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Orgasmo
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - 88 Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (7th August 2024). |
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The Film
 Newly-widowed Kathryn West (Giant's Carroll Baker) flees to Italy away from the enmity of her late husband's frosty relatives and bitterness over her inheriting his fortune and business interests. She is set up in a remote villa by her infatuated attorney Brian Sanders (Werewolf Woman's Tino Carraro) where she can get a hold on her fragile nerves with the help of pick-me-ups and pep pills and get back to her interest in painting with only stern housekeeper Teresa (L'eclisse's Lilla Brignone) to keep her company. Her peace and quiet, however, is quickly disrupted by young and handsome American layabout Peter Donovan (The Killer Nun's Lou Castel) whose car breaks down outside the villa, leading to the offer of hospitality for a night that ends up with the two of them together in the shower. Just as Kathryn has become resigned to being a sugar mama, Peter brings his equally adventurous bisexual sister (or is that half-sister or stepsister) Eva (Your Hands on My Body's Colette Descombes) into the picture and into bed with the two of them. When Kathryn attempts to rid herself of the pair only for them, they return with incriminating photos of her drugged bedroom activities. They claim they do not want money, they only want her; but she soon becomes a prisoner in her own home and their motives appear even more sinister. A jobbing director who worked in every Italian genre trend from early 1960es costume pictures, westerns, and spy thrillers to 1970s gialli and Poliziotteschi, 1980s cannibal and zombie gore, not to mention a couple Joe D'Amato Filmirage pics and gorier than usual Italian TV horror movies, Umberto Lenzi's contribution to the giallo genre was a quartet of films headlining exiled Hollywood starlet Baker that set into motion a trend of jet-setting melodramas about human foibles leading to murder that was quite apart from Mario Bava's body count pictures and aped by Sergio Martino and Lucio Fulci both of whom were involved in the Romolo Guerrieri-helmed Baker giallo The Sweet Body of Deborah before Fulci's own first stabs at the genre with On on Top of the Other and A Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Martino with The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh even as their efforts made concessions to the more violent gialli of Dario Argento whose The Bird with the Crystal Plumage rapidly revised the tropes of the genre (with even Lenzi's own later giallo Seven Blood-Stained Orchids made grudging concessions to Argento's influence). Released in the United States under the less salacious title "Paranoia" which mean that Lenzi's follow-up film with Baker titled "Paranoia" in Italy had to be retitled A Quiet Place to Kill for U.S. release but with an X-rating and some additional extended nude shots of Baker, Orgasmo is tame stuff now but was quite racy at the time what with a Hollywood starlet indulging in drugs and implied lesbianism; and, indeed, knowing something of the circumstances that lead to Baker fleeing the states for the continent, part of the thrill of watching the film is imagining how different Rome must have seemed to the actress just getting out of a bad marriage and a lawsuit against Paramount regarding her contract. Although Castel had some arthouse pedigree, his low-key bad boy does not seem magnetic enough, while Descombes with her boyish haircut and sharp features does manage to convey a certain childish maliciousness. It is Baker, however, who makes the triangle truly unseemly by playing a character who craves being "dirtied" by characters with fewer hang-ups. It is actually easy to forget this is a thriller until the ending with multiple twists (a major one of which was snipped out of the American version making the fates of three major characters seem rather arbitrary). Lenzi and cinematographer Guglielmo Mancori (Web of the Spider) contrast some stately Techniscope compositions of London, Rome, the Italian countryside and the villa environs with more subjective and druggy views utilizing the familiar kaleidoscope filters and POV shots through foreground glasses of J&B. The jazzy score of composer Piero Umiliani (Baba Yaga) includes the unforgettable "Just Tell Me" by Wess and the Airdales, the earworm quality of which is deliberate as it is used to drive Kathryn into a rage. Lenzi semi-remade the film as An Ideal Place to Kill, flipping the scenario with the youthful lovers having to take their hostess hostage when they discover that she is trying to frame them for her husband's murder. 
