Che fine ha fatto Totò baby? (1964) Poster

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4/10
Toto baby
BandSAboutMovies9 January 2024
Warning: Spoilers
An Italian comedy giallo parody of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? How did I never know about this?

Directed by Ottavio Alessi, who wrote Emanuelle In Bangkok and Emanuelle In America and made Top Sensation, which dares to have a love scene between Edwige Fenech and Rosalba Neri, then ends with a Bible verse, this stars Toto, whose real name was Antonio Griffo Focas Flavio Ducas Komnenos Gagliardi de Curtis of Byzantium, His Imperial Highness, Palatine Count, Knight of the Holy Roman Empire, Exarch of Ravenna, Duke of Macedonia and Illyria, Prince of Constantinople, Cilicia, Thessaly, Pontus, Moldavia, Dardania, Peloponnesus, Count of Cyprus and Epirus, Count and Duke of Drivasto and Durazzo. "The Prince of Laughter" had a career marked by tragedy, like spurned lovers committing suicide, the loss of a son at a young age and even an eye infection that could have been stopped had he cancelled a show and disappointed his fans. Instead, he went on and lost a percentage of his site for the rest of his life. When he died, there were no less than three funerals, including one given by a local organized crime leader where an empty casket was carried along the packed streets of the small town where he was born.

Step brothers Totò Baby and Pietro (Pietro De Vico) steal suitcases at the train station. One day, they find that one of their stolen cases has a dead body in it. They switch that with two German women, Inga and Helga (Ivy Holzer and Edy Biagetti), but that's only the beginning of their problems. The women are having an affair with Baron Mischa (Mischa Auer, a Russian-born actor who was a famous silent movie actor in Hollywood before continuing his career in France and Italy), who finds out that our protagonists had the body and blackmails them into murdering his wife (Gina Mascetti).

When they attempt to kill her, she dies of fright instead, but Totò Baby begins to eat salads with marijuana instead of lettuce and becomes a serial killer. His step brother attempts to escape him, but is finally dragged to the brach - yes, like Baby Jane as he's also put in a wheelchair and served a frog - the police catch them. Totò Baby is committed where he writes the story of his life on an invisible typewriter. After all, his father was a criminal, so he was evil from birth.

If you recognize the home of the Baron, it's Casale di Santa Maria Nova in Rome, which is where Blood and Black Lace was made.
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3/10
Why does he keep biting his brother? That's disturbing
Bezenby16 May 2017
I've been duped! Here's me going back through the lists of Italian films just in case I've missed a giallo or horror and I find a comment on the IMDb that says 'ignore the comedy tag for this film as this is a giallo' I don't think so! This is an Italian comedy through and through, with a very, very slight giallo tang.

From what I can gather from my dodgy understanding of Italian and the insane auto-generated subtitles on YouTube is this: Toto and his brother are master pickpockets (well, Toto is, his brother is a Stooges level moron), but after hitting an old woman over the head with a stick and stealing her pension (that's serious assault, right?) Toto and his brother somehow end up stealing a dead body in a suitcase.

This dead body gets mixed up with another suitcase owned by some hitchhikers who end up at a house where everyone is smoking the chronic and the owner of the house buries the body, then convinces Toto to kill his wife! Following this, Toto seems to go mental while high on the skunk and starts killing everyone....I guess that's the giallo bit as Toto melts someone with acid, beheads someone else, and usually walls them up somewhere in the villa...always with the villas.

This film is like Benny Hill on acid and smack and PCP and coke injected into his penis while snorting coke from the rectum of a hooker while he felches magic mushroom spunk and tries to think of modern drugs to take that are beyond his age range like M-Cat, McHurley Wax and Smorkcing Ernds. However, the YouTube auto-translate subtitles are brilliant, for example:

Potential song titles for an art-rock band: "Pork Instep!" "A species of Cards" "An unethical lozenge" "I am east of the fence in the land of the horses"

The incomprehensible: "Barbara Striesand is on the internet too much these days"

And my favourite:

"Someone who loves you has sent me to f*ck the Police School Logo"

This film was crap. I hate this stuff. Turns out smoking weed makes you kill folk or something.
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