Il ritorno di Cagliostro (2003) User Reviews

An experiment, with plenty of ideas and few coherence

[checcocinema · 7/10 · 23 March 2004]

It is difficult to find innovative approaches to filming and directors who have the courage to explore new routes and who do not feel obliged to respond to the public. Cipri' and Maresco fortunately are not like this, and are convinced that cinema can be made without following the standard manual that you learn at a film school.

Their cinema cannot be described, but it is a new experience, where you are taken and transported together with incredible characters and an intense form of human passion.

It does not follow a coherent route, but imagination is the main vehicle of their cinema. Art is expression, not reproduction of standards, and these directors are walking in that direction.

The end of trilogy

[destracricetale · 6/10 · 7 November 2012]

This movie is the third and last movie of the trilogy of the freaks by Ciprì and Maresco , the first one is "the uncle from Brookling " and the second one is "Totò that lives twice". I wrote the freaks trilogy because their actors, including the main characters are non professional ones but instead people taken from the streets like Pasolini actually did but unlike him Ciprì and Maresco the "actors" uses only "freakish" people ugly, obese, aged, with health ( or mental)problems, speech impairments or disfiguring scars. Those freaks are the trademark of the director duo and are used in TV for a series of surreal sketches called "cinico TV". About the movie plot: in a cesspool Sicily, after the second War, the Lamarca brothers very want to be filmmakers, because they love cinema . so they sold their factory of stone statues and, with the help of a heinous cardinal, they start the "trinacria cinema studios" like their real life counterparts ( the directors of the movie Ciprì and Maresco)..they hired freakish people for playing in absurd and failed movies. In a desperate attempt to save their studios the Bros accept to make a movie about the wizard Cagliostro hiring the declining American movie star Errol Douglas (played by a very good Roberd Englund). (spoiler) the American actor falls down from a window and remains crippled after that, the incident lead the end also for the Lamarca brothers and their director that are killed by the Mafia because..they are financed by Lucky Luciano and Errol Douglas was a friend of the gangster ( end spoiler)

Pros: If you are a fans of the duo Ciprì and Maresco then you will enjoy this one: the main characters ( the ones who are actually alive) are still here, the toothless Giordano and the spiting One, the aphasic Cirincione etc. Some gags ( the statue with a big dick) are rather amusing.

Const : the movie uses various styles like neither the directors have a clear idea about the final result: it is a fake documentary ( but only in the first half), a vulgar comedy, a drama or the surreal "cinic" TV sketch. The actors cannot really act, some of them really made their best but their performance are so modest that the result is embarrassing to watch. Some of them are deformed others look like patients from a mental institute , dialogs consist in ugly people that yelling profanities in a very heavy accent... funny for a while but those gags cannot hold a whole movie . The plot is very confuse as well: Errol Douglas ( Robert Englund) get a head trauma and end his days in a mental asylum because think to be Cagliostro in the half of the movie..and was killed an devoured by feral pigs in the end.

Summary:

the movie follow different directions and looks like they try to blend together different projects; is amusing in some segment and tiresome in others. A little inferior of the first two, lacking the unreal atmosphere and tried to be a comedy but failed in that because the poor acting and writing . I'll do 6 of 10 for the visible effort.

Strange. VERY strange.

[sperman · 3/10 · 8 September 2003]

I cannot say whether I liked it or not. Or actually I cannot say whether it is a good film or not. I personally liked it, although I cannot say I enjoyed it. It is surely one of the most weird, bizarre, "screwed-up" films I have ever seen in my life. Nothing follows a logical flow, there is basically no plot and no actors, but you inevitably end up laughing about something... and you do not even understand exactly WHY you are laughing, sometimes. but you laugh. Completely absurd, nonsense and pointless, but so strange you will end up feeling strange as well.