Strip Nude For Your Killer (1974)

Note to Killer: Bring plenty of singles.

I just want to make something clear before we start: I’m not mad at Italy. The Italian people have given the world some of my favorite things, from the exalted (St. Mark’s Basilica) to the humble (the Roman-Style Hummingbird Tongues-in-Honey Platter at Applebee’s). But it also gave us this film, and frankly, I’m not sure the Renaissance makes up for it. 

Strip Nude for Your Killer (1974)
Directed by Andrea Bianchi
Written by Andrea Bianchi (story), Massimo Felisatti (screenplay)

I must begin with a warning. Hell, a legal disclaimer. The following film opens with considerably more bush than usual. And when I say “bush” I don’t mean some pathetic little growth like the tree in A Charlie Brown Christmas, I mean a vast, Normandy-style hedgerow of hair! I mean a crotch richly carpeted in deep-pile, natural shag! In short, I’m talking about the wild, untamed jungle of sub-equatorial Debbie.

What can I say? The Seventies were another country, man.

Anyway, ladyscaping is the least of her problems, because we find her in mid-abortion, and immediately feel awkward for having barged in on her. Worse, this is three years before the procedure became legal in Italy, which explains why her immediate surroundings don’t appear to meet the minimum standards of clinical cleanliness, and her attending physician looks like a cross between Harpo Marx and Dr. Giggles.

She dies stark naked on the table. The quack calls up someone named Carlo, and the two take her back to her home and leave her in the bathtub with the water running. So now she’s dead, damp, and whoever rents her apartment next will have a lot of moldy grout to deal with.

Cut to a spa, where hairy Italians cavort around an indoor pool. A sexy redhead wiggles and jiggles by, attracting the attention of a half-nude photographer named Carlo (I’ll spare you the suspense—it’s the same guy who helped dispose of the back alley abortion victim). He snaps some photos, telling her he works for the world’s biggest magazines and she could be a fashion model if she just “loses a bit of that tummy.” (It’s the Birth of Negging! And You Are There!) Naturally, they wind up in the sauna, where Carlo strips her, snaps some future revenge porn, and then they have sex. So here’s the first important lesson I learned from this movie: When you’re in the sauna, always sit on a towel, because other people have perspired on that bench, and Italians have fornicated on it.

“Oopsie…!”

Cut to Albatross Photo Studio and Modeling Agency. Their slogan: “When you think of Albatross please think of fashion, and not that dead, rotting bird hanging around some old sailor’s neck”

Carlo introduces the redhead, Lucia, to the rest of our pre-corpse cast: There’s photographer’s assistant Magda, played by Italian sex comedy star Edwige Fenech.

There’s the dead-eyed model Patritzia. There’s the middle-aged, relentlessly gay Mario, the agency owner, Gisella and her hairy, heavyset husband, Maurizio, who wants to know if Lucia puts out. Mauritizo, by the way, is played by the same Italian actor who was eaten by the giant octopus in Tentacles (1977) after suddenly deciding he was Mexican. So the man has range.

Maurizio dates all his wife’s models, and takes Patritzia to a live sex show featuring two girls so incompetent at faking sex that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they’d taken this gig after flunking out of mime school. Patritzia pulls the ripcord and bails on the date, leaving Maurizio to pantomime “Undertones of Sadness with top notes of Blue Balls”. He does such a vivid job of it I wish it was him up on that stage doing the live sex show. It’s not like this movie could get any grosser.

(Note: I am about to be proven wrong.)

Magda catches Carlo in the darkroom and strips nude for him, proving that at least she’s read the script. Magda wants to model, but Carlo points out she’d have a longer career as a photographer, since fashion models are washed up after only a few years. This is good, solid, professional advice, and in response Magda performs oral sex on him, as recommended in the Employee Handbook.

That night, Very Gay Mario sneaks into the darkroom and prints a photo featuring all of our characters from the studio, plus the dead girl—Evelyn—and a couple we’ll meet shortly. On the way home, he’s stalked by a figure wearing black leather with a shiny black motorcycle helmet and breathing like Darth Vader--three years before Darth Vader. The movie asks us to believe it’s a man, but we politely refuse.

Helmet Head is welcomed by Mario, but he gets a little freaked out when she spills his whiskey, and downright pissy when she stabs him to death.

The next day, when Patritzia comes by to pick up Mario she finds him pantless and bloody, and faints. Enter the Police (not the band; they won’t form for another three years). Instead we get three Investigatori della polizia, and they’re all useless, annoying, sexist knobs, so I feel like ignoring them.

