Naked Girl Killed in Park

There's no doubt Naked Girl Killed in Park / Ragazza tutta nuda assassinata nel parco is a great exploitation title. But the problem, as we all know, is that it's easy to come up with a title, a lot harder to make a film that lives up to it. And, alas, this is something of a case in point. For while director Al Brescia does at least deliver the promised naked girl killed in park – though not, it should be emphasised, the actual crime – and memorable opening and closing sequences set against the backdrop of the an amusement park, much of what occurs they bookend is of the 'old when old was young' variety, such as a mute, muscular handyman (Howard Ross) upon whom suspicion inevitably falls and a beautiful but neurotic young woman with a Les Diaboliques style heart condition (Pilar Velasquez).

The story opens with wealthy businessman Johan Wallenberger emerging dead from a ghost train at Madrid's Luna Park. Two questions emerge: what was he doing there, and why did he have to die just hours after taking out a $1 million insurance policy?

Hoping that the former will answer the latter and prove foul play, the insurance company calls in cocky young investigator Chris Buyer (Robert Hoffmann). Introduced to one of Wallenberger's daughters, Catherine, at a party – she has just, not coincidentally, been the recipient of a threatening telephone call and soon thereafter being terrorised in her house – the investigation soon leads the couple to the family's home, complete with Catherine's equally beautiful and suspect sister and their not unattractive, recently widowed mother. (If you do the math, looking at the actresses birthdates, the latter would have had to have been around ten years old when she had her first daughter.)

The case gets increasingly complicated from here on in, with blackmail, intrigues and double-crosses leading to a few instances of killing as the ultimate simplification of life…

Besides the odd subjective camera stalking scene and a few moments of gratuitous nudity and violence, Naked Girl Killed in the Park is a pretty old fashioned film, whose sensibilities seem more rooted in 1940s noir than 1970s giallo, eschewing Argento-style psychosexual motifs/motives for good old-fashioned avarice.

Whether this floats your boat or not – personally I found it worth a look in a completist sense, but neither especially memorable or worth ever revisiting – the film certainly deserves a better treatment than the one I saw, taken from an old VHS and with some especially bad panning and scanning that conveyed little sense of composition within the frame and instead injected a touch of the avant-garde into proceedings through a prevalence of mismatched shots and ones that focused on the space between two characters, relegating them to the periphery of the frame.