The best Carmelo Bene’s movies

In pre-war Italy, a young couple have a baby boy. The father, however, is jealous of his son - and the scene moves to antiquity, where the baby is taken into the desert to be killed. He is rescued, given the name Edipo (Oedipus), and brought up by the King and Queen of Corinth as their son. One day an oracle informs Edipo that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he flees Corinth and his supposed parents - only to get into a fight and kill an older man on the road...

A surreal and disturbing distillation of Western Civilization, Necropolis is the unhinged vision of Italian director Franco Brocani. Pierre Clémenti is Attila the Hun, naked and on horseback, while Warhol superstar Viva is a drunken and abusive Countess Bathory. A pop pastiche for the psychedelic generation, Necropolis features a soundtrack by Gavin Bryars.

Frank was removed from an investigation into Mac Brown, the owner of a pharmaceutical company, who was suspected of drug trafficking and illegal experiments on teenagers. When Brown is murdered, Frank is called to investigate...

A man (Carmelo Bene) can not bear to be part of society. He considers himself a "jerk" and so invents its own philosophy, which involves the destruction of his land of Puglia where all citizens are devoted to the Catholic religion. However, the man can not destroy the belief of the pilgrims of Salento, because a woman would prevent that. It is an unknown "Santa Margherita", which tries to divert man from his weird and impossible philosophy. Successive scenes of the film show various situations unreal and dream in which the two protagonists try to obtain the best one on the other. After a blasphemous dialogue between monks, the man includes his whole philosophy in a Moorish building. In fact, this seems to have been the scene of the massacre of the famous 800 Martyrs of Otranto, which are considered by the scetic man the absolute death of Christianity.

Hermitage, defined by Bene as "a rehearsal for lenses", beyond any literal rendition - its narrative trace comes from one of his anti-novels, Credito Italiano V.E.R.D.I - displays his immediate attitude to thinking a cinematic language completely based on actor's movements and actions, and more specifically, on his presence and his schemes. Camouflaged or naked, still or moving, his body seems to play and be played at the same time, shifted by objective and subjective tensions, both metaphorically and visually speaking.

The "Hamlet" in this well-mounted Italian spoof is the Danish prince, not a small town or village. The movie irreverently draws on both the Shakespeare play and the 1877 story by Jules Laforgue. In the story, Hamlet (Carmelo Bene) is a would-be playwright. He suffers from inept Freudian analysis by Polonius (Pippo Tuminelli), and Ophelia and Gertrude (Isabella Russo & Luciana Cante) are women conjured up in his erotic imagination.