321. Naked Massacre

321. Naked Massacre aka Die Hinrichtung (1976)
Director: Denis Héroux
Writers: F.G. Ranger with contributions from Denis Héroux and Clenn Wood
From: Chilling (only 2 remain!)

A man breaks into a boarding house full of nurses, gathers them together, and gradually tortures each of them to death before escaping.

Nope. That’s literally all that happens. Torture, rape, death. One woman survives by hiding under the bed all night. The killer hangs around town a bit, reporters ask questions of passersby, and the killer gives away all the things he stole. A cop guarding the house feeds the women’s cat and watches the news reporting on all kinds of violence throughout the world, implying that they’re all related. The killer tries to commit suicide by slitting his wrist, but fails. The doctor cleaning him up realizes who he is. THE END

I can be glib about some of these movies, especially when they offend my politics (Pink Angels) or enter this area of torture porn. In my defense, there’s rarely anything more to these movies than my glibness.

I watched this movie well over a decade ago when I was trying to go through all the movies on the Chilling collection in sequence. In fact, I was visiting a friend and let them pick the movie. We decided on this one because of its salacious title thinking it would be laughably titillating. Instead, it’s really dull and relies upon your enjoyment of random women getting hurt. They aren’t characters, they aren’t particularized, and their deaths don’t mean anything. In the end, there’s no story here, just suffering, and I can’t even tell you that the suffering is inventive or novel. Watching it didn’t make me feel ashamed or angry, just empty.

And somehow, as of this writing, this holds a 5.1/10 on IMDB. That means, community-wide, this is ranked higher than nearly every other film in the Misery Mill.

As with all of these “oh, does it offend you?” flicks, it’s boring. The movie is about a massacre, but it takes over thirty minutes for him to get into the house. In the interim, he stops a sex worker from being attacked, but gives all her money to her attackers. Then he goes home with her, menaces her, and leaves. We also get drips and drops of his past and the general situation—Belfast, Vietnam, etc. It’s not implied, but explicitly stated that things could have been prevented if only other choices had been made. Not his, his choices don’t seem to come up for criticism. Instead it’s the irony of a barkeep not taking his knife as payment or, later, calling the cops as a drunk yells in the street. Oh, if only things had been different these women would have been saved.

In other words, it’s not the murderer’s fault, it’s the culture and the women. All the women. Cause they’re all whores who deserve what they get.

By the way, after the murders, the women’s purity and lifestyle is brought up.

So, yeah. Fuck this movie and don’t bother looking for it.