John Steiner

A documentary concerning the violent Italian 'poliziotteschi' cinematic movement of the 1970s which, at first glance, seem to be rip-offs of American crime films like DIRTY HARRY or THE GODFATHER, but which really address Italian issues like the Sicilian Mafia and red terrorism. Perhaps even more interesting than the films themselves were the rushed methods of production (stars performing their own stunts, stealing shots, no live sound) and the bleed-over between real-life crime and movie crime.

Documentary on the life and films of Antonio Margheriti.

This documentary examines the life and legacy of controversial Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci through interviews with his colleagues, each of whom answers the question, "What is your fondest memory of Lucio Fulci?". The responses are as varied as the people who knew the late writer-director, providing a nuanced look at the man behind such gory grindhouse classics as City of the Living Dead and The House by the Cemetery.

In 1957 Trieste, a few months before the general ban on brothels, inexperienced country girl Mimma becomes Paprika to finance her useless boyfriend as a prostitute. Amid the hustle and bustle of Rome, Paprika drifts from one brothel to another as she learns the ropes and works her way up one client at a time. However, as Paprika embarks on a stormy journey of self-discovery and sexual liberation, the sense that something is missing haunts her. Is Paprika meant to experience a passionate romance and solve the great mystery of true love?

Z-movie actor Bruno Martel has hero syndrome, often quarrelling with directors. He meets fellow actor Doris, who is obsessed with Ophelia but cannot get any Shakespearean bookings. One day, during a nervous breakdown, Bruno 'rescues' Doris from the set, leaving town to encounter various absurd situations.

An Italian policeman investigates a series of murders involving people in prominent positions. Left behind at each murder scene is a drawing of a salamander. The policeman begins to suspect these murders are linked to a plot to seize control of the government.

Yor is an extremely blond prehistoric warrior who comes to question his origins, particularly with regard to a mysterious medallion he wears. When he learns of a desert goddess who supposedly wears the same medallion, Yor decides that he must find her and learn his true identity. Along the way, he encounters ape-men, dinosaurs, and a strange futuristic society.

A razor-wielding serial killer is on the loose, murdering those around Peter Neal, an American mystery author in Italy to promote his newest novel.

After unknowingly coming into possession of an incriminating set of photos, a glamorous call girl in Rome becomes the target of a switchblade-wielding assassin.

A bodybuilder, a junk-food addict and a wild blonde nymph and their friends are stalked by a terrifying figure. An horrific tale of murder as a fun-loving group of college students explore the Colorado wilderness.

What begins as an innocent art class becomes a steamy triangle of erotic passions and forbidden love. A beautiful Japanese girl becomes the object of obsession in a devious relationship between the wife of a German diplomat and her husband.

A reporter and her cameraman connect a surviving Jonestown leader and a TV exec's missing son to a drug war where jungle installations are being massacred by an army of natives and a skilled white assassin.

David must fight for his life against the gangsters who killed his brother for a CD filled with proof of their illegal activities. When David gets possession of the CD they go down to Mexico where David lives as a shark hunter. Who will get David first, the gangsters or the shark?

Oscar dreams of becoming an actor or a stuntman. To contact a manufacturer he stages an accident and consequently injures a young actress, then tries to limit the damage by taking the girl to his home.

A cruel dictator rules a Latin American state. Corruption, brutality and exploitation are present every day. A few people begin to organise resistance. Under the leader "El Leopardo" a small group of guerillas fights against the violent government.

A charming billionaire manager kidnaps a criminal and locks him up in her private villa in Sardinia.

Sinbad returns from the sea to find his country subjected to the will of two unscrupulous sorcerers.

An American soldier and a British intelligence agent try to track down an ancient relic called the Golden Cobra, rumored to have supernatural powers. An early Raiders rip-off directed Antonio Margheriti.

A grieving woman, haunted by the loss of her husband on their wedding day, suddenly finds herself slipping between two realities—one where she remains a widow and another where he is alive with their son. As she struggles to distinguish truth from illusion, she becomes entangled in love, betrayal, and mystery, questioning her sanity while searching for answers in a world that keeps shifting.

Ten years after the end of the war in Vietnam, four ex-Marines decide to return to S.E. Asia to investigate reports of American POWs still being held there. These four include Roger, whose daughter's just been married, the unemployed James, Mark, who's quit his job at an Arizona roadside tavern, and Richard, recently a patient at a mental hospital. In the jungles of S.E. Asia they discover American POWs but also find out about a U.S. Government plot to keep this knowledge a secret.

During the Vietnam war, an American soldier gets trapped beind enemy lines. A squad of his buddies sets out to rescue him.

