
            The action takes place in a German village in the fifteen months that precede World War I.Among the people who live there are a baron, who is a large landowner and a local moral authority, his estate manager, a pastor with his many children, a widowed doctor and a schoolteacher who is thinking of getting married. It is he who, many years later, tells this story.Though everything seems to be quiet and orderly, as it always has been, with the seasons following each other, and good harvests following bad ones, suddenly some strange events start to occur. If some appear to be quite ordinary, even accidental -- a farmer's wife dies falling through rotten floorboards -- others are inexplicable and may well be malevolent.Thus, a wire placed at knee-height has brought down the horse being ridden by the doctor, who is severely wounded.There's more of the same: an unknown hand opens a window to expose a newborn baby to the intense cold of the winter. A whole field of cabbages, on the baron's land, are beheaded with a scythe. One of the Baron's sons disappears: he is found his feet and hands bound, his buttocks lashed by a whip. A barn belonging to the manor is set on fire. A farmer hangs himself. A midwife's handicapped child is found tied to a tree, in a forest, seriously beaten, with a threatening message on his chest speaking of divine punishment.The village is worried, and at a loss as to what to do. The baron whose wife will soon leave the village to go to live in Italy makes a speech in the church, but it has no effect. The pastor, a particularly strict character, had since the beginning of the events, tied a white ribbon to the arm of his two eldest children, a boy and a girl: it is to remind them permanently of their duties to purity. In spite of these ribbons, his own family is not spared. His eldest son admits that he masturbates. The pastor's pet bird is stabbed with a scissor by the pastor's daughter.The schoolteacher, whose pupils are growing more and more unruly, and who is considering getting married (it is the only love-story in the film), starts little by little to unravel the mystery. What he discovers seems incredible to him: those guilty of most of these misdeeds are the village children. They have formed a secret society and their leader seems to be Klara, the pastor's daughter.Why did the children behave this way? The schoolteacher can't say. They are haunted by dark feelings, fears, a desire to revolt, to dominate, to conceal, to be violent. All this is heralding something that will explode fifteen or twenty years later, when this generation has grown up.The schoolteacher tries to reveal what he thinks he has found out to the pastor. He is rebuffed. There's no question of bringing that out into the open. The pastor insults him, and even threatens to report him. Our children guilty? It's inconceivable.We learn that the Archduke of Austria has been murdered by a Serbian in Sarajevo. An international crisis is brewing.The worries and the dramas of the village are soon lost in the strange excitement of the coming war. Later, the schoolteacher ponders over it again: didn't those events contain the germs of the tragedies that followed? Weren't the barbaric acts of the children, deep down, the natural consequences of what they had been taught? [www.cinemas-online.co.uk]
    

The White Ribbon


            
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The Charterhouse of Parma

On My Skin: The Last Seven Days of Stefano Cucchi

Il Divo

18 Presents


            Cheyenne is a former rock star. At 50 he still dresses goth and lives in Dublin off his royalties.
The death of his father, with whom he wasn't on speaking terms, brings him back to New York. He discovers his father had an obsession: to seek revenge for a humiliation he had suffered.
Cheyenne decides to pick up where his father left off, and starts a journey, at his own pace, across America.
    

