Next to 'Strip Nude For Your Killer', 'Naked You Die' is my favourite title for a giallo: none of that baffling 'Seven Eyeballs for a Lizard's Belly' nonsense, just the promise of some good old fashioned gratuitous nudity and murder. Unfortunately, unlike 'Strip Nude...', this one doesn't manage to live up to its lurid title, offering only fleeting glimpses of bare female skin and mostly bloodless kills; in addition to the disappointing lack of sleaze and gore, it also manages to fall flat in the narrative department, with a humdrum plot and a twist ending that can be seen a mile off.
Pretty redhead Eleonora Brown stars as Lucille, one of a group of sexy young students stalked by a leather-gloved killer at an exclusive girl's school. As the bodies pile up, and the list of possible murderers grows longer, Lucille decides to leave the school in the company of her lover, riding teacher Richard Barrett (Mark Damon)—but even he, it seems, is not above suspicion. However, quite how anyone fails to work out who the killer is from the outset is beyond me: Ms. Clay (Ludmila Lvova), with her weird, androgynous features and masculine voice is so freaky that she might as well wear a T-shirt with 'Murderous Psycho' emblazoned on it, and it comes as no surprise when it is finally revealed that 'she' is actually a 'he', and 'he' is the one who has been bumping off the girls.
On a more positive note, director Antonio Margheriti does his best to please the eyes and ears with his beautiful and stylish photography, a bevy of lovely young ladies, and a wonderfully kitschy 60s soundtrack (which includes a rather cool Bond-style theme song), but in the end, the eye candy and jazzy score are simply not enough to compensate for the uninspired storytelling, absence of intrigue, and of course, the woeful lack of nudity.
Pretty redhead Eleonora Brown stars as Lucille, one of a group of sexy young students stalked by a leather-gloved killer at an exclusive girl's school. As the bodies pile up, and the list of possible murderers grows longer, Lucille decides to leave the school in the company of her lover, riding teacher Richard Barrett (Mark Damon)—but even he, it seems, is not above suspicion. However, quite how anyone fails to work out who the killer is from the outset is beyond me: Ms. Clay (Ludmila Lvova), with her weird, androgynous features and masculine voice is so freaky that she might as well wear a T-shirt with 'Murderous Psycho' emblazoned on it, and it comes as no surprise when it is finally revealed that 'she' is actually a 'he', and 'he' is the one who has been bumping off the girls.
On a more positive note, director Antonio Margheriti does his best to please the eyes and ears with his beautiful and stylish photography, a bevy of lovely young ladies, and a wonderfully kitschy 60s soundtrack (which includes a rather cool Bond-style theme song), but in the end, the eye candy and jazzy score are simply not enough to compensate for the uninspired storytelling, absence of intrigue, and of course, the woeful lack of nudity.