The Movie
Inexplicable surrealism and sharp social, sexual and political commentary intermingle in One 7 Movie's nice DVD transfer of Sergio Citti's debut film Ostia (1970). Curiously, the title for the American DVD release of Ostia is A Violent Life, which is the title of an Italian crime film from 1962 based on a novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the notorious filmmaker, poet, and journalist who wrote the script for Ostia. Pasolini's own confrontational films were drawn equally from his Catholic belief system and Communist ideology. Ostia will appeal to those who wish to dig deeper into Pasolini's body of work because the film has remained relatively obscure in the US.

Ostia/A Violent Life was filmed in the real-life Roman slum where Pasolini was murdered five years after the film was released and opens with two Anarchist/petty criminal brothers, Bandiera (Laurent Terzieff) and Rabbino (Franc...Read the entire review

Hyde's Secret Nightmare:
Dedicated to, and mentioned as the Italian heir to Joe D'Amato, Domiziano Cristopharo's Hyde's Secret Nightmare (2011) flirts with danger. Bragging about any lineage to the Crap King of Erotic Horror, Joe D'Amato, is like bragging about being Hitler's son. That's the quickest Godwin's Law has ever been activated, and in a way it's not justified, as by-and-large Cristopharo has crafted an Erotic Horror movie worlds better than anything D'Amato ever squirted out. Yet at 2-hours long, and including a baffling proselytizing tone, Cristopharo's created a movie seemingly ashamed of what it is, and ultimately less satisfying than it could be.

Henry Chagall (Claudio Zanelli) suffers impotence (and possibly Gender Dysphoria). Luckily, he's a mad scientist with a hunchbacked assistant, Hans (Giovanni la Gorga) who can help him test his experimental cure serum on corps...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Silent black and white movies have a great nostalgia value, and are often interesting artifacts of their time. The German expressionists had a wonderful visual style and a knack for storytelling. So why, one might ask, would someone want to make a silent black and white film now? It's a question worth asking to the producers of Lilith, A Vampire Who Comes Back, because that's exactly what they did, with very mixed results.

Baron Ludwig (Tanivo Golino) was a happy man, wed to his beautiful wife Lusilla (Cinzia Susino), but then she died and he took to wandering around the town, morose, paying little attention to his disreputable servant Balduin (Emanuele Giammusso) whose hobbies seem to be seducing naïve village girls and then murdering them. Interspersed with, and unluckily for poor Ludwig, connected in the minds of the townsfolk with the young girls going missing, chil...Read the entire review

In addition to Westerns and giallo horror, the erotic thriller was a staple of the Italian film industry that remains popular enough to get DVD releases today. Most of these films are exceptionally cheap, trashy movies with forgettable or incomprehensible plots, punctuated by bad acting and lengthy sex scenes. Still, there are fresh apples in every bunch. Top Model (aka L'attrazione) isn't a film the uninitiated should seek out, but it is an intriguing haze of fantasy and reality, packed to the brim with as many wild twists and turns as the filmmakers can devise. It's so loopy it hardly makes sense, but for a 40-year-old C-movie, it's a fun, inventive diversion.

Nadine (Florence Guerin) is a fashion photographer hoping to put together a sexy lingerie magazine, and she needs a place to shoot it (try and suspend your disbelief that people were not falling over themselves to volunteer their hom...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Better known as Nosferatu In Venice or Vampire In Venice and made as an unofficial sequel/follow up (maybe almost ten years too late to be a complete cash-in?) to Werner Herzog's Nosferatu: The Vampyre, 1988's Prince Of The Night (where distributor One 7 Movies got this title is anyone's guess) was directed by some combination of Mario Caiano, Luigi Cozzi, Maurizio Lucidi, producer Augusto Caminito and possibly to Klaus Kinski himself. As to who did what, that would appear to be lost in the annals of history but with all of those named above rumored to have at least attempted to helm the film, it's safe to assume that this was a very tumultuous production indeed. Then again, pretty much any production with Kinski attached to it could fall into that category, his temper tantrums having since become the stuff of legend.

The film, as you could prob...Read the entire review