Non Si Sevizia un Paperino(Don't Torture a Duckling) COMING TO DVD IN APRIL 2000! Synopsis: In the small Italian village of Accendura, a killer is preying on young boys. Suspicion falls on each of the local "outsiders": the village idiot, who hides one of the bodies to perpetrate a foolish "kidnapping" scam; an old hermit, who says a saint appeared to him and warned him of one of the crimes; the local witch, who thinks she killed the boys by magic because they tried to dig up her dead child; and a rich man's daughter, a former drug addict returned from the city. When the witch, insane but not guilty, is released by the police, the village men get together and beat her to death. It's left to another outsider, a reporter, to figure out what the locals are unable to see for themselves: the killer is the local priest, who kills little boys when they seem to be in danger of losing their innocence.
Notes: Fulci's blistering attack on closed-mindedness is every bit as brutal today as when it was released. Abandoning the cool, reserved tone of Beatrice Cenci, Fulci is much more aggressive in Non Si Sevizia..., confronting us with really horrible images and perverse situations. No-one is who he or she appears to be in this movie. The vigilantes who punish the outsiders have the same mind-set as the killer, and the killer himself is not an outsider at all - he's one of the "pillars of the community" (in most thrillers this would be just another ironic twist, but in this one, it's because he's at the moral heart of the community that he has become a murderer). Even the reporter who eventually untangles the situation has his secrets: we think he's going to "end up with the girl" until just before the climax, when he reveals that the reason the case means so much to him is that he has children (and a wife) at home. The uncertainty of all the characters and their relationships, and the near-impossibility of our making any moral judgments on them, contrasts with the rock-solid "clarity" of the killer's moral choices. This becomes apparent in the final moments of the film, as the priest's delirious fantasies of sending his boys to Heaven alternate with slow-motion images of the priest's bloody death. This is a dirty, brutal, squalid film - and it just happens to be one of Fulci's best, most powerful and most personal movies.
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