4 1/2 stars.
This Arrow edition for Giallo and Gelato is a rather raunchy affair called Strip Nude For Your Killer. It’s a brutal and sleazy entry into the genre which isn’t completely repulsive thanks to the joy that is giallo queen, Edwige Fenech (All the Colors of the Dark). The movie is full of the dark and uncomfortable elements of the modeling game. The film lives up to the title on so many levels. This is not for the viewer looking for a sophisticated taste of ’70s Italian cinema. I recommend Talenti’s Dark Chocolate Cherry to scoop before pressing play on the remote to see Strip Nude For Your Killer.
A fashion model dies of a heart attack while receiving an illegal abortion. The doctor calls up a mysterious person so they can carry the body back to her apartment and stage it so the model looks like she died while taking a bath. One night, the doctor encounters a person in motorcycles and racing leathers who stabs them to death. There’s not much mourning at the Albatross Modelling Agency. One of the photographers stalks a woman at a resort and uses his offer of taking test photographs as an excuse to get her naked in a sauna. The owner of the agency (Lia Amanda) is having an affair with a model (The Killer Must Kill Again‘s Femi Benussi) while her perv husband keeps poaching on the talent too. This is not a modeling agency of model citizens. The only one who seems slightly respectable is Magda (Sergio Martino's Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key‘s Edwige Fenech). She’s a photographer who wants to be a model. She hooks up with fellow photographer Carlo (Radley Metzger's groundbreaking Camille 2000‘s Nino Castelnuovo). The motorcycle helmet killer starts to pick their way through the agency. The only big clue is that the killer knows the agency since an early victim lets them in the house and talks business before they meet the business end of the knife. As they keep losing co-workers, Magda and Castro investigate even though one of them might be the killer for all they know.
Strip Nude For Your Killer came out in 1975 when the wave of Giallo was dying down in Italian theaters that were now showing over the top Cop action flicks. While some might view the film as more of a slasher/body count film, it’s still a Giallo to me. Why? Because ultimately Giallo is about mystery and this film is a double mystery. First we wonder who is behind the motorcycle helmet. But we also must ponder who was the mystery person that covered up the model’s death. Is this ultimately the killer’s target or was that person the killer?
Over 40 years later, Edwige Fenech is finally getting a proper audience for her ’70s Giallo work in America with top notch releases not based on butchered prints. This movie shows her cinematic power since she keeps this film from just being all detestable characters getting hacked away by a mystery killer. She’s the only person on the screen you don’t want to see sliced up. Likewise you could forgive her if she turns out to be the killer.
The second biggest star of the film is Berto Pisano’s score. His music is as nasty and funky as the action. There’s nothing subtle about his instruments driving the beat. His notes are as obvious as the title. The Director, the consistently sleazy, Andrea Bianchi had just made the infamous sickie Cry of a Prostitute with Henry Silva (The Godfather and countless Italian crime films). The gangster film was pretty rough and nasty so he didn’t completely change up his style for his Giallo entry. Strip Nude For Your Killer delivers as an exploitation flick that doesn’t tease.
The video is 2.35:1 anamorphic. The transfer brings out the gritty nature of the modeling industry. The audio is Original lossless mono Italian and English soundtracks. The levels are great for both version. The English dub sounds fine in case you don’t want to read subtitles. The movie is subtitled in English.
Audio Commentary by HORRORPEDIA.com’s Adrian J. Smith and David Flint gives history of the film, cast and crew.
Sex and Death with a Smile (23:02) is a new video essay by author and critic Kat Ellinger on Edwige Fenech. Kat explores the career of Edwige as both a giallo and sexy comedy icon in Italian cinema. This gives a great overview of Edwige’s career with plenty of clips for her movies.
A Good Man for the Murders (14:32) is an interview with actor Nino Castelnuovo. He talks of wanting to play roles like Bogart and Cagney. He rose up from the Spaghetti Westerns.
The Blonde Salamander (18:30) chats with actress Erna Schurer as she smokes her pipe. She talks of her early career and how she went from modeling to acting without too much of a hitch. She had a bit of a background in the industry before this movie.
The Art of Helping (44:18) allows assistant director Daniele Sangiorgi to get deep into the film. He gives a sense of how he got in the business. The assistant director is the foreman on the set who has to make sure everything is set up for the director.
Jack of All Trades (21:50) allows actor and production manager Tino Polenghi to discuss his duel roles. He started as a background extra in a movie in Milan and he ended up becoming an assistant director who was in charge of finding more extras and pointing out interesting locations as a local kid. He has great stories about how the producers worked cheap because they didn’t pay anyone. Plus he breaks down a few love scenes. Like the other interviews with the cast and crew, he speaks Italian so all is subtitled.
Two versions of the opening scene: tinted and untinted viewing options for the model’s death and cover up.
Original Trailers in both Italian (3:42) and English (3:42) are the same with different dub soundtracks.
Image gallery (2:45) are posters, lobby cards and promotional stills.
Arrow Video presents Strip Nude For Your Killer. Directed by Andrea Bianchi. Screenplay by: Massimo Felisatti & Andrea Bianchi. Starring: Solvi Stubing, Nino Castelnuovo, Edwige Fenech & Erna Schürer. Rated: Not Rated. Running Time: 98 minutes. Released: March 19, 2019
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Reviews with images
Sleazy bit of giallo nonsense that focuses pushes sex before violence
In exploitation movies, a good title probably puts more butts in the seats than the finished product ever will. So behold the power of Strip Nude for Your Killer, a title that could apply to most of the slasher flicks released from 1978 to present. But the Italians got there first with this 1975 giallo – a genre of spaghetti thrillers whose main ingredients are sex, blood and a black-gloved killer…in no particular order.Starring the strikingly beautiful Edwige Fenech (here sporting a fashionable pixie hairstyle), the film ticks the marks on all the giallo clichés established a few years earlier by Bava and Argento, even cribbing the fashion industry background from Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. Fenech plays as assistant photographer whose beautiful co-workers keep winding up dead at the hands of a motorcycle-clad killer. Don’t bother trying to sort out the mystery; like most of these films the murders are tenuously connected by a tragic back-story one could never have guessed. Instead, soak up all the campy sleaze on display from writer/director Andrea Bianchi who uses any excuse to get his scream queens disrobed. Sporting one of the most uncomfortable punchlines in screen history (until The Kingsman went there, that is), Strip Nude for Your Killer is a clumsy progenitor of all those Cinemax thrillers from the '90s...if the men all wore ill-fitting tighty-whities.Release twice by Blue Underground, Arrow Video picks up the torch with a new 2K restoration that looks at least twice as good, adding an optional tint to the opening scene, Italian and English versions, along with new interviews, commentary and a collector's booklet.
