corrupt cop steals evidence of a Mafia drug ring with plans to sell it to their rivals, but is hunted by the mafia and government agents.
Hoping to avoid the fate of his anti-Fascist father, an Italian leaves his community to marry a nobleman's daughter.
The characters are two ruffians in various disguises: as false priests, they sell a rotten arm pretending it to be a relic of St. Luke; they cheat a stingy friar who abuses of the confessional to get rich and, once he finds out he's been cheated, gives himself sacramental absolution. They help the noble Filippo, disguised as a woman, in the alcove of the innkeeper's wife; they save from despair Fra Martino who had forgotten his underwear in his lover's house (one of them disguised as a cardinal retrieve the garment and expose it as a relic to the devotion of the faithful). To live with their lovers, Brother Jeronimo strives exorcisms and frà Partenope pretends to fight with the devil
In the fragmented opening we see snapshots of modern urban life including the savage knife murder of a prostitute, committed (or so it would seem) by executive Marco. Outside the city, Marco runs a sprawling, cutting-edge chicken farm with his wife, Anna, while pretty young Gabrielle tends to their secretarial needs. Their moneyed existence produces all forms of monstrosities including a plan to bump off Anna between the adulterous Marco and Gabrielle, professional paranoia thanks to the suspicious activity of the plant’s advertising head, debauched dinner parties, and an automated factory nightmare that results in pulsating, David Lynchian chickens without heads or wings. Soon all the deceptions and murderous plotting come to a head, though not quite in the way you'd expect.
Secret agent Perry Grant is called in to investigate a strange case which involves counterfeit money, industrial espionage, and a fashion company that may be functioning as a front for a secret criminal organization.
Hercules, after sailing global waters is eventually shipwrecked in South America. After losing his Greek shipmates, Hercules is enlisted to overthrow a tyrannical king int he land of the Incas. Featuring scenic views of the mountains of the Andes.
The evil Queen Tenefi demands that a steady supply of young women be sacrificed to the God of Fire. Maciste intervenes and saves from this sacrifice a village's women including the beautiful Antea. Maciste then becomes involved in an effort to restore to the throne of Memphis its rightful ruler, Prince Iram.
Centuries ago in the Orient, the fiscal exactions on the people lead to a revolt against the usurper of the throne, and the empowerment of a new leader.
The leader of a gang of Spanish mercenaries falls for a beautiful princess. Thing get dicey, however, when an imprisoned leader is freed and comes calling. Paget, as usual, is absolutely stunning.
On his way to (or from) the Crusades, Robin Hood is shipwrecked but saved by pirates who plan to return him home in order to ransom him to his father.
The script, which was written on a day-to-day basis as the film was being shot, concerns the adventures of a motley crew of swindlers and ne'er-do-wells trying to lay claim to land rich in uranium deposits in Kenya as they wait in a small Italian port to travel aboard an ill-fated tramp steamer en route to Mombasa.