Two deadbeat friends barely pass the entrance exam for the Carabinieri, the national gendarmerie of Italy, but love for the same woman gets in the way.

Lewis Collins is back to leading mercenaries on the move in Southeast Asia. This time the cast is unusually good including Lee Van Cleef, Brett Halsey (Cop Game), Romano Puppo (Robowar), Mike Monty (Raiders of Atlantis), Bobby Rhodes (The Great Alligator), etc. Anyway, Van Cleef has Collins go on some random mission to locate a disc with all sorts of valuable crazy intelligence data on it. It just happens that Donald Pleasence, a random government official, hires another mercenary-for-hire Manfred Lehman to tag along and make sure the data ends up in the right hands. Van Cleef isn't taking any chances, and since he is crooked and murders Collins's other bosses quickly, he places Romano Puppo in the group as well to make sure the operation runs smoothly. Collins may not be too expressive but at least he seems to figure out quickly who's out to get him, so the mission continues with lots of double-crosses, twists and turns, and of course lots of explosions!

A safecracker takes a job where he must go to Istanbul and steal a scepter that once belonged to the god Gilgamesh but is now in the temple of a secret cult.

The Summerking's daughter has been kidnapped, and the legendary hero of the desert comes to her rescue as he did when she was young. The Lone Runner proves to be an unstoppable hero with limitless fighting abilities. He battles those who would harm innocents, and does what ever else he can for them.

In Italy, set in the early 1930s, a missing Swedish millionaire (Erland Josephson) is the target of a journalist (Rüdiger Vogler) who sets out to discover exactly what happened to the man and whether or not he is still alive. The biggest lead he has is the millionaire's attractive mistress (Brigitte Fossey), and the story takes off from there.

John Slade is hired to rescue a journalist named Frank Morris from a Sandinista prison in Nicaragua. He teams with Marta, a local woman, to carry out this mission, but then he's captured, tortured, and forced to deal with the fact that he's been betrayed.

After the death of the paranoid emperor Tiberius, Caligula, his heir, seizes power and plunges the empire into a bloody spiral of madness and depravity.

In Nazi Germany, Kitty runs a brothel where the soldiers come to 'relax'. Recording devices have been installed by a power-hungry official who plans to use the information to blackmail and usurp Hitler. One of the girls discovers the ploy and, with the madam's help, takes on the dangerous task of exposing the conspiracy.

Sequel to Lucio Fulci's first 'White Fang' has the wolf-dog once again trying to stop the villainous Beauty Smith from claiming a recently discovered gold mine in 1899 Yukon, Canada.

The wolf dog, White Fang, aids a reporter, a fur trapper, a nun, a young Eskimo boy and his father of ridding a gold mining town of a sleazy crime lord in 1896 Yukon, Canada.

As John Dannahay, a CIA agent stationed in Rome, plans the overthrow of an African government, he discovers one of his men has been in contact with agents from the other side. Before he can confront the traitor, the man seemingly goes crazy, sniping several people before taking an adulterous couple hostage in a hotel room.

A young couple become embroiled with the personal problems of another couple on a yacht moored off Sicily during a turbulent weekend of fun, games, sex games, betrayal, spouse abuse, and murder.

Maurizio Merli stars as a hatchet-wielding bounty hunter with a dark past and an even more desperate future. But when he disrupts the balance of power in a corrupt mining town, he unleashes a firestorm of brutality, betrayal and cold-blooded murder. Now, one man stalks a savage land where justice walks a razor and no bullets slice deeper than vengeance. He is A MAN CALLED BLADE.

A couple is terrorized in their new house haunted by the vengeful ghost of the woman's former husband who possesses her young son.

Young women in Nazi-occupied countries are packed onto a train and shipped off to a prison camp, where the sadistic commandant uses them as rewards for his lesbian guards and perverted and deviate troops.

Arrested on suspicion of a hit and run, a succesful architect is put in prison awaiting trial or release. Whilst there he witnesses the grim reality of life behind bars: corrupt staff, corrupt inmates, an inhuman judicial system and the power of the Mafia.

Days before the general election, after a girl from a rich family is murdered in an attempted rape, the editor-in-chief of a conservative tabloid tries to derail the police investigation in order to help the right-wing candidates supported by his bosses.

In the Nazi occupied city of Rome, an assault on an SS brigade draws retaliation from the military governship. "Massacre in Rome" is the true story of how this partisan attack led to the mass execution of Italian nationals under the orders of SS-Lieutenant Colonel Kappler.

A castaway arrives on an island. He thinks it's uninhabited, but he sees a palace with also a hidden room. Soon he sees some people walking, dressed with old-fashioned clothes. He is afraid because people don't see him, like a ghost.

