US Palmese: Manetti bros win the game

Everybody knows Italy loves football (or "soccer"). But, when co-director Marco Manetti - before the film begins in Milan's Anteo-Palazzo del Cinema - asks the audience "Is there anyone who doesn't love football, here?" I have to raise my hand. Yes, well, I don't care much for football, although once in a while I watch games of the Italian or Spanish national football teams. But that doesn't mean I cannot enjoy a story about football: after all I don't need to know about fishing to read The Old Man and the Sea or to be a martial artist to enjoy Enter the Dragon.

The new film by acclaimed Italian directors Manetti bros - Marco e Antonio Manetti - is about a big football star who ends up in a small amateur football team, a fallen hero who gets back on his track at last. And about the town of Palmi, in the province of Reggio Calabria, with the kind of people you might find in any southern Italian... or actually any Italian town; and about their dreams. It's social Italian comedy at its best, a sports movie and, undoubtedly, a Manetti movie, with their own brand of irony and empathy.

But, of course, I might be biased, because I've known the two guys for quite some time, I love them and their films. I've been working with them - mostly Marco - on the novelizations of their Diabolik film trilogy and now I realize why he sometimes answered my calls from Paris... But, mostly, I always enjoy their way of making movies.

Marco Manetti (fotocappi)

In Milan, young football French star Etienne Morville (played by former Belgian football player turned actor Blaise Afonso) grown up in the banlieues of Paris, has become rich, spoiled, aggressive; although he invented a unique move called "Houdini", he now makes the news mostly because of his unpleasant behaviour.

Meanwhile in Palmi Vincenzo (Rocco Papaleo), a pensioner and widower who lives with his daughter Concetta (Giulia Maenza), sitting in a café talking football with his friends, makes a few calculations: if every citizen of Palmi gave 300 euros, the local amateur football team - Unione Sportiva Palmese, or U. S. Palmese - might be able to buy a real champion, such as Morville.

Concetta is doubtful. Palmi's poetess Ferraro (Claudia Gerini) thinks football is the opium of the peoples. Anyway, not only Vincenzo manages to collect the money, but Morville's manager forces the football star to accept the offer, in order to clean up his name and image. After the big teams and the big life in Paris or Milan, now the place and the game are totally different. At first, Morville doesn't seem to accept the new rules. Till he finds himself again, changing his life, the team and the town, with a few surprising twists at the ending.

Antonio Manetti (fotocappi)

Meanwhile, in the real world, Palmese has become one of the most famous football teams in Italy. U.S. Palmese was filmed in Paris, Milan and of course the directors' beloved Palmi, birthplace of their mother (to whom the film is dedicated). Spoken in Italian, French and the local dialect, the movie makes use of several technical tricks, some of which - says Marco - inspired by the Japanese anime series Captain Tsubasa. Manetti fans can recognize their style in shooting, but also their enduring love for cinema.

Besides, in their path through different film genres (horror, sci-fi, crime, musical and now sports) they also seem to have now found the epic, the faces and even the film score (as usual by Pivio & Aldo De Scalzi, here dotted by rap from the three different movie locations) that could allow them to make their own spaghetti western.

I just had time to ask them about it, while they were surrounded by fans in the theatre's foyer. "Who knows..." said Marco.

Manetti bros wearing the official Palmese shirt (fotocappi)

Gabriele Mainetti's Forbidden City

Once more, Gabriele Mainetti succesfully creates a movie you wouldn't expect from an Italian production. "I don't want to feel comfortable", says the director, after dealing in a very personal way with superheroistic themes in two highly unusual and powerful movies, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (2015) and Freaks Out (2021). In order to stay far away from his comfort zone, with La città proibita he challenged himself with an Italian-made effective kung fu movie, deeply faithful to the genre, while maintaining all the elements that have become typical of his work: human feelings, engaging characters, unconventional bad guys and... the city of Rome, which is always much more than a setting.

Kung fu movie lovers remember The Way of the Dragon with Bruce Lee - who also directed it - fighting young Chuck Norris in a Concord/Golden Harvest production unusually set and filmed in Rome. Lee's character Tang Lung arrives in Italy to protect the family restaurant from a local gang. Memories of this 1972 movie (released in Italy in 1974, six months after Lee's death and two years before Mainetti was born) might have somehow inspired La città proibita, although - says the director - when he suggested a martial arts movie in Rome, the producer thought he would do something like The Karate Kid. Absolutely not: Mainetti has a deep knowledge of the genre and how to deal with it.