Video
Orgasmo was trimmed to six minutes from its original Italian cut when it was released stateside as "Paranoia" from Commonwealth United the U.S. post-production was by Synchrofilm editors Robert S. Eisen (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Stanley Frazen (The Monkees) who also retooled Jess Franco's Venus in Furs and 99 Women as well as Massimo Dallamano's A Black Veil for Lisa for Commonwealth United however, that X-rated U.S. version added some nude takes of Baker to her shower scene (such inserts also made an appearance in the Italian version of A Quiet Place to Kill), a slightly more lingering shot when she rips open her robe in the garden, and Descombes reveals more in a shot in bed with Baker than she does in the Italian version. It was this edit that played in the U.K. theatrically between 1969 and 1976 according to Kim Newman in the second commentary track as well as the tape release. When the Italian version did first turn up, it was as a subtitled version shown on the Australian SBS TV station but the image was incompletely-letterboxed but still a step above the panned-and-scanned U.S. Spotlite Video VHS. When 01 Distribution in Italy put out a DVD, they simply recycled the same master minus the subtitles. It was not until Severin Films' The Complete Lenzi/Baker Giallo Collection in 2020 that the film finally received a respectful treatment of both cuts which 88 Films has also included for their separate 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen presentations of the "director's cut" or Italian version (96:59) and the X-rated U.S. version (91:00) sharing the same disc. Both transfers look virtually identical to the Severin presentations, imperfect as they are sourced from fifty-year-old internegatives, both versions look softer as the result of the 2-perf to 4-perf optical conversion when compared to some other Technsicope gialli with scans directly sourced from the original 2-perf negatives. The dullness of the colors is largely due to the wardrobe and dιcor choices since some reds do pop when they turn up. 
Audio
The director's cut version includes the original Italian mono track in LPCM 2.0 and an English LPCM 2.0 mono track that reverts to Italian for undubbed passages notably a chunk of the ending as well as snippets that cause some confusion when it comes to different currency and amounts in English and Italian with the choice of full HoH subtitles for the English track, full English subtitles for the Italian track, and subtitles for just the Italian spots on the English audio track. The American version features the mono English mix in lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 with an English HoH subtitle track. 
Extras
Severin featured audio commentaries by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas on the Italian version and Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth on the U.S. version while 88 Films include a pair of new commentaries for the Italian version. 88 Films features two tracks for the Italian version starting with an audio commentary by film historians Troy Howarth, Nathaniel Thompson, and Eugenio Ercolani who note that the film was one of Lenzi's most internationally-successful works and his first giallo. While it was taking cues from The Sweet Body of Deborah an earlier giallo starring Baker, A Quite Place to Kill's Jean Sorel, and future Sergio Martino giallo regulars George Hilton and Luigi Pistilli which had been a big hit in the United States thanks to distribution from Warner Bros. Lenzi actually wanted to cast older actress Eleonor Parker in the lead and Ray Lovelock in the Castel role. While Howarth and Thompson reassess Castel's casting, Ercolani notes that in political connotations of casting him in any role in an Italian film, the film's salacious content being an outgrowth of loosening censorship and politically-charged films that deconstructed the bourgeois family, as well as Lenzi's attitudes towards both the idle rich and hippies (also noting that the theme of the old taking advantage of the young is muddled here partially due to the casting and out of a cynicism about about both generations in the plotting). They also discuss the differences between Lenzi's cut and American X-rated version including some bits left in the latter that are rendered incoherent. Howarth also confirms that the assistant director credit for Bertrand Tavernier (Sunday in the Country) was a French co-production quota credit. The second commentary is an audio commentary by author/critic Kim Newman and film historian Stephen Thrower who note that the film was intended to be called "Paranoia" and that the Orgasmo title is not as blunt and salacious in Italy as