In Genoa, the Commissioner Sironi has identified the leader of the ferocious racket that controls the port activities. But the law restrains his action.

A detective sick and tired of the rampant crime and violence in his city, and constantly at odds with his superiors, is finally kicked out of the department for a "questionable" shooting of a vicious criminal. However, he is soon approached by a representative for a group of citizens who themselves are fed up with what they see as criminals going unpunished, and they make him an offer he may very well not refuse.

Plot of Fear tells the story of a decadent weekend party full of orgies and drugs on the outskirts of Milan. Inspector Lomenzo investigates a series of bizarre murders, each linked by the fact that pages from the German children’s book "Shock-Headed Peter" have been left at the scene of the crime. As the bodies pile up, Lomenzo is guided by a model and a surveillance expert to a decadent club frequented by the rich and powerful.

A boorish, snobish toothpaste factory owner, Constantino Nicosia, gives his wife and everyone a hard time having let success and wealth go to his head. But after the superticous Nicosia has an encounter with an elderly gypsy aunt, and a business trip to Romania results in another encounter with a suave vampire, named Count Dragalescu, Nicosia returns with blood-sucking like qualities which makes him re-examine his life and existence.

A dramatic and penetrating examination of the intellectual and moral standards existing at Oxford University, England, in the early 1970s.

A woman gives birth to a baby, but this is no ordinary one. The child is seemingly possessed by the Devil.

Italian TV movie. Based upon a novel by Anton Chekhov.

Mario Gastaldi, a lawyer with no clients and no money, agrees to be a negotiator in a deal on stolen paintings, between the boss Peseti and the engineer Farnese, who plots kidnappings unsuspectedly. After he cashed from Farnese three hundred millions of lire to deliver to Peseti, Mario lets money be robbed by four pickpockets, which he is naturally in cahoots with and which he will share out it with. Money cannot be used since it comes from a kidnapping and it was marked. The lawyer will be able to make the boss get arrested.

Architect Dumas dies from a bullet of his own gun in front of his house. The police suspect his young Swedish wife Catherine and her English lover Tom Hastings. After numerous interrogations, in which they entangle themselves in contradictions, they try to flee, but are soon both caught and brought to trial, he in England, she in France. Only when Catherine keeps on proclaiming her innocence, superintendent Corbier finally considers believing her.

After his Western triumphs, Valerii stepped out of the shadow of Sergio Leone with this distinctly Bergmanesque sexual melodrama.Dionisio is perfect in the title role and this remains her best film, Valerii turns up along the way too. Just when the film hits a period of auto pilot John Steiner turns up in the final reel for a climax that is quite unforgettable. A bit difficult to trace but well worth the effort.

In ancient Mauretania, the young Roman Lucius Apuleius and his friend Aristomene run into a series of misadventures.

In an attempt to win better conditions for the workers in 1920s Turin, Gramsci leads a takeover of the factories by the workers. He is offered assistance by Kabak (who has just arrived from Moscow) but Gramsci soon realizes Kabak is not motivated by ideology, as he has other motives.

Benito Freire, a pedlar in a small village in northern Spain suffers from epileptic seizures and rumours start to spread that he may be a werewolf and responsible for a series of killings. The local Abbot is called upon to form a team to investigate, in an effort to halt the harrowing murders.

Returning from Switzerland to Rome, the boss prof. Salviati, called 'The Prince', finds his business compromised by Rudy, a small local bandit full of presumption, audacity and men ready to kill. Commissioner Baldi a young and brave employee, will fight against them with the help of an ex-employee Rampelli.

The Mexican guerilla leader Tepepa and his gang fight against the chief of police, Cascorro.

A hapless loser sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for seven wishes, but has trouble winning over the girl of his dreams.

In Charenton Asylum, the Marquis de Sade directs a play about Jean Paul Marat's death, using the patients as actors. Based on 'The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade', a 1963 play by Peter Weiss.

Mario, a young philanderer, receives 13 antique chairs in a bad state by inheritance and decides to sell off them to get some money. Afterwards he gets to know that one of them contains documents worth a lot of money. So he begins an adventurous trip to regain possession of the chair. On the way he meets many strange people who would like to help or to swindle him.

Dreamlike satire about a young man who resists getting a job at the lone employing conglomerate in his dreary industrial town, but changes his mind when he discovers the plant's boiler room has the perfect climate to assist him with his pet horticultural (fungal) project.

In this look at Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), aka Lewis Carroll, Dennis Potter mixed biographical drama with a psychological profile to explore the roots of Dodgson's creativity. Dodgson tells stories to ten-year-old Alice Liddell, leading to recreations of scenes adapted from ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND (1865), designed to resemble the original Sir John Tenniel illustrations.