First of all he needed real martial artists, including expert fight coreographer Liang Yang, who would sometimes need to take over direction and photography. And stars who could both fight and act, such as Shanshan Chunyu and the film's big surprise, Yaxi Liu. Some viewers might think that choosing a strong female main character is just a tribute to contemporary film rules, while Mainetti simply follows a long tradition of heroines in kung fu movies. Italian roles are filled by well known stars such as Sabrina Ferilli, Marco Giallini, Luca Zingaretti (internationally famous for the Montalbano tv series) and young Enrico Borello as the main male character.

Gabriele Mainetti (Photo: A. C. Cappi, 2025) 

The story: due to China's one-child policy (1979-2015) Mei always had to stay hidden at home, till her older sister Yun emigrated to Italy so she could stop living her claustrophobic existence. But Yun fell into mr. Wang's prostitution ring, hidden under his Chinese restaurant called "Forbidden City", in Rome's Esquilino neighbourhood.

Mei follows all the way the clandestine immigration path in order to find her sister and set her free, but discovers Yun has become the lover of Alfredo, owner of a nearby Italian restaurant, who left his wife and life for her.

Both Wang's gang and local boss Annibale, Alfredo's long time friend, are looking for the mysterious kung-fu-fighting Chinese girl to get rid of her. Meanwhile Mei joins forces with Marcello, Alfredo's son and cook in the family restaurant, to find the missing couple. A darker truth is about to be discovered. Mei nearly gets killed and soon she'll be out for revenge, while doing her best to preserve Marcello's innocence.

Written by Mainetti with Stefano Bises and Davide Serino, the movie balances perfectly staged action, comedy and noir, transplanting the rules of classic Hong Kong movies into the colourful, multiethnic setting of today's Rome. The result is both an Italian story and a Chinese story, with hints of William Wyler's Roman Holiday, Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars, Lo Wei's Fist of Fury and Bruce Lee's Game of Death, and a kitchen fight reminding of Jackie Chan.

Undoubtedly, it's an author's approach to martial arts films that doesn't betray the soul and spirit of the genre - which the director clearly knows and loves - but might appeal to audiences that are not familiar with a kind of movies viewers of the 70's grew up with.

Meanwhile, due to her impressive presence on the screen, martial arts film lovers in Italy start regarding Yaxi Liu - previously known as Yifei Liu's stunt double in Disney's 2020 live-action Mulan - as the next Michelle Yeoh.

Argento's Deep Red: 50 years and a fiction tie-in

On friday March 7th, 1975 - exactly 50 years ago - a new horror-thriller hit Italian theatres: Profondo rosso (Deep Red) was directed by Dario Argento, already a star after his thrillers that since 1970 had defined the "Italian Giallo" genre (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o' Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet) and the 1973 tv series Door into Darkness, in which he had been assisted by Luigi Cozzi (co-writer of Four Flies and other Argento movies, and later director, among others, of the science fiction cult movie Star Crash). The Italian Giallo usually mixes serial murders and a few supernatural elements, and Deep Red is considered its masterpiece.

The 50 years celebrations will include, in April 2025, a series of Profondo Rosso Concerts by composer Claudio Simonetti's group, Goblin, performing live their original soundtrack during screenings of the film. But the first act of the celebrations is a book: the most unusual kind ot tie-in.

Fantasmi di oggi e leggende nere dell'età moderna is a collection of original mystery/horror short stories by ten different writers, conceived by Mario Gazzola, who edited it with me (Andrea Carlo Cappi), containing original artwork by artist Roberta Guardascione, here also at her writing debut. The "lost book from the movie Deep Red" is published by Luigi Cozzi (also author of one of the short stories) through his publishing brand Profondo Rosso and will be available since mid-March 2025 at the famous Profondo Rosso Store in Rome in via dei Gracchi, 260 (which is also the home of the Dario Argento Horror Museum) and later all over Italy and in online bookshops. Before explaining what kind of book this is, let's look at where it comes from.