it is in English-speaking territories as it has the connotation of excitability and was commonly used in sports commentary. While they note the film as an outgrowth of the influence of Les diaboliques, the film was also a color and widescreen counterpart to the monochrome film's seediness, here depicting enviably wealthy people who are nevertheless unhappy and horrible to each other, as well as the effect of that theme on the ending of both versions (also noting that one is a murder mystery that plays fair and the other is a Lady in a Cage-type thriller). They observe that while Castel had a real life reputation representing the proletariat donating his salaries and coming to see acting as just a job he often characters like the counter-revolutionary agent of A Bullet for the General. They also note that Baker's entry in Brian Clemens' Thriller titled "The Next Victim" in which she plays a wheelchair-bound woman left alone in an apartment block during a hot summer with a strangler on the loose is the British TV equivalent of a giallo.  In "Editing for Umberto" (22:51), uncredited editor Eugenio Alabiso discusses his beginnings editing "sexy documentaries" for Luciano Martino's partner Mino Loy noting that his first and last jobs as an editor as of 2008 were for Loy with Sergio Martino's L'allenatore nel pallone 2 and that his big break came while assisting Roberto Cinquini on Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More. When Cinquini died, he was replaced by Mario Sarandrei who did not work well with him; however, when Alabiso came up with a solution to hiding the sparks made by blanks, Leone insisted on replacing Serandrei with him. He also discusses his long working relationships with the Martinos describing Sergio as his "brother" as well as his more fraught one with Sergio Corbucci. He speaks admiringly of his own producer brother Salvatore who did not care if he was actually credited and had an American front for his productions shot in the states, and mainly speaks of Lenzi in relation to the two American back-to-back productions: Primal Rage which was intended to be directed by Lenzi but instead went to effects designer Carlo Rambaldi's son Vittorio and the slasher he ended up directing Nightmare Beach. "The Cinephile Director" (35:47) is an archival interview with Lenzi that does note cover any of his gialli or popular works, instead focusing on how he got interested in cinema through a high school teacher who had been a former Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia student, his own film schooling experience and subsequent crewing for a former professor and going over his head to get a paying assistant director job which lead to him then assisting Domenico Paolella on Guns of the Black Witch. Since Paolella had just had an appendix operation, it was Lenzi who conveyed his orders to the crew and the producers hearing his voice on the guide audio track lead to his first directing job Queen of the Seas and his realization much later that he should have been more selective about taking on projects. The discussion shifts tangentially in the way of the feature by way of his recollections about CSC classmate Wandisa Guida who got a scholarship after being awarded Miss Italia and her subsequent marriage to Luciano Martino who wanted her to quit acting and raise a family (after which he dumped her for Edwige Fenech). He closes the conversation by noting that Guida's daughters who inherited the company had signed a contract with him to remake Almost Human while an Austrian producer wanted to remake Nightmare City. "Baker's Dozen" (12:35) is a visual essay by film historian Mike Foster who provides an overview of the actress' thirteen Italian films between 1967 and 1976 from the arthouse The Harem to the string of giallo films with and without Lenzi, Baba Yaga, and the sex comedies The Private Lesson, The Virgin Wife, and My Father's Wife. The disc also includes a reconstructed English "Paranoia" trailer (1:01) that seems like visuals from the film added to a radio spot, as well as the U.S. X-rated "Paranoia" theatrical trailer (1:45). 
Packaging
The disc comes with a reversible cover while the first pressing includes a limited edition anti-scratch O-ring slipcase and a booklet featuring "The Satirical Class - Society, Satire and Guilt in Umberto Lenzis Orgasmo" by Francesco Massaccesi and "Orgasmic Pleasures" by Mia Boffey (none of which were provided for review).
Overall
Be it titled Orgasmo or "Paranoia" with additional X-rated footage, Umberto Lenzi's giallo might be tame stuff now but it was a genre trendsetter that still has some nasty surprises for the uninitiated.
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