At Albatross Studio, Carlo and Magda are doing a photo shoot with the other couple from the stolen photograph—Steffano and Doris.

Steffano is a tall, skinny, hairy guy with an amazing pornstache. Not quite Tom Selleck; more like Tom Selleck if he were an appetizer at Macaroni Grill. Neither he nor Doris make for particularly convincing fashion models, but they’re both in the mysterious photograph, so I assume the movie’s setting up its next victims, like a malevolent pin boy in a bowling alley of MURDER.

Cut to Gisella’s house, where she’s gettin’ it on with Lucia. Afterwards, Gisella goes back to work and Lucia wanders nude around the house, getting startled and terrified by things like carpet fuzz, and the sink. Helmet Head watches her for a while, then seems to say, “Well, she stripped nude, she must be expecting me to kill her.” The black-clad slasher keeps up her end of the bargain, offing Lucia in a fit of furious belly-stabbing, because she’s avenging a woman who died in a botched abortion. (You really can’t put a price on subtlety, which is why the filmmakers didn’t buy any, figuring if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.)

The next morning, Magda wakes up and fusses over Carlo, serving him breakfast in bed while he does nude head-stands and acts like a sexist jerk.

The morning paper tells them that Lucia is dead, killed in the same way as Very Gay Mario. Magda gets suspicious and asks Carlo, “Hey, just how did you know that girl?” But he convinces her of his innocence by wrapping his hands around her throat and strangling her only half to death.

But there’s a clue in one of the newspaper photos. Magda notices an earring clutched in the dead girl’s hand, and something about it seems familiar…

As Doris strolls to the studio, Maurizio pulls over and insists on giving her a lift. Instead he takes her on a terrifying Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, ending at the house he shares with Giselle—the house where Lucia was killed. Doris recognizes it—apparently she’s had sex with Gisella too—and Maurizio offers her half a million lira to sleep with him. When she declines, he throws her on the couch anyway, but she knees him in the groin, and he threatens to brain her with a glass sculpture.

Doris basically throws up her hands and says, fine, let’s get it over with. Maurizio strips down to his baggy white briefs, crawls on top of her, and bursts into tears when he can’t get an erection. “I’ve never made it with a girl,” he sobs. “No one. My mother told me I would, but I haven’t, not yet.”

Doris skillfully de-escalates the conflict by murmuring, “You will someday. Now come button up the back of my dress.” Captain Underpants feels bad and offers to pay her anyway, but she kindly demurs, obviously trying to leave this defective non-erective what miniscule dignity he still has.

The movie, on the other hand, has other plans…

Doris leaves and Maurizio pulls a half-deflated love doll out of a dresser, moaning, “You’re the only one who can make it happen. The only one…”

Okay! Let me just hop in here before things go any further. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we’re not here to kink shame. Especially when it originally appeared this sequence would climax with the murder of Doris, a tragic end I was not prepared for, and I’m genuinely relieved that it now seems to be aiming for a less violent, even happier conclusion, except I can’t think of a more tragic ending than watching Maurizio have a happy ending.

Still, the film isn’t called Strip Nude for Your Killer (Just the Ladies!), so I guess we better get this evisceration on the road. Maurizio starts blowing up his O-Faced vinyl friend, but then he hears water running and wanders around the house in his underpants, cradling a limp sex doll, in a sequence I’m pretty sure officially makes him the most pathetic character in movie history. And because of its massive cultural significance, I hope this is the clip they included in the Academy Award’s “In Memoriam” reel when he died.

Anyway, after a lengthy tour of the house by the two limpest docents in town, Marizio gets stabbed and mutilated. No word on the condition of, uh…Great. Now I gotta Google “Is there a common name for blow-up sex dolls?” And yes, it seems that “Judy” is the most popular moniker amongst the Pneumatic-American community (there might be some who identify differently, but I stopped scrolling down when I hit Lovin Lamb Inflatable Party Sheep).

The next day, Gisella fields a call from a blackmailer telling her to bring ten million lira to an underpass that night, or the police will find out she was banging Lucia. Carlo follows her to meet the blackmailer and takes “infra-red” photographs, catching Gisella’s murder in the process.

Carlo goes back to the Albatross agency, but there’s someone waiting for him in a car, so he throws the exposed film into a garbage can and tries to make his escape on foot. Which sounds stupid, but Italian paparazzi are like cheetahs--they can reach speeds of up to 60 miles per hour in short spurts. Plus, the killer is driving a 1969 Fiat 124, and even my grandmother could outrun that piece of shit. Unfortunately, Carlo’s spurt falls shorter than usual, and he’s instantly flattened by the Fiat.

