(1952)
Dir - Roberto Rossellini
Overall: MEH
Long lost and presumably left unfinished by filmmaker Robert Rossellini, The Machine to Kill Bad People, (La Macchina ammazzacattivi), fuses neorealism, fantasy, and comedy within a story about a camera that either kills or merely freezes people in the perpetual state that they posed in for the photograph. Even with seven credited screenwriters, the otherworldly specifics are loosey-goosey at best and the plot has a disruptive quality where everyone talks over each other and nobody is all that likeable. This, the on location shooting, and the social commentary about how noble intentions can often be manipulated and taken advantage of by people's inherent selfishness root it clearly enough in the neorealism movement which Rossellini championed, but the humorous elements fall flat due to the film's rambling yet sluggish presentation. There are some clever bits scattered about, (like the bookending segments where a narrator introduces the tale with picturesque scenery and models being placed in front of each other by someone's hands), and the closing reveal of a mysterious hobo being some form of lower devil is fun, but it gets lost in its agenda along the way.
(1954)
Dir - Roberto Bianchi Montero
Overall: WOOF
A rare, pre-Mario Bava Italian production to score Boris Karloff, The Island Monster, (Il mostro dell'isola), suffers from top to bottom, not least of all due to its misleading title. Combining the words "monster" and "Karloff" together would logically indicate "horror", but this is not the case. Instead, the film is a dull and moronically plotted crime caper where Karloff plays a drug kingpin mascaraing as a philanthropist who kidnaps the daughter of a drug task force agent because stupid. Besides a quick introduction, Karloff is absent throughout the rest of the first act which leaves all the time in the world for a snore-inducing love triangle and some badly-dubbed military officers and criminals to talk to each other. Even the Ischia island setting is poorly utilized since Augusto Tiezzi's cinematography is merely of the "point the camera at the actors until they're done saying stuff" variety. Karloff does his respectable best and was still spry enough at this point in his career to perform some physical action, but there is hardly enough overall for him to do to elevate such uninspired tripe. Hopefully he at least got a nice vacation out of the assignment.
(1959)
Dir - Stefano Vanzina
Overall: WOOF
Christopher Lee makes his first of many appearances in an Italian production, playing a member of the undead for the second time following his breakthrough in Hammer's Horror of Dracula with Uncle Was a Vampire, (Tempi duri per i vampiri, Dracula is My Uncle, Hard Times for Vampires, Hard Times for Dracula, My Uncle, the Vampire). Sending up his image already in a hare-brained slapstick comedy directed by Stefano "Steno" Vanzina who is mostly known in his home country for making such movies, Lee proves to have a keener sense of humor than anyone else involved in the proceedings here, which are exactly as stupid and not-funny as one would suspect. As was common for Italian movies of the era, there are numerous people credited with screenwriting yet none of them were able to come up with any amusing gags. Renato Rascel portrays your typical weaselly protagonist until he becomes a vampire, which ushers in much dopey mugging and monologuing to himself in a reverberated voice. Lee fans will be doubly disappointed since he disappears for the entire second act and is dubbed in English by a guy with an Italian accent, making this one of the horror icon's least essential movies by a mile.
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