Horror movies, like pretty much any other movie, are products of their time and the culture in which they’re made. And horror movies also tend toward transgression, since they’re largely dealing with the kind of stuff more polite entertainment doesn’t. What this means in practice is that the older the film, the more likely it is that it will have…not aged very well. Values and norms change over time, and some things that used to be acceptable aren’t any more. So I’ll sometimes find myself watching a movie where I’m more grossed out by the way the people in it behave than I am by blood and gore.
In my limited experience, gialli are especially susceptible to this. A type of film made largely in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy, gialli have some ideas about sex, sexuality and gender that are by modern standards pretty repugnant. And Nude Per L’Assassino (Strip Nude For Your Killer) is definitely no exception. I mean, with a title like that, it was never going to be subtle. But even though it isn’t as viciously nasty as some I’ve seen, the way it seems to be equal parts murder mystery and softcore sex film ends up being pretty distracting.
It comes in pretty hot, opening with a woman at a doctor’s office getting an abortion. It’s not as lurid as it could have been, thank goodness, but it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on. Halfway through, she appears to expire quietly in the chair. It’s an unusually low-key sequence, ending with the doctor calling someone in a panic. They’re going to move her back to her apartment and make it look like she died of natural causes. They dump her in the bath and start the water running, then they leave.
Some days later, a mysterious figure catches up to the doctor as he’s about to walk into his house, and stabs him to death.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, fashion photographer Carlo is busy trying to bed an attractive woman while he’s out in public…taking photographs, I think? He’s very much the kind of dude who doesn’t take “no” for an answer, which is gross enough, but somehow it’s worse that the woman he’s pressuring into sex (in a public place, no less) relents and goes along with it. Apparently, “no” means “yes” in this movie, and it’s pervasive. When Carlo brings her back to the fashion design house, he sort of dumps her on the head of the agency and finds out that one of their models apparently died of natural causes. Hmmm. And then only a couple of days later, another employee dies. It takes a bit for people to start putting it together, but a mysterious killer is targeting everyone who works for this design house. Someone’s out for revenge.
The biggest problem with this film is the same problem as pretty much any other Italian movie in the genre from the mid-70s – pretty much every man in this film is one flavor of pig or another. It’s more chauvinistic than misogynistic or homophobic (I still haven’t gotten the taste of
New York Ripper out of my mouth), but there’s plenty of dudes who don’t take no for an answer, who have no sense of boundaries, who’ve never heard the word “consent.” And on top of that, most of the women in this film are sexually available in one way or another. Carlo has a brief, tense exchange with aspiring photographer Magda, who is intent on proving herself as a photographer on her own merits, but this doesn’t stop her from turning around and seducing Carlo in a darkroom for…reasons? It really does underscore the idea that boundaries and consent don’t really mean anything. No matter what she says, she really wants it. Even a scene with two cops interviewing someone can’t resist having one of the cops spend the whole thing leering at a scantily-dressed woman in the office. Why is she scantily-clad? That’s a good question. With the exception of two nurses in a brief hospital scene, pretty much every woman in this film ends up getting naked, whether it makes sense or not. It ranges from the somewhat uncomfortable - there’s a brief scene of a woman getting slapped around toward the end - to the pathetic, as another executive at the design house attempts to pay a woman to sleep with him, and when he’s unable to perform, he cries for his mother. I didn’t feel dirty after watching it (still looking at you,
New York Ripper), but I did yell “ew, gross!” more than a few times at the way dudes acted in this film and at the subtext about sexual availability. I’m usually able to calibrate for older films, but in this instance it ends up being distracting.
So it’s very much of its time, to the point that it is kind of a distraction, but there’s also not a whole lot of movie outside of the gratuitous T&A. Apart from that, it’s sort of a mixed bag. The editing comes straight from the school of “meanwhile, in another movie,” the acting is nothing to write home about, and there’s very little mystery to it. It’s not so much that the killer is immediately obvious as it is it just one person after another dropping like flies until the very end, where the killer is revealed mere seconds before process of elimination would make their identity clear to the audience. It doesn’t have the stylishness of Argento’s work or the deranged vision of Fulci at his weirdest, but it’s mostly cohesive (if not especially interesting in how it develops the story) and it does manage a decent amount of suspense with a repeated motif of running water, heavy breathing, and a near-subliminal insert shot from the beginning of the film heralding the killer’s arrival. The deaths are quick and nasty, full of blood that looks like tempera paint, but they aren’t overly sadistic, and both men and women get killed. So it isn’t as icky as I was afraid it was going to be, landing more on inappropriately horny in a way that mostly just made me roll my eyes. It’s grainy, with pops of color and rainy streets at nighttime, and it’s got the requisite cop-show up-tempo score mixed in with some lighter pop music from the period. I’m beginning to see what people mean by “Eurosleaze” after watching this, and though it has its merits as a style of film, the “sleaze” part makes it a little tough to appreciate.
Film - especially horror film - is a place where you can explore difficult or upsetting ideas, grapple with uncomfortable emotions and express things in strong, vivid terms. I don’t like moral panics or pearl-clutching, and I don’t think that any particular creative work’s value should be determined by its adherence to a particular set of norms and values. Judging the films of 40-plus years ago by the values of today doesn’t make much sense to me. But anything that yanks me out of a movie is going to be a problem, and this one’s just juvenile and gross enough to be distracting.
