Taking Out the Extra Trashy with the Appropriately Titled "Strip Nude for Your Killer"

This little review is a part of Lucid Screening's White Elephant Blogathon!
Be sure to check out the other reviews.

"Killing is like loving.
It is an art. The most ancient art.
The subtlest and most perverse art..
And it gives pleasure."

-Marquis De Sade
(featured in the trailer for Strip Nude for Your Killer)


If the title wasn't enough, the basic premise of Andrea Bianchi's 1975 giallo pic Strip Nude for Your Killer revolves around a fashion model dying from an abortion, her doctor covering up the death before his own death and everyone associated with the model and her agency dying at the hands of a biker helmet wearing serial killer.

It's giallo, so you've got your sex, horror, violence and a jazzy score to accompany those lovely dubbed actors and actresses. The "story" of the serial killer (that does meet his victims in the nude) revolves around Carlo, a photographer who likes using his camera to get into girls pants. It's actually how we meet him - she proclaims that his camera isn't clicking - after she's already taken off her clothes for the camera. He quickly takes of his swim trunks and proceeds to the next phase of the interview. For most of the film he appears to be the strongest link to the murders.

One of my favorite moments had to be when a young woman who has slept with both men and women to advance in the fashion industry says (after having sex of course) "I want to be a fashion model, not a kept woman or a slave."

Uh huh.... She then walks around nude for awhile before being brutally killed.

In a way that scene is the entire movie. Part of me wants to have fun with the film, that's no doubt the point. It's trashy and doesn't hide it. But a larger part of me can't help but feel disgusted for spending 1 1/2 hours watching women portrayed as no more than slabs of meat. It's 70 machismo at it's best and for better or worse, there doesn't seem to be anything deeper in a plot that isn't especially intriguing. All you get for your 90 minutes are women taking off their clothes, people getting killed and a few interrogations in between.

One especially degrading scene features an overweight man tricking a lady into going back to his apartment, where he forces her to have sex with him only to fail in "getting it up." Which I suppose would feel better if she didn't console him after.

I'm often torn between movies I love and the way they objectify and demean women. On one hand I'm a cinephile and like films for filmsake and on the other, I'm a women and hate having stereotypes reinforced in a male dominated industry. Luckily, there was no such qualm here, the movie was just bad and unfortunately not in a good way.

In looking back at the Marquis De Sade quote, I can't help but wonder why a film that worked so hard to be nothing but an excuse for fake blood and tits is trying to align itself with art or pleasure at all. It seems to me, when all is said and done, the most pleasurable thing about Strip Nude for Your Killer is definitely the title.

*I somehow wonder if my White Elephant submission of the classic Sesame Street pic Follow That Bird somehow karmically doomed me to get receive the trashiest submission :)

* It should also be noted that I decided to write this piece after seeing Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It seems relevant somehow...

*Also - for those that are curious, the trailer is below: