Titled and marketed as a direct sequel to Nothing Underneath in Italy, this film has nothing to do with Carlo Vanzina's film beyond being set in the fashion world, and being terribly, terribly 80s. Is it terribly, terribly bad though?

Sylvia O'Neal is an up-and-coming model in Milan. Her agency boss, Alex, also pimps on the side, and he reluctantly agrees to set Sylvia up with a rich old sleazy dude. The only problem is that he forgot to tell Sylvia about the arrangement, so when the old guy rocks up to a post-shoot hot tub session in Alex's house, her fellow models have to (/choose to) restrain her to allow him to have sex with her. Sylvia flees the house, taking Alex's car, which is later found crashed and burned out, housing an unidentifiable corpse. Using some far-fetched computer wizardry, the police ascertain that the corpse was shot in the head before the crash was staged, suggesting that Sylvia (if the corpse is indeed hers) was murdered. And speaking of murder, someone is doing just that to everyone who was involved in the hot tub rape. Could it be Melanie*, the mysterious American who might know more about Sylvia than she's letting on? Could it be music video director David, who owns some of those transparent, inflatable chairs? Or could it be Sylvia herself, back from the grave to enact her vengeance?

That's actually a tricky question to answer, in a way. In another way, (SPOILERS), it's very easy to answer: the killer is David. However, the fact that Sylvia's body is never formally identified might lead the seasoned giallo aficionado to suspect that she may rear her pretty head at some stage in proceedings. Intending to incorporate this 'twist' would also explain the paucity of suspects, which, once we discount those involved in the rape (and it's easy to do that, as they're mostly dispatched fairly quickly) numbers all of two people, the music video director who was returning from America on the night in question, and the American starlet who arrives in Milan right after the night in question. Suspicion is diverted slightly more towards Melanie, the starlet (she seems to recognise Sylvia's voice on an answerphone message, which is subsequently played to taunt those involved in the murder, and she actually turns out to be the 'dead' girl's sister), which makes David's unveiling as the actual killer somewhat (and I'm being generous there) surprising.

What would be slightly (again, being generous) more surprising would be Syliva ultimately being the killer, which seems to have been the original intention-storyboards of an alternative ending exist which seem to depict her being interrupted just as she's about to kill the last of those responsible for her assault. This would make sense narratively if an explanation could be proffered as to who the shot-and-burned corpse was, which sounds like something easily done, but the details would be quite important-if it was an innocent party who was killed simply for a bait-and-switch, Sylvia becomes a much less sympathetic character. Or, have I got this all wrong, and misindentified the characters in the storyboard sketches-is the detail about the body being difficult to identify a clever double bluff, designed to trick the complacent among us into thinking that we have the film's number, only for it to shock us by revealing that we've overthought things, and the killer is actually one of the obvious suspects? (END SPOILERS)

As was common at the time, there's a serious whack of music video throughout proceedings here. Not alone is there the literal music video (at least, I think that's what it is) which continues to be in production for a bizarrely long time considering the number of deaths among those involved, but pop songs dominate the soundtrack, accompanied by regular glossy, slow motion montages. Whereas the soundtracks of the 1970s gialli often seemed to drive the action on the screen, in films such as this (and Murder Rock, for example) the action grinds to a halt for the musical numbers. There is a score which pops up from time to time as well - I was going to refer to it as an 'original score', but Bernard Herrmann might have something to say about that (if he wasn't dead, poor chap) - and those of you who love synth drones (of whom I'm one) won't go home disappointed, so it's not just wall-to-wall pop. And, to be fair, the calibre of pop act is fairly impressive here (Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Huey Lewis etc).

The expensive soundtrack is almost another stick with which to beat the film, however - there was clearly a bit of money behind this film, in contrast to the straitened circumstances in which many of the great genre directors found themselves in the late 80s - and Dario Piana hasn't made the most of it. There are solid technical credits - the roving steadicam is impressive, if overused, and the slomo is nice-looking, if extremely overused (check out the sequence of the two girls making a bed). There's none of the credulity-defying psychic carry on from Nothing Underneath, although we do get some interesting takes on the functionality of computers - the forensic analysis which discovers the bullet hole in the corpse in the car would have been pure sci-fi in the late 80s, while the porno game (titled 'Porno Game' which Alex plays was actually quite a canny anticpiator of things to come, if some ads I've seen online are to be believed. Overall it's not a terrible film, but it's certainly not a shining example of the filone, much like the majority of 80s gialli. It is, in some ways (and bear with me here), analagous to the ridiculous stalking sequence wherein two cops trail Alex by driving right behind him as he walks to a café, before giving them the slip through the back door. There's a bit of money behind it (cop car with a working radio), and it looks nice (the sequence looks nice - that one's not really an analogy), but ultimately it's a bit too lunking and lacking in imagination (obviously he's going to escape via the back door, you stupid coppers) to really capture our hearts and minds (/Alex). 

