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Reviews
La casa dalle finestre che ridono (1976)
A true gem of the Italian Seventies Thriller
La casa dalle finestre che ridono by Pupi Avati is the movie that scared me most. And that's because you don't expect it. The lazy, sunny, Amarcord-like setting (the plain of the Po, in Italy) only adds to the increasing terror that slowly grabs the spectator. The apparently jolly characters are all double. You can't trust nobody, because everyone will turn his back on you. The whole village and his roundabouts seem possessed by evil, an unconfessable past with ghosts still living among us.The final truth is upsetting, as is the open ending. Each time I watch this movie I feel deeply disturbed, but I like it. A true gem of the Seventies Italian Thriller, much more original than, e.g., Dario Argento. Sigmund Freud (see Der Unheimlich) would have loved it.
La monaca di Monza (1969)
Disturbing but accurate Italian Chronicle of the XVII century
Disturbing but accurate Italian Chronicle of the XVII century. It depicts the real story of the Spanish nun Virginia de Leyva, a noble forced to take the religious votes in the Italian convent of Monza, where she becomes mother superior, and of her violent affair with an Italian "Signorotto", after which she gives birth to a girl. He gets killed, she ends up buried alive for more than ten years in a tiny cell. Cruel inner plots, corruption, sex hidden behind the walls between nuns and priests, hysteria and general hypocrisy, not to mention tortures and psychological violence, all make up to a disturbing but effective kind-of prequel to Ken Russell's "The Devils". The story of Virginia de Leyva also inspired a famous chapter of the Italian historical novel "I promessi sposi" by Alessandro Manzoni.