Like Argento's previous movies, Deep Red is the story of a killing spree aimed to hide a secret, which the main characters are forced to investigate if they want to survive. The film is set in a fictional Rome - actually made up with bits of Turin, Perugia and Rome itself - and starts with a public lecture during which German psychic Helga Ulmann (Macha Méril) suddenly feels a murderous presence in the audience. The same night Helga is killed near the window of her apartment.

British jazz pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), who lives in the same  building, witnesses the murder from the street and runs into the victim's apartment, too late. His friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), also a jazz pianist, who was with him in the street, is too drunk to be of help, But Daly, after having been threatened at his home by the killer, finds himself on the trail along with crime journalist Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi, who after filming started a long relationship with the director and later gave birth to actress Asia Argento).

More victims are brutally killed, including non-fiction writer Amanda Righetti (Giuliana Calandra), whose book Ghosts of Today and Dark Legends of Modern Age (in Italian: Fantasmi di oggi e leggende nere dell'età moderna) gave Daly a few clues on a previous unsolved mystery that seems to be connected to the killing spree through an old children song and an abandoned villa. Everything is explained in the end, during the final confrontation between Daly and the killer.

Almost everything, because there's a few little mysteries left. Where does the strange puppet used by the killer to attack professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri) come from? Why is the mysterious villa called "the villa of the shrieking kid"? And why is Amanda Righetti - whose book was originally published in 1956 and doesn't seem to contain compromising information about the killer - murdered almost 20 years later, in 1975? All of this is explained at last in our book.

In the movie we can see the cover of Fantasmi, its index and the first pages of the chapter about the mysterious villa. Everything is so detailed that you might think the book - published in 1956 by Sgra in Perugia, Italy - really existed. It's just a "pseudobiblion", a book that is quoted and mentioned, though it never really existed. But what if we could write it?

The idea came to writer-editor Mario Gazzola, author a couple of years ago of Hyde in Time, a book containing the fake (but rumoured) first draft of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and two (also fake) sequels by two descendants of the writer, all illustrated by - apparently - three different artists... all of them actually Roberta Guardascione, working in three different styles.

Since I'm a writer and an editor as well, Mario suggested we might call in a few fellow mystery-thriller-horror authors to write the ten chapters listed in the index, each apparently a "non fiction story" written by Amanda Righetti about a supposed "real Italian mystery". We assembled the group, but while we were working on Amanda Righetti's fictional biography, something surprising happened: we discovered her life.

In 1956 Amanda published the first edition of Fantasmi, based on her university dissertation, from which she had omitted a few personal details that might have seemed too strange to her professors. Then she became a well known "paranormal reporter" and went on investigating mysteries, including some she had already dealt with in the book... and, also, some that regarded her. Including her interest for the works by Regina Calamai, a maudit artist of the early 20th century, some of which - The Black Paintings - had been collected by Helga Ulmann. That's why, around 1974, Amanda decided to work on a new edition of Fantasmi, with all the material she had left out in 1956 and her later discoveries, including an eleventh chapter, all illustrated with The Black Paintings. But, just a few days before going in print, she was murdered and the publisher decided to shelf her new book, which remained unknown for fifty years...

So our Fantasmi "by Amanda Righetti, new edition edited by Mario Gazzola and Andrea Carlo Cappi" is at the same time a collection of eleven short stand-alone stories (by Claudio Bovino, Andrea Carlo Cappi, Luigi Cozzi, Paolo Di Orazio, Mario Gazzola, Roberta Guardascione, Enrico Luceri, Gian Luca Margheriti, Claudia Salvatori and Giada Trebeschi), a novel about Amanda Righetti (by Cappi, Gazzola & Guardascione) and a selection of Regina Calamai's The Black Paintings (by Roberta Guardascione; one of them above).

It's up to readers to discover the connections among the stories, the untold secrets of Deep Red, the hints to the whole film universe by Dario Argento (including Suspiria or Inferno) and the details hidden in the anamorphic pictures, that can be discovered by looking at the book upside down.

Fantasmi di oggi e leggende nere dell'età moderna (214 pages, 19.00 euros, published by Profondo Rosso) is available since mid-March at the Profondo Rosso Store and website, and since April also in online and physical bookshops.