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Strip Nude for Your Killer
Blue Underground // Unrated // March 27, 2012 // Region 0
List Price: $29.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
So, the movie's titled Strip Nude for Your Killer, and printed in big, bold letters on the top of the cover is "Ultra Trashy Fun!" That...yeah, that's about the size of it. In its first fifteen minutes alone,
you're looking some spreadeagle broad keeling over in the middle of an illegal abortion, a dude decked out in motorcycle gear stabbing some poor bastard to death, a bunch of girls prancing around in bikinis, a topless photo shoot, a sex scene in a sauna, and a couple of chicks making out on-stage in some dive of a strip club. It's about as sticky and sleazy a slasher flick as you're ever likely to come across. Strip Nude for Your Killer finds some excuse to get just about every woman in the movie to lose every last stitch of clothing...over and over again in a lot of cases too. The title really is truth in advertising, with blood or breasts -- sometimes both! -- in pretty much every single scene in the movie. Whole lotta stripping. Whole lotta killing. The murders are especially vicious and gory too, especially compared to so much of the rest of the class of 1975. Wait, so why didn't I rate Strip Nude for Your Killer a perfect five stars again?
There's no real point getting caught up in the plot here. Botched abortion. Modeling agency. Masked, gloved killer. Splatter splatter. Amateur detective work. Shocking reveal. This isn't your first giallo, so you can connect a lot of those dots yourself. My biggest gripe with Strip Nude for Your Killer is that the sleaze gets kind of exhausting after a while. This isn't a trashterpiece like Pieces that's constantly one-upping itself...where no matter how surreally sleazy a turn it's taken, that'll somehow be topped three or four minutes later. All the best stuff in Strip Nude for Your Killer is out of the way in its first half hour, and the rest is just more of the same. The murder sequences are pretty much interchangeable, and the movie's far more interested in boobs than buckets of blood anyway. There's nothing resembling tension, suspense, or...well, logic along the way. I promise that you won't care even a little bit about the mystery of who the murderer is, and Strip Nude for Your Killer gets especially painful when it starts lobbing out reams of exposition to try to cover all that
near the end. Aside from the occasional "ha ha, she's showing her tits again, and I have no idea why" laugh, even the staggering volume of nudity gets kind of boring after a while.
Part of me's grudgingly impressed by how grotesquely misogynistic a film this is. All of the women in Strip Nude for Your Killer are shrill harpies, mindless fuck dolls, or some combination of the above. The aimless, meandering scene with Nino Castelnuovo berating Edwige Fenech for not having any milk to put in his coffee is more painful to watch than any of the gruesome murders, in part because it seems like it's never going to end but also because the character of Carlo is such a raging asshole. You just had sex with Edwige Fenech! Have you seen her? You think he'd be grateful or whatever, but instead he drones on and on about what a blithering fucking idiot she is for not comprehending the science of how milk changes coffee molecules. In another scene, a morbidly obese guy starts to rape a model, and she begs and pleads with him...that she'll do anything he wants if only he'd stop trying to rape her. So obviously she agrees to fuck him (?!?) then is all comforting and nurturing when the guy can't get it up. I'm not going to pretend to take some moral high ground about a movie called Strip Nude for Your Killer, but still, even by those standards, the scale of its misogyny is kind of awe-inspiring.
The short answer is that Strip Nude for Your Killer is a gleefully sleazy blast for twenty or thirty minutes, but it starts repeating itself pretty relentlessly after that. No matter how many boobs start jiggling in front of the camera or how many gleaming, bloody knives are raised, it feels kinda dull and uninspired. It's more of a titty movie with a handful of gruesome kills than the "sexy giallo" that co-writer Massimo Felisatti says he set out to make. If you're looking for a sleazy slasher, you could do a lot better than this. Then again, those movies don't have Edwige Fenech shamelessly stripping down every couple of minutes, so there's that. So anyway, even though it's kind of terrible, if you're still reading this review, I guess that means you'll probably find Strip Nude for Your Killer at least worth a rental. I get it. I can't not watch a flick called Strip Nude for Your Killer either. Rent It.
Video
There's no mistaking that this Blu-ray release of Strip Nude for Your Killer is culled from a completely different master than the 2005 DVD. The color timing is brighter and warmer this time around, and the framing is noticeably different as well:
As much of an improvement as this 1080p remaster is in so many ways, it still suffers from the same flaws as Blue Underground's other Italian releases. Strip Nude for Your Killer has a sheen of analog video noise that floats over the rest of the image, lending it a false sense of sharpness when the meat of the film is a soft, mushy mess. Open the screenshot below up to fullsize and try to tell me this looks even a little bit filmic:
One snarky reaction I read is that Strip Nude for Your Killer looks less like film and more like a painting made by dabbing with a cottonball, and at least at times, that's not too far off. If you've been grabbing all of Blue Underground's BDs up to this point, chances are that you don't mind this look or you've just come to accept that this is how their Italian releases are going to be. Strip Nude for Your Killer is really just more of the same. Well, that's not entirely fair; it's worse, actually. I don't recall being as distracted by the way the CRT noise looks in motion throughout Blue Underground's other Italian releases as I am here. Also, the only blacks in this movie are in the letterboxing bars. Anemic, milky grays are supposed to pass for black instead, leaving contrast completely flat and lifeless as a result. I normally crop the letterboxing out of the thumbnails in my reviews, but to really hammer the point home:
That's not an extreme example either; every single shot in the film looks like that on Blu-ray, and yet the DVD doesn't struggle with its black levels at all. I'm not really sure what to say here. This Blu-ray disc is deeply flawed, yet perhaps because of my lowered expectations for an Italian release by Blue Underground, it still seems passably okay to me. Botched black levels aside, this high-def release is still a considerable step up over a DVD that really hasn't aged well over the past six and a half years. It's not as if it's all that likely that a second HD remaster of Strip Nude for Your Killer is anywhere on the horizon, so it's a matter of how willing you are to settle for better-but-not-good-enough.
