The Italian title translates as "The Machine That Kills Bad People", not exactly the most elegant name I would have come up with, with just a little more thought. "The Camera from Hell" kind of says it and supports the plot of the story, but even that seems a bit awkward. This picture employed a pretty unique concept when an apparition mistakenly taken for St. Andrew, the patron saint of the mountain town of Amalfi, empowers a photographer's camera with the ability to strike its subjects dead when their photo is taken. When the photographer Celestino (Gennaro Pisano) discovers what he has, his own sense of morality impedes on his judgment, and he takes pictures of those citizens he deems to be morally compromised, thereby reducing the town's population one by one. Lest this all sounds unusually macabre, the story proceeds in somewhat humorous fashion, until Celestino's guilt has him confront the would-be St. Andrew, who confesses that he's really the devil Farfanicchio, who magnanimously reverses the 'deaths' of all the people that fell victim to the man's camera. Actually, when Farfanicchio made the sign of the cross, I expected him to vaporize like a vampire caught in sunlight, making the 'all's well that ends well' finale somewhat inconsistent with the story that went before.
Review of The Machine to Kill Bad People
