Radiance has released this set that has three crime movies starring Franco Nero and directed by Damiano Damiani. As a proud Italian-American, I must remind you that there is no organized crime syndicate known as the Mafia currently active in the United States.

The Day of the Owl: Franco Nero is Captain Bellodi, who starts this investigating the death of truck driver Salvatore Colasberna, a man murdered while delivering cement to a construction project. The only witness may be Rosa Nicolosi (Claudia Cardinale), a woman of somewhat loose morals. Either her husband caught her with Colasberna or the trucker was killed by a corrupt group of manufacturers under the orders of Don Mariano Arena (Lee J. Cobb).

This was one of the first of a wave of organized crime based films. The trend started when the Leonardo Sciascia’s novel To Each His Own was adapted as We Still Kill the Old Way. Day of the Owl was based on another Sciascia novel which was the first book he’d written about organized crime in Sicily.

Written by director Damiano Damiani and Ugo Pirro, who also wrote We Still Kill the Old Way, this differs from the book that it’s based on. Piro said, “To me, the book is a hint: I must try and preserve its message by using a different language.”

The Case Is Closed: Forget It: Based on the Leros Pittoni book Tante Sbarre, this has Franco Nero on the wrong side of the law as Vanzi, a man jailed for a hit and run misdemeanor and learning just how bad it is inside Italy’s prison system. That’s because organized crime runs everything even inside.

Vanzi tries not to get involved with the others, but soon is helped by an elderly prisoner by the name of Campoloni (Georges Wilson) and hindered by Biro (John Steiner), a killer who is barely able to keep himself under control. When Vanzi is moved into a cell with Pesenti (Riccardo Cucciolla), he learns that his new roommate is about to testify against Salvatore Rosa (Claudio Nicastro), which gets him killed right in front of Vanzi, who can either get out of prison if he says nothing or die if he reveals that the suicide was truly a murder.

This isn’t like any other role I’ve seen Franco Nero in and the ending is a gut punch. Expected, but still it’s a rough indictment.

How to Kill a Judge: Franco Nero plays filmmaker Giacomo Solaris, whose latest film, Inquest at the Courthouse, is based on the real-life corruption of a judge named Alberto Traini-Luiz (Marco Guglielmi). That movie ends with that man’s ties to organized crime causing him to be killed and when the actual judge seizes the film, he’s killed as well.

Solaris feels that he is responsible, but soon finds himself in a world filled with conspiracy and the murder of everyone close to him, as well as a relationship with the judge’s widow Antonia (Françoise Fabian).

This movie is just as tough on director Damiani, as it was inspired by the actual murder of a judge who he had based a character on in his movie Confessions of a Police Captain.

This set from Radiance has tons of amazing extras to go with the new 2K restorations of the films.

There are new and archival interviews with Nero for all three films, as well as filmmaker and Italian crime cinema expert Mike Malloy discussing The Day of the Owl, a video essay by filmmaker Howard S. Berger looking at actor Lee J. Cobb’s career transition from Hollywood to Italy, an interview with Claudia Cardinale, a making-of for The Case is Closed: Forget It; a visual essay on the career of Damiani Damiani by critic Rachael Nisbet; interview with Alberto Pezzotta, author of Regia Damiano Damiani, who discusses Damiani’s contribution to the crime genre, a new video essay on How to Kill a Judge by filmmaker David Cairns; trailers for all three movies, a reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters for each film and — most awesomely, I may add — a limited edition 120-page book featuring new and archival writing on the films by experts on the genre including Andrew Nette, Piero Garofalo, Paul A. J. Lewis , Shelley O’Brien, Nathaniel Thompson, Marco Natoli and Cullen Gallagher.

You can get this incredible set from MVD.

Erotic Games of a Good Family was directed by Francesco Degli Espinosa and this is the only movie he ever directed. His credits include writing the Laura Gemser movie Emmanuelle On Taboo Island, Vengeance Is My Forgiveness and C’era una volta questo pazzo, pazzo, pazzo West. Strangely, he’s listed as the assistant director on his own film on IMDB for this movie.

It was written by Renato Polselli, which accounts for both the film’s psychological and prurient content.

Riccardo (Donald O’Brien) comes home early one night and finds his wife Elisa (Malisa Longo, Nude si muore) with her legs around another man. As the moralist husband barges in gun drawn, that man jumps out the window to escape. Riccardo tries to keep his morals about divorce and stays with his wife, but then decides to give her a sleeping pill in her whiskey, place her body in a sack and throw it down a hill. He’s overcome by anger when all he wants is love. This act drives him a bit insane, but it seems that all is healed when he and sex worker Eva (Erika Blanc, Kill, Baby…Kill!, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse, The Devil’s Nightmare) end up falling in love. Or lust. Yet he can’t stop seeing visions of his dead wife and in the middle of all that, he’s so far gone that he also starts trying to sleep with his niece Barbara (Maria D’Incoronato, Concorde Affaire ’79).