Strip Nude for Your Killer is presented at an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 on a single layer Blu-ray disc. The video has been encoded with AVC.
Audio
Easily the most noteworthy upgrade that this Blu-ray disc has to offer is the inclusion of an Italian language track. This didn't find its way onto Blue Underground's DVD release back in 2005, and it's intriguing
to have that as an option here, especially because the dialogue can be so dramatically different between the two languages. For instance, one line in the English track goes "you're up to your old tricks again?", while it comes out to "another hooker?" in Italian. The running "corp-suckle" gag is nowhere to be found in Italian, and the big announcement on the radio is worlds apart from one language to the next. The Italian audio is a good bit louder than the English track, leaving a direct comparison a little tricky to make. Fidelity is understandably dated but generally fine across both languages. Bass response, mostly as it relates to the score, is more substantial than I would've expected to hear. I didn't watch the entire movie in Italian, but at least in the portions I listened to, no clipping, pops, or clicks ever got in the way. The English track is similarly clean. A moderate hiss creeps in at times that's more pronounced in Italian, but that could simply be a factor of that track being so much louder in the first place. No real gripes or complaints.
Both the English and Italian language tracks are monaural and presented in 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio. There are a few English subtitle streams: the default one that translates the Italian text that appears on the screen, another for the English dub that's captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing, and, finally, a translation of the Italian audio. Also included are subs in French and Spanish.
Extras
The extras on Strip Nude for Your Killer build slightly upon those on Blue Underground's 2005 DVD, adding in one other trailer as well as a small image gallery.
The Final Word
The first half hour of Strip Nude for Your Killer is every bit as deliriously, legendarily sleazy as its title promises. The pace starts to drag after that, though, and even with all the murders and the endless, shameless nudity, Strip Nude for Your Killer feels like it's just repeating itself over and over and over and over. Too uneven to recommend as a blind buy, but if you like your gialli sticky and depraved -- or, hell, even if you just can't pass up a title like that -- Strip Nude for Your Killer is at least worth a rental. Rent It.
) |
| [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] |
There's no real point getting caught up in the plot here. Botched abortion. Modeling agency. Masked, gloved killer. Splatter splatter. Amateur detective work. Shocking reveal. This isn't your first giallo, so you can connect a lot of those dots yourself. My biggest gripe with Strip Nude for Your Killer is that the sleaze gets kind of exhausting after a while. This isn't a trashterpiece like Pieces that's constantly one-upping itself...where no matter how surreally sleazy a turn it's taken, that'll somehow be topped three or four minutes later. All the best stuff in Strip Nude for Your Killer is out of the way in its first half hour, and the rest is just more of the same. The murder sequences are pretty much interchangeable, and the movie's far more interested in boobs than buckets of blood anyway. There's nothing resembling tension, suspense, or...well, logic along the way. I promise that you won't care even a little bit about the mystery of who the murderer is, and Strip Nude for Your Killer gets especially painful when it starts lobbing out reams of exposition to try to cover all that
) |
| [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] |
Part of me's grudgingly impressed by how grotesquely misogynistic a film this is. All of the women in Strip Nude for Your Killer are shrill harpies, mindless fuck dolls, or some combination of the above. The aimless, meandering scene with Nino Castelnuovo berating Edwige Fenech for not having any milk to put in his coffee is more painful to watch than any of the gruesome murders, in part because it seems like it's never going to end but also because the character of Carlo is such a raging asshole. You just had sex with Edwige Fenech! Have you seen her? You think he'd be grateful or whatever, but instead he drones on and on about what a blithering fucking idiot she is for not comprehending the science of how milk changes coffee molecules. In another scene, a morbidly obese guy starts to rape a model, and she begs and pleads with him...that she'll do anything he wants if only he'd stop trying to rape her. So obviously she agrees to fuck him (?!?) then is all comforting and nurturing when the guy can't get it up. I'm not going to pretend to take some moral high ground about a movie called Strip Nude for Your Killer, but still, even by those standards, the scale of its misogyny is kind of awe-inspiring.