Cut to the hospital, where Carlo is having his eyebrow stitched back on. He appears unconscious, until the doctors and nurses leave the room, then he peeks open an eye, grabs the phone, and calls Magda. He tells her to fish the roll of infra-red film out of the rubbish and develop it.

Now suddenly—an hour and ten minutes into the movie—our heroine turns into a massive klutz who can’t manage to pull her peignoir over her head without a struggle, which I assume is so we can enjoy a few seconds of her impressive breasts jiggling on the big screen. Which is…fine, whatever, you want to keep those butts in the cinema seats, but it’s a little weird that she abruptly goes from figuring out clues that have stumped the police like a kittenish Sherlock Holmes, to screaming, “I can’t operate my lingerie!”

To be fair though, Magda is kind of an idiot, because after she recovers the film roll, she leaves her headlights burning—and for once in this movie that’s not a euphemism—while she develops the film in her huge fur coat. (Full disclosure, I was just an amateur photographer in my day, but when working around smelly, hazardous chemicals that stain everything they touch, I did like to swan about the darkroom in my chinchilla bed-jacket)

Carlo calls Magda to see how it’s going, just as the lights go out. Magda, who’s been alternately smart and incredibly dumb and useless, rolls the dice and lands on useless, asking the brain-damaged guy in the hospital what she should do. He tells her there’s a revolver in the locker, “under some papers,” which explains why this shitty movie got a five star review from the NRA.

Magda gets the gun—an automatic, not a revolver, a basic mistake which caused the NRA to immediately deduct two stars—and we get a long drawn out cat-and-mouse game while Magda slinks through the dark studio, as Carlo hangs on the phone, listening to her knock things over and scream…

Helmet Head attacks Magda by bursting through a gigantic paper poster like Evel Knievel, and Carlo decides to get out of bed and try to beat it back to the studio in time for the climax, and Oh!, by the way? When he throws off the sheets he’s not wearing a gown, so I guess this is one of those European nudist hospitals. “It is part of our proud tradition. We like to go topless on the beach, and we like to free-ball it here in the ICU.”

Cut to Doris, who’s watching a news report about the serial killings, and learns that Gisella the Irritable Lesbian and her Impotent Husband have also been murdered. Still no word on the fate of the half-deflated sex doll. Appetizer Tom Selleck comes in and snaps off the TV. He looks pissed, so to calm him down, Doris takes off her clothes and tells him Maurizio took her to his house and tried to sex her up with his spaghetti-pushing penis. But Appetizer Tom doesn’t look appeased—in fact, his eyes are aflame with rage and his mustache looks ready to jump off his face and strangle her.

Now, at this point I’m worried for Doris—who’s been nothing but nice to everybody—because she’s stripped. But she hasn’t stripped nude, so maybe Tom’s not the killer.

Carlo and his subdural hematoma arrive at the studio, but Magda is missing! He finds burned negatives in the dark room, but the prints Magda developed are coming out of the dryer. And the killer is…Appetizer Tom! Who really hasn’t been in the movie much and it’s kind of a let-down, but I’m not going to let it ruin my day or anything.

Cut back to Doris and Tom. He slaps her, she falls on the bed and cries, “I can’t stand anymore beatings! Why do you treat me this way?” as Tom menacingly doffs his sport coat. She pleads, “You know I’m your girl. I’ve done everything you ever asked, even things I never thought anyone would ask me to do!” I’m hoping this wasn’t as pervy as it sounds, and he just asked her to try the new Chicken Alfredo Pizza Bowl at the Olive Garden.

But wait! There’s a twist!

The killer turns off the lights (because why mess with a winning formula?) and Tom goes out to investigate. There’s a crash, he screams, and Doris comes out to find him stripped nude and stabbed to death. Since I doubt he saw the killer’s knife and thought, “Wait, wait, let me just slip my pants off first”, he didn’t actually strip nude for his killer, his killer stripped him nude, which is better Customer Service than I was expecting. Then Doris comes out and Helmet Head stabs her repeatedly in the gut and tears her underwear off. By this point it’s obvious: the title is totally lying to us.

By the way…If Doris is anything to go by, after death, rigor mortis hits the nipples first.

Helmet Head drives away as Carlo comes sprinting up, after just completing a triathlon (swim 1500 meters, sustain a closed-head injury, run a 10K). He finds the bodies and discovers that Tom’s penis and testicles have either been brutally severed, or smothered in a zesty marinara sauce (the special effects are a little vague).

