For nearly an hour of its hour, The Beautiful, the Bloody, and the Bare consists of a naked woman being drawn or photographed for artistic purposes. How does the narrator make that interesting? Beats me, because he doesn’t. Director and writer Sande N. Johnsen (Teenage Gang Debs) doesn’t seem to know, either, although he tries by inserting props like guitars, beach balls, African ritual masks — you know, the usual. At least the constant jazz music’s hep!
The narrator of this New Yawk story, Leo (Tom Signorelli of Michael Mann’s Thief), is an artist who convinces his buddy Pete (Jack Lowe, Johnsen’s The Twisted Sex) to put his heavy-haired arms to good use as a nudie shutterbug. Although visually the type of guy who says, “Now look here, lady” three times a day with incontestable derision, Pete agrees.
All goes fine for a while — a long, long while to the viewer — as Pete takes pictures of so many undressed dames with such varied shapes and slopes of breasts, you could CLEP out of freshmen geometry. Then Pete’s aversion to the color red rears its fangs. From a model’s fiery hair to another’s freshly coated fingernails, each appearance of the crimson makes him go wonky, resulting in one of cinema’s greatest worst reaction shots as Pete’s struck speechless for a full 10 seconds! By the time yet another model cuts her finger, Pete acts like he’s just been told he has a dead mother, tummy cancer and a disappearing penis.
So Johnsen can justify the Bloody portion of the title, Pete starts murdering the gals. It’s similar to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Color Me Blood Red, but a year earlier and really, really boring. Exception: the end’s rooftop chase and Pete’s final freakout, in which he slathers himself up like the Peanut Butter Baby. The production is so cheap, city streets and walls play home to painted and markered credits, far outlasting this nudie cutie’s run. —Rod Lott