I'll let myself out.

*Judging from this and the contemporaneous Faceless, Florence Guerin was very prone to being picked up in nightclubs

This features a surprisingly strong cast for an Alfonso Brescia production, although - reassuringly - the familiar shortcomings are there (just keep an eye on the day/night continuity in the final scene). It's likely that he could only afford the cast (Celi and Leroy especially) by shooting at breakneck speed so as to stretch every lira as far as it could go. It's ironic, therefore, that the film trundles along at whatever the opposite of breakneck speed is, until finally a neck is broken - or at least stabbed - on the 55 minute mark, leading to things picking up somewhat.

After a prologue featuring a WW2 Nazi planting a bomb in a room with a woman and child, an old man with a German name in 'present day' Spain turns up dead just after taking out a million dollar life insurance policy. Not only does he turn up dead, he turns up dead after taking a ghost train ride at a fairground whilst carrying a bag of cash, which has, of course, disappeared. Hotshot insurance investigator Robert Hoffmann is given instructions to find a reason not to pay out on the policy, and he immediately gets to work seducing one of the deceased Nazi's (come on-you'd worked that out, right?) daughters and inveigling an invite to their country pad. There follows dalliances with another daughter, as well as mild flirting with a widow, before things finally get going when said second daughter is killed and left naked in... her front garden.

Even though this is a fairly slow moving film, it actually contains one of the higher villain quotients - there are a huge amount of killers and plotters and stalkers, and as such the film plays like one of Edgar Wallace's less inspired stories. At the same time, the first daughter, Catherine, does get to show some dramatic chops as a character struggling with grief, even if some of the situations which bring on her bouts of sadness are fairly preposterous (why go to the fairground where your dad was murdered on a first date?). 

Brescia is no-one's idea of a top of the range director, but he does make moderately impressive use of the locations here - he clearly had an in with the fairground owners, and the country pile where much of the film takes place is fairly swish, as is, for that matter, the HQ of the insurance company (which may well have been a room in said pile). A couple of nighttime stalking sequences are well done, as is (if you overlook the continuity issues and its first couple of minutes) the fairground climax. There's even a hint of ingenuity and originality in a repeated device whereby characters' faces are deliberately obscured within the frame - obviously this wasn't the first time such a technique had been used in a film, but he employs it in a manner which acts as a précis of the film, ie that it's a murder mystery which presents a series of characters, whose shady motives we have to parse to find an ultimate guilty party.

I should say 'guilty parties', for as noted there are a lot of unscrupulous and murderous folk in the mix here. As such, it's impossible to fully guess what's going on, with most of the murders being committed by a character with no connection to the main narrative 'plot', which leaves us with a bizarre situation whereby those killings actually function as red herrings of sorts. The 'plot' in question is a revenge scheme deriving from the events depicted in the film's black and white (and mismatched stock footage-heavy) prologue. It's one of several gialli which feature Nazi characters (The Bloodstained Shadow and Plot of Fear to name two others), which, along with the then-burgeoning Nazisploitation genre, suggests an attempt by the children of fascists to come to terms with (and monetise) the sins of their fathers, albeit by transplanting the locus of fascism across axis borders to Germany.

Speaking of sins of fathers, Austrian actor Robert Hoffmann's character Chris is possibly the least sympathetic giallo 'hero' ever - he's an 'amateur' sleuth in that he's not a policeman, but his motivation to solve the case is derived from his job as an insurance adjuster. He shags his girlfriend's sister and snogs her mother when she's battling some pretty heavy mental health issues (as well as being stalked by Leiland Palmer off Twin Peaks), and he's also a peeping tom (although this trait was likely included merely to justify the depiction of a tryst between two marginal characters). And that's not even the half of it...

The film does pick up steam towards the end, and overall isn't a terrible watch (although if, like me, you watch it on the Full Moon Blu then be prepared to do some serious aural straining). The narrative contains so many little twists and shimmies towards the end that it can't really resolve itself in an overly-satisfactory manner, and the lack of screen time afforded the better actors (which is, as I noted, probably the most screen time that could be afforded) can be frustrating. It also contains quite a lot less sex than you're probably expecting, but on the other hand it contains a surprising amount of smashed glass, so swings and roundabouts.*

IF YOU are an insurance company, apparently you're not liable for a life insurance policy if [SPOILERS] you sell someone a policy and then murder them.

Also, IF YOU are an Italian driver in the 1970s, as neatly demonstrated in the tailing sequence here which was clearly shot among real traffic, road markings are, at best, a vague hint.

*I wrote this review during the Covid-19 lockdown,  and am posting it almost 3 years later, so I can't remember if that sign off makes sense, and refers archly to something about the film, or if it merely represents the blathering of a stir-crazed mind.