L'ultimo capodanno (1998)

December 31, 1998, Rome. The grotesque stories of the various residents intertwine within the fictional Le Isole residential complex, located at 1043 Via Cassia. Giulia is a housewife, happily married to her husband, Enzo. Shortly before New Year’s Eve dinner, she discovers from a voicemail message that Enzo has cheated on her with her friend Lisa. Desperate and emotionally devastated, Giulia has a vision of her mother, who advises her to take revenge for her husband’s betrayal. She drugs her husband’s cocktail with a powerful laxative and hallucinogen so that, during the feast, he will be forced to go to the bathroom. After the lights go out and she steals a harpoon, Giulia waits until the other guests have fled in terror, then takes revenge by impaling Enzo to his chair with the harpoon and torturing Lisa, making her vomit and eat her own stomach juices. Ernesto is a successful lawyer, alone in his office on New Year’s Eve because he is indulging his sadomasochistic perversions with an escort, Sukia. Meanwhile, three criminals, Osvaldo, Augusto, and Orecchino, sneak into the lawyer’s office to rob it and catch him in the act. They decide to blackmail him by sending compromising photos to his wife, who is clearly unaware of her husband’s perversions. Their blackmail also ensnares Filomena, Ernesto’s neighbor, who has decided to take her own life with a cocktail of pills after learning that her husband has died, having been kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Gaetano is a gigolo, forced to spend New Year’s Eve in the company of Countess Scintilla. Suddenly, Pasquale, a longtime friend of Gaetano’s, bursts into the countess’s home with his gang of Neapolitan exiles. Chaos erupts in the countess’s apartment as Gaetano tries to maintain a semblance of order to save his reputation. The chaos annoys the family living across from the countess: Mario, Maddalena, their two children, and Mario’s father. While Mario prepares his vintage car for a drive around town, Pasquale’s gang attacks Mario’s house with fireworks. Mario tries to defend himself with his father’s rifle, but it explodes in his hands, maiming him. The gang takes revenge by throwing a television at Mario’s son, seriously injuring him, while Gaetano dies from a gunshot. Ossadipesce goes to the home of his friend Cristiano, who lives with his ever-present, intrusive mother, Gina. The two smoke joints and take drugs all evening, until Cristiano shows Ossadipesce a secret room, which is actually the foundations of the residential complex itself, where the nineteenth-century oven that supplies all the apartment buildings is located. Bored and looking for drugs, the two decide to sniff some model-making glue, which is actually a powerful hallucinogen and goes to their heads. Cristiano sees the corpses of the complex’s nineteenth-century founders, while Ossadipesce thinks that Gina and her friends are in fact a police anti-drug task force. Convinced they have come to arrest them, Ossadipesce throws a stick of dynamite into the oven, blowing up the complex and killing everyone.