The Scare Salon

Given that the film says “nude” right there on the tin, you would expect this thing to be pretty much wall to wall nakedness, and for the most part, you’d be correct; most of the women in the film (including beautiful giallo veteran Edwige Fenech) get their kit off at least once but usually multiple times, and there’s also some discreet male nudity to balance things out, as well as a couple of lesbian scenes if you’re into that (and who isn’t really).

On the gore side of things, while Strip Nude isn’t as graphic or violent as some of Argento’s work, it does have one scene where a man’s junk and a woman’s tit are cut off, though the audience only sees the aftermath. The other kills are relatively tame as these things go.

Strip Nude wastes almost no time at all throwing us into the deep end, since the very first shot is a close-up of a woman’s bush and the back of an abortionist’s head. The woman, whose name we learn at the very end is Eveline (Giuseppa Meschella), dies of cardiac arrest during the illegal procedure, and the doctor (Filippo La Neve) quickly enlists the help of an accomplice to take her back to her apartment and dump her in a bathtub full of water so it will look like she simply died of natural causes while having a soak. Shortly afterward, a person in a motorcycle helmet and racing leathers approaches the doctor on his doorstep and stabs the absolute shit out of him before fleeing into the night.

Meanwhile, a sleazebag photographer named Carlo (Nino Castelnuovo), who is also unfortunately our main protagonist, is lounging by a pool when a hot woman in a bikini slinks by, attracting the leering gazes and gross comments of every male around the deck. Carlo follows the woman shamelessly, staying only inches behind her and snapping numerous pictures of her ass while she tries her best to ignore him. She finally arrives at a bar and orders a grapefruit juice, and Carlo gets way up in her business, touching her face and neck and telling her he works for all these big magazines and that she should be a model. He even pulls the negging thing decades before there was a word for that, telling her that her midriff is a bit “heavy,” which it totally isn’t. At first she tells him he’s annoying (which…yeah) and implies that she’d like him to fuck off, please and thank you, but because this was Italy in the 1970s, eventually she becomes charmed by his predatory creepiness and leaves the bar with him.

They go into a sauna so he can take some pictures of her, and he essentially bullies her into getting naked. He starts taking photos, but then the camera mysteriously “stops working,” so he’s all, oh well, guess we should fuck then, and she’s all, well, I suppose so. At some point, another woman who was apparently staying in this resort or whatever with Carlo (so she’s maybe his girlfriend, though she’s never mentioned again) sees them fucking in the sauna, and though she calls him a pig (which…again, yeah), she doesn’t react with as much anger as most women probably would in real life. After she leaves, Carlo just continues pumping away, so no harm done.

Later on, Carlo takes this woman, whose name is Lucia (Femi Benussi), to the Albatross Agency where he works, telling his bosses that they should try her out. It’s here we meet a few other significant characters, including model Patrizia (Solvi Stubing), agency owner Gisella (Lia Amanda), her husband and co-owner Maurizio (Franco Diogene), and fellow photographers Magda (Edwige Fenech) and Mario (Claudio Pellegrini). Not long after Lucia arrives, Magda goes into Carlo’s darkroom, asking him if she could also be a model. He says of course, but being a photographer is much better because models only get work for a couple of years. She then gets naked and proceeds to give him a blowie, after which the pair are love interests and designated mystery-solvers (as well as potential suspects) for the remainder of the film.

A whole bunch of sleazy and/or murdery shenanigans follow in quick succession. Maurizio develops a pitiful obsession with model Patrizia and tries unsuccessfully to get her to sleep with him. His wife Gisella embarks on a rather lopsided sexual relationship with Lucia, basically telling her that she’ll only get modeling work if she puts out. Mario is visited at his apartment by the person with the motorcycle helmet, who he clearly knows, but he is shocked when the person starts stabbing him. He’s found dead the following day, face down with his pants pulled down around his ankles. Lucia is also murdered at Gisella’s apartment after Gisella leaves for a meeting.

The police are pretty suspicious of everyone at the agency at this point, since all of the murders are linked to the place. Because Lucia’s body was found with one of Gisella’s earrings in her hand, the cops suspect the killer might be her, though there’s not much suspense around this clue since the audience already knows that Lucia was just trying on Gisella’s earrings when she got knifed.

There’s also a crazy scene where Maurizio sees another model, Doris (Erna Schürer), coming out of the agency and begs her to let him give her a ride. He then drives like a complete lunatic, saying he should have been a race car driver and all this other stuff, while Doris absolutely loses her shit in the passenger seat. He takes Doris to his house and offers her money to fuck him, but she says no, after which he starts groping and attempts to rape her, telling her how much he loves her. She fights him at first, but then basically tells him to get it over with, and acts weirdly understanding when he can’t perform and starts to cry, calling for his mommy (for real) and confessing that he’s never been able to have sex with a real woman. Doris puts her clothes back on and reassures him that she won’t tell anyone what happened. After she leaves, Maurizio retrieves an inflatable sex doll from his dresser and starts to blow it up, but then gets murdered by Motorcyle Helmet.

