d. Umberto Lenzi (1973)
Giallo films are intricate,
intriguing, surprising. They are fixated on murder and fear in the fast lane of
the twentieth century, and feature attractive people with fabulous homes, cool
clothes, fast cars and strange, unnatural urges. There is always at least one character
who is a psychotic sex killer, and part of the game is working out which one (or
two, or three) it is.
Spasmo is a text
book example of its class, a triumph of style over substance. Almost everything is here
for effect, so much so that the film resembles a less tedious Whitehall farce,
filled with non-sequiturs: characters who drive miles to say a couple of
ominous lines and then drive off again; women and men who are introduced just to
be murdered; dead people who are neither dead nor people (one of the characters
has an obsession with lifelike female mannequins, and likes to hang them from
trees); shadows, mistaken identity, unlikely coincidences.
There’s a great kinetic energy to
the film, as if it relies on perpetual motion or knows it’s a fairly flimsy house
of cards that would collapse with the merest breath. Everything is heightened,
racked up, piled on. In an amazing lighthouse on a cliff edge filled with caged
birds of prey the camera cuts rapidly between headshots of the characters and
the birds, each staring down the camera in turn as Ennio
Morricone’s superb score stabs and swoops. The effect is slightly ridiculous, but
wonderful, operatically dramatic. Perhaps the owl knows what’s going on, as
no-one else really has a clue – or a care, it’s not that sort of movie.
English actress Suzy Kendall – born Freda Belpin –
lends extra quality to proceedings: she's beautiful and moves like a model,
but is also excellent at screaming and pulling ‘urgh’ and ‘arrgghh’ faces. She
is ably supported by an equally photogenic cast: this is Giallo, so everyone is
good looking, except for the ugly ones, who have more than a touch of the grotesque about
them.
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