Advanced search

In the Sicily of the late 1940s, two brother sculptors, tired of selling madonnas to the local churches, finally realize their dream, and set up a Sicilian production company, thanks to the help of a local bishop. They start producing one box-office failure Z-movie after the other, all with terribly bad local non-pros as actors. Covered in debts, they finally have their great chance, when a local nobleman obsessed by magic decides to invest all his wealth in the making of a movie about Cagliostro, just one year after Orson Welles' Black Magic (1949). They hire a famous American actor (Robert Englund) and start shooting "The Return of Cagliostro".

A second coming? This time our savior chose a shantytown outside Turin, in the north of Italy, overcrowded by poor families coming from the south in search of a job in a factory, or less legal ways to survive. Young Maria (Cinzia De Carolis) can predict the future during her epileptic seizures, or at least that's what everyone believes, and her mother (Clelia Matania) sells her predictions and responses to the superstitious neighbors, after inducing her "trance" with electricity. One night the shock is too strong, and Maria seems to die: when she wakes up, she is found pregnant. And being a honest unmarried girl from the south, she is obviously still virgin... Notwithstanding the opposition of the local priest (Turi Ferro), everyone, including her, believes in the miracle, and prepares for a second coming, in a crescendo of fanaticism that is soon noticed by the press, and by the official church..