Not long after, Gisella gets a phone call from a blackmailer, demanding ten thousand of whatever currency (lira I presume). Magda is at the agency and overhears the conversation, including where Gisella is supposed to meet the blackmailer, who she assumes is also the killer. She tells Carlo this information, and he plans to be at the meeting point so he can snap a photo of the murderer. Please note as an aside that I have no idea what Gisella was being blackmailed for and I don’t remember if the movie ever explained it.

It’s pretty dark beneath the overpass where the meeting is supposed to take place, but Carlo nonetheless sees Gisella being murdered and is pretty sure he’s captured a photo of the killer. He’s forced to split the scene with a quickness since the cops show up after the killer has already left, and Carlo doesn’t want to get blamed. In his haste to escape, he is hit by a car (I figured this was the killer’s car, but I’m not sure); before he gets hit, he takes the film out of his camera that has the killer’s image on it and hides it in a trash can behind the agency so the killer can’t get his mitts on it.

Carlo then calls Magda from the hospital and tells her to retrieve the film and develop it ASAP. She does this, but the killer shows up and knocks her out, then burns the negative after she’s only made one print. I think we’re supposed to believe Magda got killed, but since she wasn’t shown getting stabbed, I correctly deduced that she was actually still alive.

Carlo, worried because he can’t get hold of Magda, leaves the hospital and goes to the agency, finding the burned negatives. But he also finds the print that Magda made, which the killer hadn’t noticed. He magnifies the person in the photo, and it’s supposed to be this big reveal, but it fell kinda flat for me because I was like, “Ummm…who the fuck is that?” I didn’t recognize him at all and couldn’t remember if he’d even been in the movie up to that point.

In the following scene, we’re at Doris’s place and the guy from the photo creepily enters the apartment. Doris is startled at first, but it turns out that this is actually her abusive boyfriend Stefano (Wainer Verri), who also lives there. He starts beating the shit out of Doris and she’s begging him to stop, and then the actual killer in the motorcycle helmet turns up and kills both of them, slicing off Stefano’s dick and removing one of Doris’s tits. So the plot thickens: Stefano, we’re led to assume, was the blackmailer, but not the killer. And at this point, pretty much everyone else is dead except for Carlo and Magda, and even though there are some halfhearted attempts to suggest that one of the might be the murderer, it’s pretty clear that this isn’t the case. So who the hell is left?

Carlo goes to Stefano’s place after thinking that he’s the killer, and he finds both Stefano and Doris dead. He also finds Magda there, drunk off her ass with a bloody knife planted in her hand, suggesting that the real killer forced a bunch of alcohol down Magda’s throat and dragged her from the agency to Stefano and Doris’s apartment to pin the murders on her. Carlo gets her out of there in the nick of time before the cops show up.

The killer gives chase, though, and eventually Carlo clocks Motorcycle Helmet hard enough to send them tumbling down the stairs to their death, and it’s here we discover that the murderer is actually Patrizia. Turns out that Eveline, the woman who got the abortion that killed her at the beginning of the movie, was Patrizia’s sister as well as her lover, because this movie wasn’t sleazy enough as it was. Also turns out that Carlo was the accomplice that the doctor used to help him cover up Eveline’s death. Because Eveline had worked for the Albatross Agency, Patrizia deliberately got a job there in order to punish everyone associated with the place, saving Carlo for last since she saw him as the most responsible (even though the doctor was the one who actually killed Eveline, and Patrizia took him out first, so that logic doesn’t really work). I’m not sure if it was suggested that Carlo was also the father of Eveline’s baby, which would make the most sense story-wise, but I don’t remember if the movie ever specified who the father was.

After everything is resolved, a weirdly breezy and unconcerned Carlo and Magda prepare to have sex. Magda glibly says she’d never have to get an abortion because she’s on the pill (which…that’s not quite how that works, but okay), and Carlo answers something along the lines of well, we shouldn’t take any chances, regardless. He turns her over and we freeze frame on Magda’s shocked smile as it’s pretty strongly implied that Carlo puts it in her butt. The end.

As giallo movies go, this was a pretty entertaining one, obviously way more toward the sleazy sex end of the spectrum than the gory or police procedural end. The plot was twisty enough to keep you guessing, but didn’t get mired down in too many intricacies so you could still follow along easily. Carlo was a pretty insufferable main character, but he became slightly less of a pig the more the movie went on, and to be honest almost every character in this was kind of a shit to a greater or lesser degree. It seemed fairly obvious to me that the motorcycle helmet killer was going to end up being a woman just from their body movements, but I admit I still didn’t guess who the murderer was until literally no other suspects remained. I feel like this one gets mixed reviews in general, but I had a lot of fun with it, so if you’re in the mood for some stabby softcore shenanigans with lots of tits, blood, raging sexism, and gigantic man panties, then this might be the flick for you.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.