GIALLO SUNDAY: Spasmo

Umberto Lenzi’s psychological thriller starts with two effective rug-pulls. In the pre-credits scene, a young couple race down to the beach in the moonlight; stopping in the lee of a deserted beach house, they start making out. Lenzi’s camera frames the dangling feet of a hanged body behind them. A scream rings out as the girl turns and catches sight of it. The mood soured, they go to investigate. It’s a mannequin. An engine revs and a car roars off.

Post credits, Christian (Robert Hoffmann) and his on-off artist girlfriend Xenia (Maria Pia Conte) are walking along a beach when they spot a body lying face down. Xenia is horrified and hangs back; Christian goes to investigate. The body turns out to be very much alive; a victim of sunstroke who had momentarily passed out. She introduces herself as Barbara (Suzy Kendall) and Christian offers to fetch a flask of whisky from his car to help revive her. Barbara disappears, however, leaving behind an item by which Christian tracks her to a yacht owned by Barbara’s moneyed and much older boyfriend Alex (Mario Erpichini).

These sequences bookend two minutes of credits interspersed with rapid, disorientating cuts to a series of mannequins in macabre and sexualized tableaux. Their relevance is something that Lenzi doesn’t reveal until the very last scene; a nasty, morbid coda to an hour and a half of not-what-it-seems plotting.

Christian becomes obsessed with Barbara and poor old Xenia is unceremoniously sidelined. Gate-crashing a party at Alex’s yacht (or should that be “gangplank-crashing”?), Christian and Barbara lose no time in stealing away to a motel. Barbara insists that Christian shave off his distinctive beard before they get it on – a request that seems to have greater motive than simple comfort on Barbara’s part, particularly when Christian’s clean-shaven industrialist brother Fritz (Ivan Rassimov) comes into the picture – and while Christian is busying himself in the bathroom with scissors and electric razor, he is attacked by gun-toting thug Tatum (Adolfo Lastretti). During the struggle, the gun discharges and Christian is left with a body, his prints on the gun and Alex outside wanting Barbara back and Christian out of the picture.

Returning to the motel after a heated discussion with Barbara and Alex back at the yacht, Christian is disturbed to find the body missing. Meanwhile, more mannequins in death poses are turning up. Barbara flees Alex’s possessive influence and holes up with Christian in a holiday home she claims belongs to a friend of hers but is being occupied by the saturnine Malcolm (Guido Alberti) and his much younger consort Clorinda (Monica Monet). Christian comes to believe that he’s met Clorinda before and that she has something to do with his brother. As a plethora of unsettling events play out, Christian tries to hang on to his sanity while dealing with Alex’s benign influence and the possibility that the psychotic Tatum might not be dead after all.

‘Spasmo’ – a compellingly blunt title – plays out as utterly baffling for its first hour. Nothing quite connects; there seems to be little or no logic to narrative developments. Character dynamics are curious. Who exactly is the catalyst for the weird shit that happens: Barbara or Christian? Why does the mysterious Malcolm take such an interest? What’s the deal with Clorinda and Christian’s brother?

Things start clicking into place after an assassination attempt that plays out unexpectedly, sending Christian on a desperate chase to piece the remaining clues together. Everything is explained by the end credits, but Lenzi seems hellbent – right up to the end – to monkey with audience expectations. His determinism in this respect is entirely commendable, although it does make ‘Spasmo’ something of a hard slog in places, certainly in the middle section where the accretion of elliptical and seemingly uncontextualized incidents threaten to become infuriating.

The final third of the film more than compensates, however. The performances are uniformly good, with Kendall in particular taking a character who could have been unbearably histrionic and instead honing the characterization beyond what the often utilitarian script gives her to work with. It’s stylishly shot by Guglielmo Mancori, who makes excellent use of locations varying from swanky yachts and beach houses to abandoned quarries and industrial works. And those mannequins – carrying on a giallo tradition established by Mario Bava’s ‘Blood and Black Lace’ – bring a creepy visual element that’s all their own.

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: The General

Although well-received in some quarters (“Sillitoe scores a hat trick” - Punch), ‘The General’ confounded many people. Highly anticipated after the one-two of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ and ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, here was a curious fable, miles removed from the back-streets of Nottingham, its twin protagonists the titular military type and a standoffish orchestra conductor who ends up as his prisoner. A fable, moreover, that occurs in a fictitious country, during a period of time that’s deliberately out of time, and loaded with philosophically charged and decidedly non-naturalistic dialogue.

Kind of like Shane Meadows following up ‘Small Time’ and ‘TwentyFourSeven’ with ‘Ivan’s Childhood’.

With an author’s note that “East and West in this novel bear no relation to the east and west of modern times”, it’s clear from the outset that ‘The General’ is 160 pages of allegory. The country in which the story takes place is never named, the General himself remains anonymous beyond his rank, the army he commands are only ever referred to as “the Gorsheks”, and the members of orchestra who become his prisoners have names like Evart, Starnberg and Armgardson – suggesting some shared European (possibly East European) heritage, but remaining frustratingly elusive.