He also finds Magda unconscious on the sofa with a bloody switchblade in her hand. He wipes off the fingerprints and slaps her awake just as we hear approaching sirens. He carries her to a park as she moans and acts drunk. She tells him Appetizer Tom was in the photo she developed, but Carlo says Tom was only blackmailing Gisella; the killer actually attacked her from behind while wearing a motorcycle outfit—the same killer he saw leaving Doris and Tom’s house!

Carlo drives to some place we’ve never seen before. Inside, the unseen killer takes a sword from one of the many loitering suits of armor, so I assume it’s Hogwarts? Carlo sees a framed photograph of two girls in unitards, and the editing suggests this is a BIG DEAL! But before we can see what all the fuss is about, Carlo gets brained with a sword and falls down. Honestly, this guy has suffered more head injuries in one movie than Mike Connors did in all eight seasons of Mannix.

Carlo hears Magda screaming and stumbles outside to find Helmet Head strangling her (but not very effectively, since she’s screaming just fine and seems to have lavish amounts of air to work with).

Carlo saves her (sorry folks, but this asshole is our hero) and chases the killer through the Italian equivalent of the Sherman Oaks Galleria. They tussle, he punches the killer right in the helmet, and despite the fact that it’s supposed to protect you from face and head injuries, she falls to the floor faster than a pair of panties on Prom Night.

Carlo pulls off the defective helmet and reveals the killer is…Patrizia! 

Um, okay. I can honestly say…and again, I think I speak for all of us…that if I could care, I would.

Cut to Magda’s apartment. As she strips (but not for her killer! She’s off the clock now and back to stripping on spec!), Carlo explains that Patrizia and the abortion victim were sisters, but…more than sisters, if you know what I mean. So the filmmakers have really double-braced their murderer’s motive. I mean it seems to me like either “woman avenges her lesbian lover” or “woman avenges her dead sister” would work equally well on their own. Combining them only makes me think you’re trying to hit some kind of Pervert Bingo.

Anyway, the sister “got herself knocked up, had an abortion, but died of cardiac collapse”, which I guess means she should have used a doctor for her abortion instead of a civil engineer.

Carlo strangles the semi-nude Magda again, who’s flabbergasted that he’s actually attempting foreplay instead of just driving the choo-choo through the tunnel like he usually does, and says, “Are you being careful? Don’t worry, I’m on the pill, honey.”

Carlo says, “How nice. But it’s better not to run any risks!” and flips her over like he’s Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris. Magda says she won’t bring him the butter, and bellows in protest, but Carlo assures her he’s just joking about the sodomy. Or is he? Comical sit-com freeze-frame. Roll credits.

Yeah. It was a lot easier to be an asshole back in the Seventies.

Strip Nude for Your Killer is a decent exploitation title, but as advice goes it’s absolute shit. Sprint Fully Dressed From Your Killer seems like the much more responsible PSA. Or Kick Your Killer’s Nude Balls with Your Hobnailed Boots. No, that’s too long for the marquee, especially at a multiplex, and why would your killer be nude? I mean, somebody’s gotta be, it's an exploitation film, but Strip Nude for Your Victim is an unpromising approach to serial killing because it leaves your victim way too much time to run, especially if you get your slacks caught around your ankles. What are you going to do then? Chase them? Suppose you run past a fraternity house having a raging kegger and the frat bros mistake you for a streaker and they all instinctively shuck off their clothes and join in, and now you’ve got a screaming loose end you need to silence running away from you, and 300 nude witnesses panting behind you.

Speaking of making a clean getaway, I also learned that if you want to strip nude for your killer (and you really should, that’s just good manners), then you’ll need to dress for movement. Since watching the film I’ve taken to always wearing tear-away tuxedo pants like Thunder From Down Under, so if I meet a killer I can just whip them off, fulfill the social contract, then make like the Roadrunner (who was fast, obviously, but also habitually ran around pantsless). Of course, one problem we humans face when sprinting commando, a difficulty not shared by our feathered friends, is the tendency of the scrotum to bounce with the speed and force of a dribbled basketball. Personally, I find that distracting. But maybe I don’t have the most focused, disciplined, and logical mind, because as a result of watching Strip Nude for Your Killer, I just spent thirty minutes Googling, “Do roadrunners have ball sacks?” Unfortunately, Siri misunderstood my question, but she did furnish me with a lot of interesting trivia about the French writer Honoré de Balzac.

And his scrotum.