To see Donald Pleasence eat sketti off a Wendy’s salad bar in Milan, you simply must see Carlo Vanzina’s Nothing Underneath.
Other reasons exist in favor of loaning your eyeballs to this bizarro giallo, in which Yellowstone National Park ranger Bob (Tom Schanley, Eruption: LA) senses — thanks to a psychic twin link — that his supermodel sister (Nicola Perring, Duet for One) is in big trouble in Italy. Bob’s not wrong; his sis has just been brutally murdered with an oversized pair of scissors! Naturally, she’s hardly the last victim, which further drives his amateur investigation once he lands in Europe to find out what’s what, aided by Pleasence’s kindly police inspector.
The inevitability of the “twist” is redeemed by the bug-nuts circumstances surrounding it. From top to bottom, Vanzina stirs up quite the ’80s buffet, offering not just lurid thrills, but cocaine, Lycra, Magnum P.I., cocaine, cocaine, “One Night in Bangkok,” Russian roulette and Danish dish Renée Simonsen. Plus, Pino Donaggio’s Body Double retread score auto-grants the film a wonderfully perverse mood it otherwise would fail to achieve throughout.
Nothing Underneath’s killer concept was back — even if Vanzina wasn’t — for 1988’s inferior sequel, Too Beautiful to Die — an obvious misnomer considering the whole movie is about models biting it. Despite the implement of doom being upgraded to a weapon from Conan the Barbarian’s closet, the movie virtually the same, Xeroxing everything from the broken glass to the frilly-undies montage. —Rod Lott