I don't know if this was a great film or if my expectations were so low that it was a home run for me. The Machine That Kills Bad People was an extra film on my Fear DVD so I assumed that it was nothing to write home about. Boy was I wrong. I loved the film.

The idea is brilliant. A man gets the power to kill bad people simply by taking a picture of a picture of them. The funny thing is that they even die in the same position they were in on the photo.

SPOILERS! The protagonist loves that he has this power, until he starts to realize that we are all evil and if he…

Roberto Rossellini has not shied away on the content of religion, as many of his films demonstrate how its existence are critical to the lives of the Italian people, whether it may challenge them or fulfil them, palpable either directly or thematically in its narrative, and with it, amplifies his adoration for the neorealistic qualities that initially defined his work. Even in his later films, as he departs from the grounded essence of his War trilogy, his tendencies of neorealism remains, still impacting our perception of the content and amplify the emotions that surround his characters. This was certainly the case in his first collaboration with Ingrid Bergman, Stromboli, as the environment that surrounds her is amplified in its captured…

”If the good people do not act then they become accomplices of the bad people”

Roberto Rossellini is regarded as one of the very finest filmmakers to have ever walked this earth. I’ve seen a few features from the Italian cineaste and though I cannot say that I am in love with any of those pictures, I do have an immense respect for the same. So, as I walked into this more obscure movie from his opus I didn’t have particularly high expectations, I was watching it as an educational viewing to get better insight into the director’s work. Luckily The Machine That Kills Bad People surprised me as this is a wonderfully joyful and immensely entertaining output.

Set in…

The "machine that kills bad people" turns out to be Cocteau’s death camera, freeze-frame and all, to Roberto Rossellini it’s "a comedy, my friends." The distance between neorealism and surrealism is a short one, the seaside village displays wartime scars but not before it is erected as a cutout diorama by the big hand in the sky (cf. Lubitsch’s The Doll). The wizened wanderer who’s run over on the road is later seen at the religious procession, grinning at the fireworks; the shabby photographer (Gennaro Pisano) welcomes him into his shop and is rewarded with the power to petrify anyone to death with the click of a shutter. (The first to go is the bully, buried with his arm frozen…

I gotta give it to Rossellini, making a post-war Italian neo-realist The Good Place was a real power move. Perhaps more cutting than that show, because it comes from a more knowing time and place and a more clearly political creator, but the comparison still hits enough for me, in that it’s a project created to tell you how bad the system is and how bad granting an excess of power to an elite is. It’s incredibly funny when it chooses to land a joke (the special coffin for the fascistic policeman), but it also manages to sustain its critiques and its bite throughout that, building to an excellent end.

Also, I am increasingly becoming a lover of the use…