This Must Be the Place

L'amore molesto


            New York City. An old man walking his pet dog in waste ground near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge along the East River waterfront in Brooklyn, is horrified when his dog retrieves a decomposed human hand. It is identified by the police as belonging to Ann-Lynne, a local prostitute.At a police station, Lieutenant Fred Williams (Jack Hedley), the middle-aged, burned-out police detective investigating the murder, interviews the young woman's nosy and obnoxious landlady, Mrs. Weissburger (Babette New), who tells the police detective that during her daily spying and eavesdropping on her tenants, she overheard the girl last week over the phone arranging to meet a man who spoke with a strange, duck-like voice.Meanwhile, a young woman (Cinzia De Ponti) rides her bicycle down Manhattan to the Staten Island Ferry at Battery Park. After an altercation with a boorish motorist driving a red Volkswagen, whose car she accidentally scratched riding her bicycle, she rides onto the boat with the man yelling misogynist slurs at her. When the ferry is underway, the young woman sneaks into the car-bay and begins vandalizing the man's car, but she is interrupted by an unseen figure. Introducing herself as Rosie, she tries to engage the man in a conversation. But the figure adopts a grotesque 'Donald Duck' voice and brutally murders her with a switchblade knife, stabbing and disemboweling her, and leaving her body to be discovered when the ferry docks at Staten Island.At the morgue, Lt. Williams talks to Barry Jones the pathologist (Giordano Falzoni), who believes he recognizes the style of the killing and links it to Ann-Lynne, as well as a similar case in Harlem the previous month.Having informed the press that a serial killer is at large, Williams is visited at the station by New York's chief of police (Lucio Fulci). Williams' skeptical superior tells him not to make any further public announcements about the case to avoid starting a city-wide panic. Soon after the police chief leaves, Williams is notified that a man "sounding like a duck" phoned while he was out at the press conference wanting to speak with him.Williams travels to Columbia University where he meets with a brilliant young psychotherapy professor named Dr. Paul Davis (Paolo Malco) for help in creating a profile of the killer. He is surprised that the young genius not only agrees to help with the case, but has already anticipated his motive for wanting to speak with him.That night in New York's red-light district, Jane Lodge (Alessandra Delli Colli), an attractive, well-dressed woman in a chic raincoat and derby hat, attends a live sex show. She is recording the simulated moans and groans of the two performers with a pocket tape recorder. A scruffy, dangerous looking man (Howard Ross), sitting a few rows behind her, and with two fingers missing from his right hand, observes what she's doing. After the show has ended, the female performer (Zora Kerowa) retires backstage to her dressing room only to find it totally dark. Hearing a noise, she opens a closet door and is brutally attacked by the maniac, who disembowels her by shoving a broken and jagged liquor bottle from her crotch to her abdomen.Later that night, at the home of Kitty (Daniela Doria), a prostitute regularly visited by Williams, he receives a taunting phone call from the duck-voiced killer saying that he has killed again. The detective is perplexed; how does the manic know he's there?The next day, Jane shows her latest tape recording to her husband Dr. Lodge (Laurence Welles), who has agreed to support their open-marriage. Later, Jane goes to a bar in a rough neighborhood in the Lower East Side where she's approached by two rough, Hispanic bar punks who proceed to fondle and sexually humiliate her right at the bar. After allowing herself to be taken advantage of, the emotionally troubled Jane runs out of the bar and drives away.That night, Fay Majors (Almanta Keller), a casually dressed young woman, is riding alone on a late-night subway train when she gets menaced by the same ominous man from the porno theater. Fleeing from the perceived threat, she runs off the train, through the deserted subway station, and onto the street where she gets attacked in a dark alley by the quacking maniac, who brutally stabs her in the leg and slashes her hands and arms as she tries to defend herself. Limping away, Fay stumbles through a doorway into a seedy apartment building where she closes and locks the door behind her so the killer won't follow. Fay passes out from the loss of blood, and then realty and illusion blur: Fay is sitting alone in a dark movie theater watching cartoons when she attacked and killed by a different, handsome young man who slashes her neck with a straight razor.Fay wakes up the hospital the morning after when the same man visits her in her room. The man is revealed to be her physicist boyfriend Peter Bunch (Andrew Painter), who is relived that she has survived the attack. Lt. Williams and Dr. Davis visit Fay where she tells