THERE'S NO FOOL LIKE AN OLD FOOL
★☆☆☆☆ (Kill It With Fire)
Director: Umberto Lenzi
1969
A wealthy American widow named Kathryn decides to grieve (I use the term loosely) in an Italian villa in the middle of nowhere. Nearly forty, Kathryn was considered out to pasture, and this is important to the plot. Ready to renew her youth—when she painted nudie pictures of herself and hung them up in the living room—she becomes involved with an aimless young man. She may be older, but she’s not wiser. By the time he and his sister move into Kathryn’s villa and live off her money, there’s seemingly nothing she can do. Kathryn is the physical manifestation of Scarlett O’Hara’s whiny, “Where shall I go? What shall I do?” When it comes to every character in Umberto Lenzi’s Orgasmo, Miss Wilkes don’t give a damn.
Orgasmo (also called Paranoia) is a disgusting entry in the early days of giallo, when they were more exploitation chillers than bloody massacres. Orgasmo reminded me of the vile Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key. A forty-year-old woman who has shockingly not licked lead paint before is unable to call the police, say no, use her legs to walk somewhere else, not take an unknown pill from a stranger, or figure out someone is blatantly taking advantage of her. Obviously, her new boy toy and his sister are up to no good, but Kathryn is the last person on Earth to figure out their physical abuse means trouble. Then we’re forced to watch them torture the widow in her own home for a whole hour before something new happens. We get it, they want her money. What’s the mystery?
Kathryn’s (Carroll Baker) dead husband had oil fields and multiple businesses and houses, which means she’s able to sell off his property for a killing. When not giggling with her lawyer friend as she signs paperwork, she’s painting and bossing her poor maid around her new Italian abode. But money and friendship and hobbies are not enough for her. She wants to feel young again, so without thinking, “Hmmm. A lot of people might want to take advantage of a woman worth $200 million” she jumps into bed with the first homeless guy she can find, and the moment their eyes meet is comical. These are the groovy 60s films Austin Powers made fun of. You can imagine Twiggy shaking her hips at the bar; you are surrounded by English mod culture that includes fashion and animalistic convertibles. And when something important happens, a Captain Kirk light shines on a character’s eyes as the sitcom dun, dun, duuun… plays.
Our heroine’s meet-cute with Peter (Lou Castel) is one of those moments. When the smart maid tries to run Peter off the villa’s property, the idiot Kathryn intervenes and invites him to stay the night and bone. Orgasmo is one of the first X-rated films in America, and I can’t imagine how shocking the sex scenes would have been back then. The millionaire and the homeless man, after having said fifty words to one another, hop in the shower to lick body parts in the steam. But Peter has even bigger plans for his new sugar mama. There are threesomes and pill-popping and Kathryn squealing that she loves being around young people because they make her young. The debauchery almost distracts you from the fact that this is a horrible film. Eventually, she’s getting slapped and drugged before being r*ped and I’m checking the credits on my streaming service to make sure I’m not watching a Sergio Martino film.
Why is Kathryn incapable of telling Peter and his sister “no” when she’s excellent at barking orders at her maid? It's not like she hates confrontation. Though all the events are of her making, involving her own choices (even with the twist), it is somewhat sad to see Kathryn’s downfall because in the end, she didn’t deserve her fate. One major flaw of Orgasmo is that Lenzi didn’t write Kathryn as a sympathetic character in any way before she became a victim. I’ll say this time and time again: Being a victim does not create a hero. In the first fifteen minutes, we’re repelled by the demanding millionaire widow whose only redeeming qualities are offering to give an ancestral home back to her husband’s aunts and admitting that she wasn’t after her dead husband for his money. She says she needed affection from him, but he couldn’t provide it, and I suppose this is a clue to her terrible character traits—the neediness, the gullibility, the general brattiness. It’s her way or no way and she’s on board with having a swingin’ time with you until something has inconvenienced her. She considers herself a tough cookie, a worldly woman who will never go back to New York City. Perhaps this is early torture porn and the writer/director wanted us to enjoy Kathryn’s misery.
Umberto Lenzi’s poor character development never matches his creative camerawork. When it comes to filmmaking, he far surpasses Lucio Fulci and many of his contemporaries, but his stories are not as clever as he thinks they are. And no one can get a worse performance out of the usually talented Carroll Baker. Much like in Lenzi’s Knife of Ice, her eyes are dead, her line delivery is her trying out for a role on Days of Our Lives. The twist in Orgasmo does nothing to elevate the movie, and the lesson is this: Old people aren’t necessarily street smart. Everybody in this film is taken for a ride by the kids. Speaking of ride, Orgasmo should have been called Erectil-a Disfunctiona. This is supposed to be a hot movie, but sex scenes are not sexy if they’re not consensual.
GENRES: Atmospheric, Giallo, Psychological
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