'Spasmo' (1974) - Umberto Lenzi.

Murder maestro, Umberto Lenzi's fabulously monikered Giallo has an equally perverse, creepily convoluted plot to match it! The passage of time has done little to dull the stilleto sharp edge of Lenzi's compellingly off-centre, audaciously twisted Giallo! Excitingly, Spasmo's skewed narrative takes more wayward U-turns than, Robert Downey Jr's no less circuitous route to sobriety! The genuinely thrilling opening gambit is a seamily bizarre sequence wherein a courting couple grimly discover the film's morbid leitmotif, an eerily lifelike female manikin suspended grimly from a tree! Driven by an especially evocative Morricone score we are plunged breathlessly into the palpably schizo realm of Machiavellian business dealings, ostentatious playboys, twitchy-eyed assassins, voluptuously vulpine Femme fatales, and darkly fulminating sibling rivalries!

While highly regarded, I don't feel that, Lenzi's scintillating psychodrama 'Spasmo' is afforded the avidly expressed plaudits it so ardently deserves. Intriguingly, it doesn't rely on the razor-slashing rages of a ubiquitously black gloved killer, and its conspicuous lack of nudity is an atypical trope for maestro, Lenzi. While relatively chaste, Spasmo's exemplary, tantalizingly twisted, dreamily diabolical plot concludes explosively in a spectacularly lurid climax!!! Featuring Euro-cult luminaries, Suzy Kendall, Ivan Rassimov, Monica Monet, with a mesmeric, paranoid turn by the vastly underrated Robert Hoffman. Hoffman's increasingly desperate descent into a hallucinatory spectrum of deadly duplicity is sure to keep Gialli gawkers blissfully boggled! Umberto Lenzi's stylishly sinister Giallo exudes a beguiling strangeness, maintaining its fearful fascination without resorting to ostentatious camerawork, excessive gore, and formalized black-gloved overkill. For me, 'Spasmo' remains a captivatingly serpentine, not infrequently orgasmic Giallo masterclass!