What a mess of a movie

I love gialli, but this was a mess of a movie. It made no bloody sense for an entire hour, and even after you got all the explanations, that first hour still moved without hardly any logic in it.

Umberto Lenzi is among the worst Italian story-tellers, or perhaps it comes from the screenwriters he works with, I don't know, but the way the story is told is just unintelligible. The same happened with Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro (1975) and Incubo sulla città contaminata (1980), but less extreme than in Spasmo. The only film of his that I've seen that was not a mess in terms of story was Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso (1972), probably because it was written with the great Roberto Gianviti, the best giallo writer.

*SPOILERS*

But Spasmo... Spasmo... SPASMO! started to make no sense at minute 8 when Christian and Xenia are to be found casually sipping drinks on the Tucania boat where Barbara is too, Barbara who just ran away from... Christian and Xenia. Huh? It's like a Tex Avery cartoon, the characters move faster than Jesus. We needed the scene where they stumble on the Tucania boat for that subsequent scene to be allowed to take place. The short explanatory dialogue afterwards with Alex is not enough. And then like someone said in another thread, Xenia disappears after the aspirin dialogue and we don't see her again until much, much later. As a matter of fact we don't know even know who she was in relation to Christian! A complete failure of logic and film narrative.

That awful dialogue, surely concocted by the translators...
- Got an aspirin by any chance?
- Why? Don't you feel well?
- No, I don't. Aren't you lucky? It means I'm not pregnant.
- Congratulations. Have a drink to celebrate.

And the "sweet, sweet whore" line. OH GOD.

I watched the English version, I'm wondering, is there a different Italian cut where everything suddenly would make sense?

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