The story itself is pure simplicity: the General puts the orchestra into captivity after their special train finds itself behind the lines. High command order him to execute them. The General doesn’t want to, and they an extension of their lives with an impromptu concert. Yet Sillitoe never seems to milk the inherent tension, instead structuring the novel as a philosophical enquiry into various states of mind, most prominently those of the General and Evart, the conductor.

As a result, characters fling entire pages of cerebral dialogue at each other. Sillitoe’s admittedly excellent descriptive writing slows down every moment of the orchestra’s potential death sentence; in some scenes, ‘The General’ seems to be a precursor of Ian McEwan’s precise and formalist style, wherein every moment is considered intrinsically. In others, it presupposes Iain Banks’s ‘A Song of Stone’ in its quixotic and melancholy approach to its subject matter.

It’s the first of a couple of oddities in Sillitoe’s bibliography, but demonstrates that he was a writer unafraid to test himself, experiment, push back the boundaries and side-step the easy categorisation that many critics would rather he be slotted into. It would be ten years later, with ‘Travels in Nihilon’, that Sillitoe wrote a novel as boldly experiment and critically baffling as ‘The General’.

Albert Finney

Albert Finney, the man who brought the brawling and boozing Arthur Seaton definitively to life in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ …

Albert Finney, the man who – thirty years later – was just as bad-ass, belligerent and not-to-be-fucked-with in ‘Miller’s Crossing’ …

Albert Finney, the man who turned down a CBE in 1980 and a knighthood in 2000 on the grounds that “they perpetuate snobbery” …

Albert Finney is 75 today and both cinema and stage are a hell of a lot better for the ass-kicking he gave them. The dude has talent, integrity, and a fuckload of great movies on his CV. Happy birthday, my man. There’ll be a fair few glasses raised at chez Agitation tonight.

Wo’k termorra? Bogger it!

GIALLO SUNDAY: poster edition (2)

George Clooney

Those who know me well will know that not only do I have an epic man-crush on George Clooney, but I am completely comfortable with it. Gorgeous George is 50 today, a glass of beer is being raised, and the doors to Fulwood Towers are open on the off-chance he's in the area!

Zebraman (guest review by Aaron)

Thanks once again to my buddy Aaron of The Death Rattle for another killer guest review.

The city of Yokohama is in the midst of its biggest crimewave in history. Could it have anything to do with the sudden emergence of aliens who crash-landed in Japan back in the '70s and have been in hibernation ever since? Yes. That being said, Yokohama needs a hero, and you can take a wild guess who that would be.


The lead character in this Takashi Miike-directed character study is a timid schoolteacher named Shinichi Ichikawa (Sho Aikawa, who also starred in Miike's GOZU - the polar opposite of this somewhat endearing tale of an everyman-turned-superhero). To escape the harsh realities of his daily life, he obsesses over the titular Zebraman - a superhero from a failed television show in the '70s which was canceled after a couple of episodes. Shinichi even dresses up in his bedroom in a homemade Zebraman outfit and fantasizes about fighting bad guys.


As far as the aforementioned "harsh realities" that he deals with: his wife cheats on him, his teen daughter dates sleazy older men, and his son is bullied in school. So, instead of confronting his problems, he hides from them while dressing up like a superhero (a superhero modeled after a Zebra no less). In my book, this makes him a coward and a shitty father, but yet we're supposed to feel sorry for this loser? Whatever.

Shinichi meets a fellow Zebraman fan in the form of a physically handicapped student who just enrolled in the school he teaches at, putting to rest any speculations of a complete lack of Zebraman fans other than himself. Together, they drop various pieces of trivia on each other, but it's mostly Shinichi being enlightened by his student, who learned all about the obscure superhero through the internet. Hoping to impress the young boy, Shinichi sneaks out of his house one night in full Zebraman get-up and dodges people on the streets out of sheer embarrassment by hiding in alleyways, hoping to ultimately make it to the boy's house where he can proudly display his neat-o costume. Things take a turn when Shinichi finds himself in a back alley confrontation with a notorious pervert who wears a ridiculous crab mask. Suddenly, without any explanation, Shinichi discovers that he's gained superhuman fighting abilities and quickly disables the pervert.


Meanwhile, a bunch of suits are monitoring alien activity as part of some secret squirrel operation. The extraterrestrial mayhem eventually spills over into Shinichi's personal life, causing him to don the costume on a regular basis and assume the role of Zebraman in attempt to act as a defender of the city, or something like that. It's later revealed that the Zebraman television show actually tied into the "real-life" alien conspiracies and attempted to expose the various government cover-ups through each episode while disguising itself as a work of fiction. But, since the show was canceled, it goes without saying that its attempt at doing so was a failure, and thus the aliens were able to exist under the radar. There's also a sub-plot involving Shinichi and the mother of the crippled boy becoming romantically involved.