The short answer is that Strip Nude for Your Killer is a gleefully sleazy blast for twenty or thirty minutes, but it starts repeating itself pretty relentlessly after that. No matter how many boobs start jiggling in front of the camera or how many gleaming, bloody knives are raised, it feels kinda dull and uninspired. It's more of a titty movie with a handful of gruesome kills than the "sexy giallo" that co-writer Massimo Felisatti says he set out to make. If you're looking for a sleazy slasher, you could do a lot better than this. Then again, those movies don't have Edwige Fenech shamelessly stripping down every couple of minutes, so there's that. So anyway, even though it's kind of terrible, if you're still reading this review, I guess that means you'll probably find Strip Nude for Your Killer at least worth a rental. I get it. I can't not watch a flick called Strip Nude for Your Killer either. Rent It.
Video
There's no mistaking that this Blu-ray release of Strip Nude for Your Killer is culled from a completely different master than the 2005 DVD. The color timing is brighter and warmer this time around, and the framing is noticeably different as well:
) | ) |
) | ) |
| DVD | Blu-ray |
| [click on any of these thumbnail to enlarge] | |
As much of an improvement as this 1080p remaster is in so many ways, it still suffers from the same flaws as Blue Underground's other Italian releases. Strip Nude for Your Killer has a sheen of analog video noise that floats over the rest of the image, lending it a false sense of sharpness when the meat of the film is a soft, mushy mess. Open the screenshot below up to fullsize and try to tell me this looks even a little bit filmic:
) |
| [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] |
One snarky reaction I read is that Strip Nude for Your Killer looks less like film and more like a painting made by dabbing with a cottonball, and at least at times, that's not too far off. If you've been grabbing all of Blue Underground's BDs up to this point, chances are that you don't mind this look or you've just come to accept that this is how their Italian releases are going to be. Strip Nude for Your Killer is really just more of the same. Well, that's not entirely fair; it's worse, actually. I don't recall being as distracted by the way the CRT noise looks in motion throughout Blue Underground's other Italian releases as I am here. Also, the only blacks in this movie are in the letterboxing bars. Anemic, milky grays are supposed to pass for black instead, leaving contrast completely flat and lifeless as a result. I normally crop the letterboxing out of the thumbnails in my reviews, but to really hammer the point home:
) |
| [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] |
That's not an extreme example either; every single shot in the film looks like that on Blu-ray, and yet the DVD doesn't struggle with its black levels at all. I'm not really sure what to say here. This Blu-ray disc is deeply flawed, yet perhaps because of my lowered expectations for an Italian release by Blue Underground, it still seems passably okay to me. Botched black levels aside, this high-def release is still a considerable step up over a DVD that really hasn't aged well over the past six and a half years. It's not as if it's all that likely that a second HD remaster of Strip Nude for Your Killer is anywhere on the horizon, so it's a matter of how willing you are to settle for better-but-not-good-enough.
Strip Nude for Your Killer is presented at an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 on a single layer Blu-ray disc. The video has been encoded with AVC.
Audio
Easily the most noteworthy upgrade that this Blu-ray disc has to offer is the inclusion of an Italian language track. This didn't find its way onto Blue Underground's DVD release back in 2005, and it's intriguing
) |
| Knife in one hand, deflated sex doll in the other: story of my life. [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] |
Both the English and Italian language tracks are monaural and presented in 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio. There are a few English subtitle streams: the default one that translates the Italian text that appears on the screen, another for the English dub that's captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing, and, finally, a translation of the Italian audio. Also included are subs in French and Spanish.
Extras
The extras on Strip Nude for Your Killer build slightly upon those on Blue Underground's 2005 DVD, adding in one other trailer as well as a small image gallery.
- Strip Nude for Your Giallo (12 min.; SD): This interview
with actress Solvi Stubing and co-writer Massino Felisatti has been carried over from the DVD. Felisatti begins by charting how the once-chaste Italian film industry became enthralled with nudity, prompting him to write this sexy giallo. He goes on to discuss how the film's premise was inspired by real stories in the press. Both he and Stubing grouse about having to work alongside director Andrea Bianchi, to the point that Felisatti tried to distance himself from the film by having Bianchi credited as a co-writer. That sort of brutal honesty is always intriguing to hear, but...well, not quite as intriguing as the peeks at Stubing's black-and-white TV spots for Peroni Beer that are dished out here! Definitely worth a look.
[click on the thumbnail to enlarge]
- Poster and Still Gallery (HD): Strip Nude for Your Killer's high-res still gallery features a couple dozen lobby cards, posters, black-and-white production stills, and video art from around the world.
- Trailers (7 min.; HD): Last up are two trailers: one international and the other Italian.
)
The Final Word
The first half hour of Strip Nude for Your Killer is every bit as deliriously, legendarily sleazy as its title promises. The pace starts to drag after that, though, and even with all the murders and the endless, shameless nudity, Strip Nude for Your Killer feels like it's just repeating itself over and over and over and over. Too uneven to recommend as a blind buy, but if you like your gialli sticky and depraved -- or, hell, even if you just can't pass up a title like that -- Strip Nude for Your Killer is at least worth a rental. Rent It.
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