This movie is highly recommended based on title alone. How can you not have a movie in your library entitled Spasmo? I was thinking it was about an epileptic magician. It wasn’t, but still was pretty good all things considered.
Director Umberto Lenzi (Seven Blood-Stained Orchids) checks in with a mid 1970s giallo film that doesn’t do too bad a job at what it sets out to do: keep you guessing, off balance, and awake, thanks to a believably paranoid performance by lead Robert Hoffman and a great score by the legendary Ennio Morricone (too many credits to do him justice, but think Once Upon A Time In The West and tons of Dario Argento movies).
Hoffman plays Christian (aka Spasmo), a guy who gets mixed up in an apparent murder and all sorts of skullduggery that stretches all the way back to his childhood.
While hanging out at the seaside, Spasmo’s lady friend photographer spies a body lying on the shore! The body (Barbara) wakes up though and announces that she must have fallen asleep or some such nonsense then she runs off when Spasmo’s head is turned.
A clue on a Thermos bottle left by Barbara leads Spasmo and his lady friend to a yacht owned by the sinister Alex. (Keep in mind that in any good giallo every character is sinister and if they don’t seem to be that sinister on the surface, then you know they’re even more sinister than the ugly Italian guys you’re already keeping an eye on.)
Spasmo reunites with Barbara and she informs him that he needs to shave off his beard before she’ll rut around with him. That’s not the strangest thing that Spasmo has to do in the bathroom that night though! That would be the karate fight he got into with an intruder and whom he later shot and killed! Or did he?
Oh, so it’s going to be one of those kinds of movies. You know the kind I’m talking about. The kind where whenever you return to the scene of the homicide, the body is gone and everyone acts like they don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s enough to drive a guy named Spasmo, err, spasmo!
Spasmo is upset about killing a guy so Barbara suggests that they go hide out at her friend’s remote home instead of doing something really nuts like calling the cops.
While at the house, Spasmo and Barbara run into a old man and a young woman. They claim to have rented the property from Barbara’s friend, but is there more to them than meets the eye? Is Spasmo on to something when he tells the woman that he knows her and that even though her hair and makeup are different that he’s sure of her identity and why is she here now?
For his part, the old man says that he was a reporter years ago and covered the funeral of Spasmo’s father. We learn that Spasmo’s dad was officially ruled a suicide and that whenever Spasmo gets in trouble he turns to his brother Fritz for help.
Is this couple renting the house for anything beyond getting out some of Spasmo’s back story? Are we ever going to meet Fritz? Why is Barbara along for the ride? And what’s up with all these freaking mannequins? And who is mystery guy that the old man is conversing with when he doesn’t know that Spasmo is peeping?
Lots of questions, but I didn’t even get around to asking all of them in that paragraph. Who is Alex and why does he keep showing up at odd intervals? What happened to the body of the guy that Spasmo killed? Why did the guy that Spasmo killed show up perfectly alive to harass Spasmo some more? (At least that answers one question!)
And whose hand is that that is sticking out of the well? The same well that Spasmo threw a bloody pair of gardening shears down that he found on the ground? And why is the guy that Spasmo thought he killed taking him to a really big cliff to kill him? At least that explains what the devil Spasmo is doing running the guy over a couple of times, switching clothes, dousing the guy with gasoline, and rolling the car off the cliff. Or does it?
The final minutes of the movie include a reunion with an unexpected twist, some deaths, a revelation about Spasmo and his family that explains much of what went on and also the nature and extent of Fritz’s involvement. The movie concludes with a final twist that explains all those dead mannequins that are piling up and it’s pretty effective though I could have done without one of the characters remembering something they had just read over and over. We got what was going on Umberto, you didn’t need to hit us over the head with it.
If I had any complaints it’s that all of this conspiracy stuff that was happening was purely a conceit of the movie. In real life, if someone is so crazy that he has a letter from a doctor that says that person needs to be locked up and gives a date that it should be done by, you aren’t going to be needing to concoct some convoluted plan to drive them “over the edge” so that they’ll seek help or be easily put away.
Still, Spasmo is a thriller that despite its relative lack of blood or skin draws you into its confusing, sweaty, desperate world before turning your assumptions on their head and leaving your expectations punctured like some mannequin’s scantily clad chest.
© 2010 MonsterHunter