them about her attacker who was missing two fingers from his right hand. Williams and Davis both conclude that this is the killer since all forensic evidence points to the killing being left-handed.Somewhere in night-time New York, the owner of his mutilated right hand picks up Jane and takes her to the sleazy Cavalier Hotel room on 34th Street for some bondage sex. He ties up the semi-nude woman to the bed. The S&M game she has willingly begun turns nasty when he begins to beat her without provocation. Then, the man turns up the radio really loud, and makes a muttered phone-call, describing the bound woman to someone on the other line as "she's right up your perverted alley." A little later, while the man sleeps, Jane overhears a radio DJ describing the killer, whom the press has now dubbed, 'the New York Ripper' and missing two fingers from his right hand. Jane carefully and quietly unties herself from the bed and flees into the hotel hallway, only to be killed by the real New York Ripper who stabs her to death in ultra-gory fashion.Williams arrives at the scene of the crime where the police find Jane's tape recordings of the sex shows and of her 'master.' Learning from witnesses, Williams discovers that the identity of the man is Mickey Scellenda, a Greek immigrant with a history of sexual assault and drug abuse. Williams and the police step up the search for Scellenda after raiding his apartment, finding photographs of most of the Ripper victims and huge stashes of pornography. Williams also pays a visit to Dr. Lodge to inform him of his wife's murder. Dr. Lodge tearfully defends his open marriage which gets him a sneering response from the 'moralistic' Williams.Meanwhile, Dr. Davis begins to express doubt to the killer's identity for Mickey Scellenda is only a petty criminal with a low intelligence quota, not the high intelligence that Davis has created in profiling the New York Ripper. Davis then buys a gay porno magazine at a local news stand (giving away his repressed homosexuality), and then pays a visit to Peter and Fay at their pleasant, well-appointed row house to ask them more questions about Fay's experience. Something about their story arouses his professional suspicious. That evening, after Peter goes out, Fay is attacked in their house by Scellenda who breaks in trying to kill her. But she is saved when Peter returns, and the man flees.A few days later, Williams gets another taunting phone call from the New York Ripper, who wants to "dedicate a murder to him." Williams and the police put a trace on the line and race to the location, only to find that the killer has set up a two-way radio to a remote phone booth, while he, is at that moment, in the home of Kitty, brutally torturing her by slowly running a razor over her face. Williams races to Kitty's apartment, but is way too late as the killer has fled, leaving behind Kitty's horribly mutilated body to be discovered.A while later, the dead body of Mickey Scellenda is found having committed suicide from self-suffocation. When Dr. Barry Jones informs Williams that Scellenda was dead for the last eight days, four days before Kitty's murder, Williams finally realizes that they have been tailing the wrong man.Williams relays this to Professor Davis, who is both delighted and disappointed with the news. Davis explains that with Scellenda eliminated as a suspect, his original idea to the killer's identity is confirmed; a deeply disturbed person, with a high IQ, who blames women for his or her troubles, and used Scellenda to pick out his victims. When Davis explains his suspicious about Peter and Fay, Williams decides to have them followed.Fay is shown visiting a hospital where Peter has a child from a previous marriage, a little girl named Suzy, who is dying from a rare bone disorder that has led to the amputation of her left arm and right leg. But is the killer Peter or Fay? Visiting the hospital, Williams and Davis observe little Suzy in her hospital bed and decide to race over to Peter and Fay's place to arrest both of them.At Peter and Fay's house, one of them gets a phone call from a duck-voiced person, while the other one overhears. When Peter goes into the kitchen for dinner, Fay has disappeared. Going upstairs to Suzy's bedroom, Fay jumps out of the darkness at Peter stabbing him with a kitchen knife. Suddenly, Peter rises, quacking like a duck, and struggles with Fay in which they both tumble down the stairs. Just as Peter grabs the knife away from Fay and about to stab her, Williams runs in and literally blasts Peter's face off with one shot from his gun.In the ambulance, Davis explains to Fay her deranged boyfriend's motivation for killing. His hatred of sexually active women stemmed from bitterness at the cruel blow fate had dealt his young daughter, who will never enjoy the freedoms of his despised victims. After leaving the scene, the phone in the now-deserted house rings again. In her hospital bed, little Suzy is calling out for her father pleading to answer her call, as her voice is drowned beneath the everyday traffic of the city.
    

