The New Monsters (1977)

What makes The New Monsters special is the way it turns everyday Italian life into a hall of mirrors—fourteen sharp little sketches that laugh first, then quietly sting, as if the joke is catching up to you. With Dino Risi, Mario Monicelli, and Ettore Scola trading off segments, the movie has that classic commedia all’italiana bite: brisk, cynical, and oddly human, powered by the effortless charisma of Ugo Tognazzi and Vittorio Gassman. It’s the kind of anthology where you don’t need every episode to be a home run, because the best ones land with such wicked precision they justify the ride all by themselves. If you prefer cozy, crowd-pleasing comedy, this may feel too dark or uneven, but if you like your laughter laced with satire, it’s a feast.

The New Monsters is trying to revive the classic Italian sketch-satire format, using a string of short episodes to poke at social hypocrisy with big-name directors behind the camera. The problem is that a lot of these vignettes feel more like thin ideas stretched to feature length than sharp observations, and the humor can land as gratuitous or simply silly rather than biting. Because it’s so uneven, you may sit through several segments waiting for the next good one, and if you’ve only seen a TV-edited version, the choppiness and missing context can make it feel even flatter. Still, if you enjoy 1970s Italian satire and don’t mind a hit-or-miss anthology, there are a few moments of craft and attitude that hint at what it wanted to be.