Spasmo

Umberto Lenzi is still playing the old school giallo hand here, which means less stabbing and more psychological games, but that doesn't mean he hasn't found new ways of presenting it. He spends the first hour of the film plunging you into a confusing plot, the explains what you've witnessed, then turns everything on its head again. Nice!

Christian (Robert Hoffman) is out at the beach with lady friend when he spots a corpse lying on the sand. The corpse turns out to be very much alive Barbara (Kendall) whom Christian becomes infatuated with. She runs off, leaving a thermos (!) with a strange name on it. This leads Christian to a boat where he meets Barbara again, and the two of them head off to a motel for some filthy squeazy, as long as Christian shaves off his beard. Of course, some strange man turns up in the bathroom and tries to kill him, resulting in one dead stranger. This happens in 75% of all one night stands.

Things go from bad to worse for Christian as he ends up in a never ending nightmare of people who may or may not who they say they are, dead strangers who come back to life, empty houses and their occupants, and the constant shots of mannequins dressed in sexy lingerie that have been stabbed with blades. Lenzi piles on the paranoia and the mysteries but doesn't lose focus, bringing it all together nicely (even if the twists are a bit cliché by this point).

Still, despite saying "Oh! It's that kind of plot twist!" Lenzi still has a couple of curveballs, one particularly grim and shocking. Lenzi keeps things nice and trippy for the most part too, as certain characters turn up as different people, and even what we've watched up to a point may not be the whole truth. The disturbing sight of sexualised dummies, which seems to have been switched with the real thing on purpose, just adds to the disorientation. The only downside is that some of the acting is a bit iffy. I'm looking at you, Kendall! Ivan Rassimov was fine though.

What people might have a bit of trouble with is home film that Rassimov watches in his office. It has all the zooms, focus shifts and edits of a professional film. When I think about it, I wonder if that was deliberate too...possibly.

Full of fetish images of inflatable love dolls hanged on trees or covered in blood, this madness of a movie is about the incoming insanity over a young industrial captain, who probably provoked the death of his father several years before. Not really bloody (most of the killings are strangling, and worst of all viewed all together at the end of the movie), not very sexy, not particularly stylish, without any unforgettable scenes and even with a very bland soundtrack, this movie is not a worthy successor of Argento giallos

Quite possibly the weirdest 'Giallo' movie I've ever seen is this Umberto Lenzi Spasmo. I'll try to give you a glimpse of the plot. It's about love dolls, wait, no. It's about two brothers. Hmmm.. let me start over. It's about a killing that wasn't a killing. Oh, I give up Spasmo is Spasmo. There that should tell you enough. It's not something one would care to sit through more then once as the surprising lack of blood and sex, makes one focus on the plot more closer. And that's the problem right there. what IS the plot of Spasmo?? It's driving me mad I tell you MAD.. spasmo..SPASMO!!! It does have a vaguely hypnotizing effect to it though.

My Grade: C-

DVD Extras: An Umberto Lenzi interview (which helped me try to decipher it); Stills gallery; Theatrical trailer; Trailers for "Eaten Alive", "Seven Bloodstained Orchids", and "What have you done to Solange?"

Umberto Lenzi's "Spasmo" is not really a horror movie as much as a psychological thriller. There's minimal violence, instead focusing on the main character's (Robert Hoffmann) descent into confusion. But as Lenzi explained in an interview, he had the flick turn out as it does to demonstrate how sick Italy's elites are. Like Lenzi's earlier "Orgasmo" (retitled "Paranoia" in the US), "Spasmo" shows that all is not what it seems in this supposedly nice group of people. Still, the sequence of events leading up to that have some pretty neat occurrences. I will say that I liked "Orgasmo" better (partially for the scene of Carroll Baker in the shower), but this one is definitely worth seeing. Also starring Suzy Kendall, Ivan Rassimov and Guido Alberti.

By 1974 the giallo genre was running out of steam and the films were getting more complicated, more violent and altogether weirder in an attempt to keep viewers coming. Director Umberto Lenzi made two that year, this one and the equally absurd Eyeball, leaving one to hope that Lenzi was putting the audience on and not the stark raving lunatic the films give the impression he was. Whereas Eyeball is a more conventional giallo, with a hooded killer picking off a variety of unwitting victims, Spasmo is more of a "Gaslight"-inspired venture. Someone may be trying to drive the irrepressible Robert Hoffman mad, but he needs little help, and the last fifteen minutes contain the strangest twists I've yet seen in a giallo. Those looking for a stylish thriller will be disappointed by the plant-the-camera-and-shoot direction, and don't expect anything like a plot that's worth following or characters with any relation to human beings. What makes it worth seeing is the genuinely dream-like story, linear yet impossible to follow, and the way each sequence transition requires a twisted justification by the viewer to accept that Yes, maybe it is possible that someone would do this. Here and there a haunting Morricone score comes in, sad and lovely as the one in "My Dear Killer," and there are inexplicable scenes of an unseen man stabbing female dolls, his identity revealed only at the very end in one the finale's many left-field twists. The only giallo remotely comparable to this one is Death Laid An Egg, and at least that had the excuse of being from the 1960's and (I assume) the use of mind-altering chemicals by its creators. I can't imagine what state of mind the filmmakers of this mini-classic were in while making it, but you'd be hard-pressed to find another film like it.