Doesn't quite live up to its title... (Strip Nude For Your Killer (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Strip Nude For Your Killer (DVD)
Date:	20/04/09 (141 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A few nice touches

Disadvantages: Nothing terribly original

A review of the Shameless DVD, available for about £6 on amazon at the moment.

This is a reasonably sleazy Italian giallo from 1975. Gialli were murder mysteries in which the murders themselves were gruesome and explicit (enough so that the films are classed as horrors rather than thrillers). This is a fairly typical example of the genre, and while entertaining, isn't really remarkable.

A young woman dies during an abortion gone wrong. The doctor is murdered shortly afterwards by someone in motorcycle leathers and helmet. Soon the employees of a photographic agency are targeted by the same killer, being picked off one by one. What's their connection to the dead girl? And who is the murderer?

Actually, you won't care about the plot revelation - it's kind of a cheat, as many gialli are. This isn't an Agatha Christie murder-as-parlour-game story, it's primarily an excuse to put naked ladies and gruesome murders onscreen. When one character finally figures out what's going on, I have no idea how they reached the conclusion they did. Another character behaves completely irrationally purely to set themself up as a stunningly obvious red herring. And the final reveal of the villain is inevitably a disappointment. As ever in gialli he'd been almost supernaturally effective at bumping people off - knowing when they'd be alone at home etc - and when you find out who it is you're likely to just shrug apathetically.

The murders themselves aren't terribly interesting. As always, there are lots of shots of the killer's black-gloved hands, and he breathes like Darth Vader (gialli are very fetishised). The usual prowling camera build-up follows the victim around for a bit before the killer strikes. There are a few quite nasty shots of corpses, but we rarely see them for long enough to know if they've really been butchered to the extent the police claim.

Although there's a lot of - often full-frontal - nudity in the film (not all of it female), the title is a little deceptive as only two of the female victims are naked when they meet their maker. Several victims are male (one is an almost naked obese guy, which at least scores points for being unusual in a horror film). But this is a weird mix of nudity that could come from a soft core porno, and grim violence. This is not untypical of Italian exploitation, but it's neither sexy enough nor horrid enough to quite work.

The hero is an unlikeable photographer called Carlo. A macho sleaze-merchant, he seduces women with promises of modelling contracts and at one point seems to be about to bugger his distinctly unwilling girlfriend. There isn't a hint of irony about any of this - I think we're meant to admire him. The hero's attractive girlfriend is likeable (perhaps because she looks a bit like Audrey Hepburn, perhaps because she does a lot of nudity. You decide). The other characters are typical - the predatory lesbian boss, the slightly camp photographer, the hard-nosed cop etc.

Everyone's been dubbed quite badly, often with American accents that feel very out of place in a film so obviously made in Italy. The music is fairly typical for this kind of thing - a charming mixture of lounge warbling and funky bass lines. It's made reasonably well, but doesn't really summon up the suspense it needs. Sequences where we know characters are being stalked by the black-clad killer should have us on the edge of our seats, but in me they just inspired a faint curiosity about whether we'd see anyone's breasts this time. The director, Andrea Bianchi, did a lot of Italian grot, but I don't think I've seen any of his other films. Some of the cast look familiar, but probably only to fans of Euro horror.

There's one great bizarre scene where a car races through the traffic with an utterly deranged dialogue track burbling over the top of it. And any film that has a trembling fat man wandering around in just his underpants waving a knife and a blow-up doll deserves points for novelty value.

The picture and sound quality on the DVD, apparently appearing uncut for the first time in the UK, are good. There's a trailer, which is effectively a 90-second montage of nudity and violence. Trailers for six other films are the only other extra. Shameless kind of annoy me with the slightly irritating prose style of their blurbs, but anyone devoted to releasing obscure 70s European horror deserves support. This isn't a classic - there are probably a dozen other films that are more or less the same - but it isn't a complete washout.

Summary: A mildly entertaining giallo