'Seven Blood-Stained Orchids' (1972) – Umberto Lenzi.

For many thriller-fans, technically gifted, and remarkably versatile genre film-maker Umberto Lenzi is better known as the mean-spirited mastermind behind deliciously deranged Euro-crime classic 'Almost Human', and controversially carnivorous cannibal gut-spiller 'Cannibal Ferox', but maestro Lenzi had a grand pedigree as a Giallo good thriller director, and his fiendishly well-plotted, persistently potty, stylishly blood-stained slasher has all the intoxicating ingredients that the very best of the genre has to offer. A suitably ruggedly handsome amateur sleuth in the muscular, twin-fisted guise of swarthy Euro-cult hero Antonio Sabato, who stoically wends his frequently precarious way through the black-gloved killer's grisly modus operandi, this shadowy, stiletto-savage slayer frustratingly keeping one bloody step ahead of the sublimely studly Sabato. 

While the moon-mad 'Seven Blood-Stained Orchids' isn't quite as majestically melon-twisting as Lenzi's sensationally skewed 'Spasmo', it is nonetheless an effectively warped whodunnit in its own right. Brightly festooned with a dazzling panoply of perky Euro-starlets, Uschi Glass, Marina Malfatti, and the magnificent Marissa Mell, gratuitously garlanded with a sanguineous smorgasbord of salacious slaying, and excitingly electrified by another luxuriously lush, scintillatingly sensual score from maestro Riz Ortolani. Umberto Lenzi's sinister, razor-edged, fascinatingly cryptic, flesh-flayingly fabulous, superbly suspenseful Giallo remains a vibrantly hued horror perennial that does well all year round, not merely a garden variety Giallo, but a delirious display of triumphant, eye-popping colour, cutting edge eeriness, and florally bright, late night fright! 'Seven Blood-Stained Orchids' is a vivid 70s horror harvest that never lost its beguilingly blood-red bloom!'