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

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Remember when you could sexually harass female co-workers and openly read porno mags in the workplace without fear of punishment? Apparently it was the same time the Big Three networks churned out some decent genre movies made for prime-time household consumption — specifically, 1984, when Calendar Girl Murders debuted on ABC.

This telepic’s Hugh Hefner, Paradise magazine owner Richard Trainor (Robert Culp, then on the back half of The Greatest American Hero’s run), has a special way to spotlight the dozen lovely ladies posing nude for the coming year: a television special … hosted in part by that icon of testosterone, comedian Rip Taylor. Unfortunately for Trainor, someone else has a different special way to spotlight them: homicide! Miss January is shoved off a hotel balcony; Miss February (Claudia Christian, Half Past Dead) is stabbed while raiding the fridge.

Assigned to the case is midlife-crisis cop Lt. Stoner (Tom Skerritt, Alien), much to the chagrin of his “meh” wife (Barbara Bosson, The Last Starfighter) and the delight of his masturbating teen son (Jonathan Aluzas, Monster in the Closet).

A tip on a photographer who gives the girls the heebie-jeebies leads Stoner to interview former Paradise Angel of the Year Cassie Bascomb (Sharon Stone), and somehow, that creepy shutterbug is not the one played here by Alan Thicke. In a preview of the beautiful Stone’s Basic Instinct breakthrough to come in eight years’ time, Bascomb and Stoner embark in a YMCA-shower-steamy affair while bodies keep turning up. Somehow, one girl manages to be drowned in a busy pool at one of Trainor’s legendary parties. (Then again, with the night containing both an impromptu breakdance and Culp in a Speedo, that’s a shitload of diversion.)

So whodunit? Exactly whom you’ll expect. As predictable as that ending may be, the culprit’s motive is a truly histrionic howler of mid-’80s pop psychology. In the hypothetic hands of, say, Dario Argento, something titled Calendar Girl Murders could be something really special by being really sleazy; in the actual hands of TVM vet William A. Graham (Shark Kill), however, it’s hardly titillating. With Calendar Girl Murders being a Sunday-night movie, its centerfolds — er, calendar girls — sport the most demure one-piece swimsuits and leotards a Sunday-night movie could get away with immediately following an ep of Hardcastle and McCormick. —Rod Lott

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Puzzle’s title refers to the amnesia of Peter (Luc Merenda, Shoot First… Die Later), a man who recalls nothing about himself eight months after a car accident. Shortly after the film begins, he’s fortunate enough to learn that he:
• has a wife named Sara (the splendiferous Senta Berger, Killing Cars)
• was a con artist who pissed off a lot of people
• is in possession of something for which said people are willing to kill

But whom and what? The movie’s very name clues viewers in that the best way to experience Puzzle is to go in knowing as little as possible, so you can investigate as much as Peter. To encourage that, I’ll reveal no further plot. Besides, you already know Chekov’s principle that if a chainsaw is left carelessly on the kitchen table in Act 1, it’s going to come in handy in Act 3, right?

Hitchcockian on paper, Puzzle comes well-constructed by co-writer Ernesto Gastaldi, who’s penned more great gialli than you have fingers, including Torso, All the Colors of the Dark, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, et al. If the screenplay can be faulted for anything, it’s that having so few characters makes the perp obvious sooner than director Duccio Tessari (The Bloodstained Butterfly) may have liked. Still, the film’s best sequence arrives after the reveal, with suspense simmering toward a strong boil as three separate elements in a room rather ingeniously threaten to place Sara in mortal danger. Tessari pays it off with intense slow-motion shots that make up for questionable close-ups of mouths (complete with crumbs on lips) early on.

Co-stars include Anita Strindberg (Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin); Bruno Corazzari (Fulci’s The Psychic), whose allergy-ridden character dispenses Kleenex as he does story points; and child Duilio Cruciani (Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling). As usual with the giallo, the setting is so magnificent, Puzzle appears to have been made with the assistance of Italy’s tourism council. —Rod Lott

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Ace adventurer Calvin Lockhart is aiming to trap and destroy the most dangerous creature known to man: a large man-dog responsible for numerous killings around Europe in the intriguing werewolf mystery The Beast Must Die.

In a remote countryside lair, Lockhart has invited the most interesting of British society for a weekend at his mansion including Peter Cushing, Charles Gray and Michael Gambon. His plan, however, is to use his many modern-day computer devices — modern for 1974, of course — to suss out who the beast that must die is.

An interesting take on the beloved British mystery, horror studio Amicus took time off from its typical anthology films to make this atypical werewolf flick, their final horror film most notable for casting Lockhart — then a solid name from Cotton Comes to Harlem — as the lead, a proto-Blade, supernatural stalker who should have really had his own series of beast-killing movies.

But what The Beast Must Die is probably remembered best for is the supremely silly “Werewolf Break,” wherein a ticking clock with pictures of the cast is shown on the screen as the audience is given 30 seconds to figure out who the beast that must die is. I guessed wrong and I’m sure you will, too. —Louis Fowler

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I’m old enough to remember the fear of AIDS that gripped America — so irrationally hysterical that when Rock Hudson’s HIV-positive status became public, headlines worried whether Linda Evans was next, given the two shared a kiss on an episode of Dynasty. It was a different time — one in which your parents and teachers told you not to utilize public fountains or toilet seats, lest you catch “the gay cancer,” too.

From this frenzied climate a year later emerged City in Panic, a bargain-basement Canadian whodunit originally titled The AIDS Murders until someone realized naming a mystery after its solution maybe wasn’t the wisest of choices.

Also not a great idea: Having your protagonist be a preening cad. FM101 talk-show host Dave Miller (David Adamson, Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman) pretentiously yammers on and on with callers about the string of serial murders plaguing Toronto. Curiously, freshman director Robert Bouvier (Avenging Warriors) moves the camera moves around Dave just as Oliver Stone’s would do to Eric Bogosian two years later in Talk Radio. Whereas Talk Radio crackled with electricity, City in Panic is a weak joy buzzer.

As Dave spouts his tired rants on air (“Bullshit has no conscience!”), he smokes, plays darts, reads comics and toys around with RC cars and robots — each endearing him even less to us, the viewers. We’re stuck with him, just as he’s stuck with his journalistic nemesis, a Truman Capote-esque gossip columnist (one-timer Peter Roberts). You’ll wish Bouvier would spend more time with the murderer, dubbed by the press as “M” for leaving that letter carved into victims’ skin. With dark sunglasses and a buttoned-up trenchcoat, “M” looks not unlike the darker half of Spy vs. Spy and definitely has a type; see if you can figure it out from these dead people:
• a male bodybuilder
• a banana-hammock stripper
• a guy who patronizes public steam baths
• a security guard who sticks his dick through a bathroom-stall glory hole

Yes, you’re on the right track. In offensiveness, City in Panic doesn’t even approach William Friedkin’s Cruising, but its easily guessed twist and shot-for-shot recreation of Psycho’s legendary shower scene help ensure it’s not going to be crowned Mr. Congeniality, either. Cheaper-looking than the similarly plotted Massage Parlor Murders!, the movie sounds even worse, with music overpowering dialogue as if everything were recorded on one track, which is likely the case. That flatness fits the single dimension exhibited by the actors.

FM101’s chipper receptionist may put it best: “Weird show, Dave.” —Rod Lott

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