Whiggles.com Compact
News // Movie Checklist // DVD Collection // Writings and Musings // Other

Strip Nude for Your Killer

I broke my earlier promise and watched Strip Nude for Your Killer before getting through all my Halloween reviews. As a result, I'm not sure that I'll be able to get The Ninth Gate done in time for Monday, but at least I managed to finish writing May this afternoon and will have a crack at Cat People tonight.

Strip Nude for Your Killer is not a very good giallo, but I was expecting as much. Produced in 1975, it attempts to leap on the bandwagon following the success of The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, but does so a little too late to take full advantage of the giallo craze of the early 70s. Instead, it attempts to dredge up more interest by shoehorning in a very tame soft-core porn aesthetic (the title is fairly appropriate), but without much success. Interestingly, after watching the interview with co-writer Massimo Felisatti on the DVD, I came away with the impression that the film's writers didn't think much of it either. "Second-rate" he calls it - he's not wrong.

Still, there is some material of interest here. In particular, the cinematography of Franco Delli Colli (who also shot What Have They Done to Your Daughters?), which employs darkness illuminated by the occasional splash of primary colour to great effect, gives it a classier appearance than the script would suggest. Also, I wasn't able to guess the identity of the villain before it was unveiled - although that's not necessarily much of an endorsement, as many gialli do tend to cheat the audience, not offering up much in the way of clues. Berto Pisano's score is pretty neat too.

I'd put this on about the same level of The Case of the Bloody Iris - it's fun enough to watch, and it's certainly not boring, but there's really nothing to warrant a repeat viewing, and you get the impression that no-one who was involved over-exerted themselves.

5/10

Disappointing DVD from Blue Underground, by the way. The transfer has been filtered and noise-reduced to hell, resulting in a lot of obvious frozen grain patterns (the source material is pretty rough) and very little fine detail. There is some fairly prominent edge enhancement too. Maybe I've been spoiled by the Italian releases of What Have You Done to Solange?, Death Walks on High Heels and Death Walks at Midnight, but I was expecting much better. Let's hope The Bird With the Crystal Plumage looks superior to this.

16:41