The New York Ripper

Three-Step Dance

The Jeweller's Shop


            Three young boys walk into a dark, abandoned house and toss a tennis ball down a dark stairway leading to the basement. One of the boys is told to retrieve the ball or he will be considered a sissy. The boys scream at the little blond boy "you're a female!" The boy cries and walks down, and after a scream, a bloody tennis ball is thrown back up. The other two boys run away.Giovanni, a local caretaker, trims the hedges at a local villa as Tony (Michel Sovai) shows Bruno (Andrea Occhipinti) the villa. Bruno is staying there as he composes a score for a thriller film being in post-production back in Rome. Back at the studios, Sandra (Anny Papa), the film's director, shows Bruno the stairway scene (from the opening scene), and discusses her "secret" final reel. Sandra says that she is having Bruno stay in the large, isolated villa to get him into the proper mood to compose the music for the film.At the villa, an unseen person walks outside and slices a magazine photo with a cutter. Just then, Bruno arrives, turns on his tape recorder and records some haunting piano music for the score. A person nearby whispers, and Bruno hears the voice and the sound of the cutter being pushed out. As Bruno looks around, a woman jumps out from a closet (after a spider scared her). The woman introduces herself as Katia (Valeria Cavalli) to Bruno and claims to be a friend of Linda who lives nearby. When Tony calls Bruno and asks him about the lights, he is told that the previous tenant, Linda, liked the dark. Katia asks where the bathroom is and she walks out. Just then, Bruno finds a diary in the closet. He reads it and it mentions Linda's secret. Outside, Katia is chased by an unseen cutter-wielding person. Katie screams to the figure: "I didn't say anything!" Katia is stabbed in the stomach and her neck is slashed.Back inside the house, Bruno rewinds the tape, plays it, and again hears the recorded whispering. He plays it again and hears a words which are "secret", the name of Linda, and "no one must know". Bruno goes outside to smoke a cigarette while a dead Katia is being dragged through the bushes by the unseen killer. Bruno hears a noise in the bushes and goes to investigate it. As he approaches the killer's hiding spot, the cutter is prepared, but Bruno returns to the house when the phone rings. When Bruno answers, the phone only makes a crackle sound as there is interference. Bruno hangs up and sees that he has some blood on his pants. Bruno goes back outside again to the bushes, but by this time the killer is gone and there is blood drag marks on the grass. At Giovanni's house on the grounds, he finds blood on the back steps to his house. Bruno hears the music inside the villa turn off in which he returns and finds the diary with the pages torn out. When Bruno sees Giovanni's front door light come on, he goes to the other house and helps him as he carries a trash bag. Giovanni claims to Bruno that he is throwing away some old newspapers and magazines. Bruno asks Giovanni about the previous tenant Linda, and Giovanni says that he did not know her all that well. A few minutes later, Julia (Lara Naszinski), Bruno's actress girlfriend, arrives at the villa and tells Bruno and her rehearsal was canceled and she was the one who called earlier but something was wrong with the phone line.The next day, Bruno tells Julia about his strange night. After Julia leaves, Bruno goes to the cellar and finds a locked door. Tony arrives at the villa where Bruno asks him about the locked door and Tony says that it contains things that Lind left behind. Bruno asks what Linda was like and Tony says that she was a "normal kind of girl". Just then, Bruno gets a call from Sandra and asks to meet later.Later that afternoon, Angela (Fabiola Toledo) arrives at the villa and tells Bruno that she is looking for her live-in girlfriend Katia who did not come home last night. Angela tells Bruno that Katia came over to get her diary back. Bruno asks about Linda, and Angela says that Linda would let her and Katia come over to swim in the pool there. Bruno tells Angela that she can use the pool whenever she wants. Angela then goes to the pool house to change. Giovanni watches her while she swims. While Angela is diving underwater, she finds the cutter on the bottom of the pool. When Bruno leaves for the studio, Angela walks into the house, while an unseen person, wearing womens high-heeled shoes with a red skirt, blouse, and red-painted fingernails, takes a knife from the kitchen. Angela goes to the upstairs bathroom to change and to wash her hair in the bathtub. As she reaches for the shampoo, her hand is stabbed and pinned to the sink by the kitchen knife. The killer then puts a plastic bag over her head and repeatedly slams her head into the counter, while laughing maniacally. Angela mages to pull the knife out of her hand, but she is placed in the tub and her throat is slit. The killer then begins cleaning the floor and counter with tissues.At the studio, Bruno