If someone were to stumble upon this film for whatever reason, oblivious to who the director was, they'd probably be utterly disappointed with it, for the simple fact that it's not your typical superhero film. On the other hand, anyone who seeks this out will more than likely find that it's everything they expected. This isn't one of Miike's more well-known films, nor is it a film that comes up when cinephiles talk about their favorite unconventional superhero movies, so I'm assuming that anyone outside of Japan would have to do a little bit of digging in order to learn about it. What ZEBRAMAN partly does is satirize superheroes and comic book characters, and in that respect it's OK at best. As far as the film's flaws, aside from the mostly sluggish pacing and the lengthy running time (nearly two hours), the lead character is a hard one to care about or sympathize with; not necessarily because he's a flawed person, but mostly because he's dull and kinda pathetic. The cast shines, however, despite them not being given much to work with.

GIALLO SUNDAY: A Quiet Place to Kill

Apologies for the minimal visual content in today’s Giallo Sunday offering; the streaming copy I watched froze just before the end credits and I’d only seen fit to take one screengrab. Nonetheless, it features a bottle of J&B, so at least there’s one giallo trope present and correct.

Umberto Lenzi’s output is prodigious and entirely genre-based: polizia, gialli, war movies, horrors. His string of gialli from the late 60s to the mid-70s are of a uniform standard – glossy, sexy, cynical – and provide something of a headache for the film historian.

For example: Lenzi’s 1969 giallo ‘Orgasmo’ (not to be confused with his later ‘Spasmo’) starring Carroll Baker as an American heiress who gets involved with a European couple only for sexual tension and murderous passions to come to the surface was retitled ‘Paranoia’ for the American market. A year and three films later (told you his output was prodigious) Lenzi made a giallo called ‘Paranoia’, which again starred Carroll Baker again as an American heiress again becoming embroiled in sexual tension and murderous passions after again getting involved with a European couple, which – to avoid (or maybe generate) confusion – was retitled ‘A Quiet Place to Kill’ for the American market. Lenzi’s next film, starring Ray Lovelock and a jailbait Ornella Muti, was called ‘An Ideal Place to Kill’, and therefore retitled for the English speaking market ‘Oasis of Fear’ a.k.a. ‘Dirty Pictures’.

For the purposes of this review, I’ll go with ‘A Quiet Place to Kill’ as a title. That or, ‘The One Where Carroll Baker Plays a Racing Driver’. Or maybe not; that makes it sound too much like an episode of ‘Friends’.

Anyway, Carroll Baker plays Helen, a racing driver who, recuperating after a crash, is invited to spend some time at the coastal villa of her ex-husband Maurice (Jean Sorel). Arriving, she discovers the invitation came from Maurice’s new wife Constanze (Anna Proclemer). Constanze has twigged to something that Helen also found out the hard way – to whit, Maurice is a good-looking, smooth-talking love rat who leeches off rich women – and is looking for a partner in crime to help her dispose of Maurice and make it look like an accident.

The film plays out against a sunny backdrop of louche, amoral privilege, where characters wander around in elegant fashions, yachting, diving, playing tennis, drinking champagne or cocktails or (hey, let’s not forget who the sponsor is!) J&B, lounging by the pool, shooting each other baleful looks, and engaging in the odd bit of hate-fucking.

So: glamorous people, glamorous locations, copious amounts of nudity and a general air of moneyed cynicism. Oh yeah, and a murder plot. Let’s not forget the murder plot. Do I need to tell you that it doesn’t entirely go to plan? Do I need to mention that a rogue element enters the proceedings – in the shape of Constanze’s headstrong teenage daughter Susan (Marina Coffa). Or that there are possible witnesses to a certain, compromised event? Or that an authority figure – in this case public prosecutor Albert Duchamps (Luis Davila) – is sniffing around, convinced that there are inconsistencies.

The second half of ‘A Quiet Place to Kill’ inhabits the kind of territory best described in Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’: you know what’s happened, why it happened, who did it and how they potentially screwed up, and the tension is generated by watching them scurry around like rats trying to lie, obfuscate and side-step their way free of the consequences. Lenzi throws in a final act curveball that explodes the character dynamics and steers things in an even more reprehensibly cynical direction.

There may not be any likeable characters here, but there’s plenty to enjoy: Baker is luminously gorgeous and spends much of the film in various states of undress; Sorel plays the good-looking bastard to a tee; Guglielmo Mancori’s widescreen cinematography is eye-catching; the lounge jazz soundtrack is, as ever in this genre, hilariously inappropriate; and the twists of the last few minutes are as serpentine as the hair-pin bends one of the characters makes a tyre-squealing escape attempt along in the tense finale.