Of course, if you ever watched an Umberto Lenzi and Carroll Baker giallo, you know exactly what’s going on. Elisa and Eva are lovers, Elisa is still alive and yes, Eva and Barbara are also lovers. Everyone wants Riccardo’s sizeable fortune, so if they have to destroy him to get it, well, that’s a bonus.

Also known as Amoral Games and Thrilling Story, this is the kind of giallo that those who have seen many of the films in the form will probably enjoy. I mean, I know I did. It’s hilarious that the red-bearded man — spoiler that isn’t a spoiler, it’s Blanc, as if you could hide her rapturous beauty under a fake beard — keeps showing up, as does the dead wife. And I have a suspicion that Polselli directed just as much of this as Espinosa if that beyond extended lovemaking scene between O’Brien and Blanc is any evidence as well as the main plot idea that in the space of a few days, Riccardo goes from an ultra moral man to one who has killed his wife, pays for sex and is trying to sleep with a younger family member. Throw in some hallucinations and it’s very much his kind of movie.

I’m frankly shocked that this has never been released in the U.S. Maybe because there’s no dub — that I know of — but it certainly has the kind of feel and subject matter that gets people excited about giallo. The closing moments, when it all comes together, really pays everything off and nobody escapes unscathed.

It’s a simple detective story that’s pretty well told. What he told Jay Slater about the giallo fo Argento makes sense to me after watching this: “Argento doesn’t make real giallos. He takes five or six horrific elements and sticks them together with a very thin plot.”

This makes a good match for another Polselli-written giallo, Psychout for Murder.

It’s pretty wild when you think about the cultural relevancy of Bewitched.

Yes, I said it.

Airing from September 17, 1964, to March 25, 1972 on ABC, the show has been in syndication ever since as well as shown all over the world, which inspired remake TV series in Argentina (Hechizada), Japan (Okusama wa majo or My Wife Is a Witch), India (Meri Biwi Wonderful), Russia (Моя любимая ведьма or My Favorite Witch) and even a UK pilot as late as 2008. That’s not even getting into the spinoffs, reboots and inspired shows, like WandaVision, which detailed the Scarlet Witch trying to fit into the sitcom suburbs of her grief or the crossover with The Flintstones in 1966.

Maybe that’s because there’s something just under the surface here, like the sardonic narration by José Ferrer or the fact that it was one of the few shows of its era to deal with interracial marriage. And in 1964, Betty Friedan wrote “Television and the Feminine Mystique” for TV Guide. While she called out so many shows that made women out to be “simplistic, manipulative and insecure household drudges whose time was spent dreaming of love and plotting revenge on their husbands,” she saw Samantha, the lead character of Bewitched, as one that broke the stereotype while both playing into and subverting said preconceived notions. She literally wrote that the characters of Samantha and Endora broke new ground in the depiction of women on television.

There are 254 episodes of the show, but for some, that would not be enough. Or perhaps their country didn’t get to see the show and the idea was universal. And in Turkey, the show was really popular.

Popular enough to get a movie.

The Turkish version of Bewitched, directed by Ertem Göreç and written by Halit Aysan, has Filiz Akin playing Selma, our heroine, and she already stands out with her platinum tresses. At just 56 minutes, this is around three episodes in length of the show, but I still find it both amusing and empowering that another society could take and remix, remake and yes, rip-off something that came from another country and make it their own.

After all, Bewitched did the same thing with the 1947 movie I Married A Witch, right?

In case you wondered, the title translates as Adventures of the Sweet Witch. Much like the show, Selma marries Fikret (Ugur Say), who makes her promise to never do magic again. Why would he ask that of her? Why would he subvert the very nature of who she is? And how can she keep loving him when he can’t allow her to be her truest self?

In 1992, The Advocate asked Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery if the show was an allegory for homosexuality. She responded, “Don’t think that didn’t enter our minds at the time. We talked about it on the set — certainly not in production meetings — that this was about people not being allowed to be what they really are. If you think about it, Bewitched is about repression in general and all the frustration and trouble it can cause.”

Unlike many countries around it, women in Turkey are free to dress how they want, go where they want, drive and work. However, around 40% of Turkish women have suffered domestic violence at some point in their lives, which is higher than Europe and America, while femicide also remains a major issue, as well as an increase in rights violations against women — as late as last year! — and arrests of women who protested.

While a silly bit of fluff, Bewitched and its inspirations have a truth inside them, hidden just as Samantha — or Selma — hit her powers. That’s universal in any language.

You can watch this on YouTube.

You have to give some credit to Brazilian director and writer Adriano Stuart, who got his Jaws parody into theaters the same year as the movie its making fun of, even ahead of the adult parody Gums.

A cod from Guinea is threatening to ruin the fishing season of São Paulo, so local authorities call everyone you would expect, like a Portuguese oceanographer and a tough fisherman who uses the records of “Rainha do Fado” Amália Rodrigues as bait.

This is as down and dirty as you can imagine a Brazilian ripoff film made in days can be. The jokes are dated and stereotypical. If the idea that Sheriff Brody is gay is hilarious to you, then you get it. So many of the jokes in the film are ones that you have to literally be there and by that I mean someone from Brazil.

They did make a nice poster, at least.