works and waits for Sandra to show up, which she never does. At the end of the day, Bruno returns to the villa. In the kitchen, Bruno sees that one of the kitchen knifes is not with the others. Going to the upstairs bathroom which is now clean, he finds an empty box of tissues, a cut on the counter, and a bloody piece of torn tissue paper on the floor. In the cellar, Bruno finds more bloody tissues under the locked door. Bruno records himself and talks of possibly uncovering a string of murders, beliving that Angela and Katia are dead.A little later, Sandra arrives and Bruno tells her what happened. Sandra mentions the killer not being able to move the bodies, and Bruno tells of a locked door in the cellar. Sandra says that she knows a Linda, but "it couldn't be her". They go down to the cellar where they find the door unlocked. When they find a large truck in the room which is filled with tennis balls, Sandra says that it must be the Linda she knew. She says that Linda as a child was the basis for the character in her film. They hear someone in the studio above. In the hallway, Bruno is nearly stabbed by a nervous Julia. After they settle down, Sandra leaves. Julia tells Bruno that the play she is appearing in was suspected due to obscenity charges.The next day, Sandra calls Linda and says that she is sorry for the way things turned out between them. She says that she used Lindas story in the movie, but it was mostly fabricated and says to Linda over the phone "I didn't say anything". The unseen Linda merely whispers and hangs up.At the villa, Bruno finds Julia listening to his tape and the two of them argue about the murders since Julia is skeptic that two murders have just taken place since there is no bodies or evidence of any fowl play. When Bruno asks Julia to go with him to the police, but she again thinks that there is no murderer lurking on the grounds. A little later, Bruno goes out and down the street to a payphone where he calls the director of the theater where Julia is working and asks about the charges of obscenity. The director tells Bruno that there are no obscenity charges for it is a children's play, and that Julia left on opening night without an explanation.At the studio, the unseen woman enters the editing room, takes out a film canister and begins to cut up the film reel. Bruno, at that very second, is meeting nearby with Carlo the editor and tries to persuade him to let him see the last reel. When they arrive in the editing room, the killer has quietly sneaked out and left behind the film which is cut to pieces. Back at the villa, Giovanni finds the dead bodies of Angela and Katia in his tool shed, but before he can do anything, he is hit on the head with a wrench. At the studio, Bruno and Carlo splice together as much of the damaged film as they can and watch the scene, which is shown of the two boys taunting the other boy to go down into the cellar, and suddenly during a splice a woman appears in the film with her back to the camera. Carlo says that it is probably the killer.At the villa, Sandra arrives to look for Linda and in the garage she finds a bearly living and bloody Giovanni. Linda jumps up from behind Sandra and wraps a film reel around Sandra and chokes her to death.A little while later, Julia arrives at the villa and enters the garage to find a dead Sandra beside a bundle of film reels. Just when, the garage door slams shut. Julia runs into the house looking for Bruno, and after being startled by tennis balls being thrown at her, hides in a closet in the cellar. She tries to keep the door shut as Linda pushes a knife through the door crack to force it open. Just then, Bruno arrives back at the villa and finding the bodies in the garage, enters the cellar and calls out for Linda. Julia jumps out of the closet and runs. Linda chases after her and stabs Julia in the back, killing her. Linda then runs towards Bruno screaming. Bruno grabs a brick and whacks Linda on the head who falls to the ground unconscious. Bruno exmines Julia on the floor and finds that she is already dead. Bruno walks back up to Linda who rises up with the knife and struggles with Bruno, who pulls at Linda's hair where a wig comes off and Bruno is face-to-face with... Tony. Tony swings the knife at Bruno who twists the knife in Tony/Linda's hand and stabs him with the knife. Tony/Linda falls to the floor and screams out: "I am not a female!" and then dies.In the final scene, Bruno watches the final scene in Sandra's film in its entirely where after the two boys run away after the bloody tennis ball flies up from the cellar at them, a woman figure walks back up the stairs and it is the little boy sent down the stairway... now adorned in a wig and dress. Bruno realizes that the sexually confused and frustrated Tony and invented the persona of Linda and had tried to cover up his secret by killing all those who knew him and his secret idenity.
    

Andrea Occhipinti

Andrea Occhipinti Movies or Tv Shows (upto Dec 2024) - Watch Online

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