[2] Lenzi also worked as a journalist for various newspapers and magazines, including Bianco e Nero[2] and, between 1957 and 1960, penned a number of detective novels and adventure stories using a pseudonym.

[4][1][5] Lenzi then turned to making war films such as Desert Commandos and Legion of the Damned and westerns such as Pistol for a Hundred Coffins and All Out (1968).

[4] Lenzi had box office success in Italy with his erotic thrillers starring Carroll Baker such as Orgasmo, So Sweet...

So Perverse and A Quiet Place to Kill which were influenced by French "film noir" movies drawing from the works of Jacques Deray and René Clément.

[4] During the early 1970s, Lenzi also directed the first of the Italian cannibal films, with Man from the Deep River, a genre that he would explore again in the 1980s with Eaten Alive!

[4] During the late 1970s, Lenzi devoted himself almost exclusively to crime dramas, with the exception of two war films: The Greatest Battle and From Hell to Victory (1979).

[7] In 1989, Lenzi directed the police action film Cop Target in Miami and Santo Domingo, starring Robert Ginty and Charles Napier.

[12] Lenzi later embarked on a career as a novelist, writing a series of murder mysteries set in the 1930s and '40s Cinecittà, involving real-life characters of the Italian film industry.

"[17] Kim Newman discussed Lenzi in 2021, stating that the director "has been rated towards the bottom of the ranks of Italian genre craftsmen by many - me included - because of the greater availability of his pulpier, more gruesome 1980s work" noting Cannibal Ferox and Nightmare City and stated that "though a trailblazer for the little-loved jungle cannibal cycle, contributing its earliest and most gruesome entries, in general Lenzi seemed one of the coat-tail riders, turning to whatever subgenre of exploitation was selling that year...and even in that class, he's less consistently interesting and exciting than Sergio Martino.