Strip Nude for Your Killer

1975  **

Oops.  My Horrorthon started with a whimper not a bang this year, as I accidentally watched some extremely softcore Italian porn.  Obviously the title should have tipped me off, but what really gets me is this:  what other genre besides horror is lied to this shabbily?

I mean, do you think this "whoops, you watched porn!" crap happens to the contestants in

Dramathon?

Bondathon?

Keanuthon?

Actually, labelling this movie porn is kind of an insult to porn, a genre that works hard to live up to its promises.  While Strip Nude for Your Killer does feature a copious amounts of nude, it's not so much sex scenes as a lot of incidental nude hanging out, stitched together with some tepid murder plot.  

A woman dies during a botched abortion and later a group of models and fashion photographers start getting picked off.  This involves very overlong scenes of suspense that have absolutely no music and no anchor for you the viewer to hang on to consciousness.  At one point the killer and another character were poised for action on the opposite side of a column.  I chose that moment to search behind the couch for the remote that I'd dropped back there, and I was able to retrieve it and slide the couch back into place before anything happened.

Not satisfied with just being boring, SNFYK also hails from that strange subgenre of 70's exploitation movies that take things just a little too far.  Like how Blood Sucking Freaks entertains but makes you a little sick.  

The sickness here is not the barely-there violence but in the attitude of main character Carlo, who charms us in opening scene by stalking a buxom, bikinied woman around a spa while he's wearing the worst bathing suit ever.

"It took me HOURS to paint on this damn plaid."

They talk at the bar and there's lots of creepy touching which quickly and uncomfortably leads to sex in the sauna, a feat Carlo achieves thanks to her aggressive stupidity and his pushing his wang at her like a kid throwing rocks at a beehive.  It's the kind of thing that takes the chatter around Will Ferrell's Anchorman (like "You know, things were really different back then") and shows it for just how ugly that truth really is.  And it's eel-ugly.

Another thing that was a problem was the blonde lady who was actually two different blonde ladies.  I was having trouble keeping track of which one was which even after one of them was dead.  Then at the end it turned out there were actually three different blonde ladies all along.

Strip Nude for Your Killer is a snoozie nudie and comes very un-recommended.  Perhaps a group viewing would be a fun romp, just make sure you invite lots of hecklers and get them really drunk.