Director – Alfonso Brescia (Iron Warrior, Star Odyssey)
Starring – Robert Hoffmann (A Black Veil for Lisa, The Lonely Violent Beach), Irina Demick (The Longest Day, Tragic Ceremony), and Pilar Velazquez (Novela, Thunder Over El Paso)
Release Date – 1972
Rating – 1/5
Blu Release – 2/5
A few weeks ago I was looking at the Full Moon Features site when I saw they an upcoming release for the 1972 giallo Naked Girl Murdered in the Park. I was not familiar with this one so I reached out to them about it. The film wasn’t available just yet but Chris Alexander requested me a review copy to check out. Most of you may have noticed the giallo kick I’ve been on since last October so I was extremely excited to give this one a spin. I want to thank Chris, Bob, and Full Moon for sending this one my way to check out.
**Spoiler Alert** The begins with the murder of a wealthy man the day after he takes out a million dollar life insurance policy. The insurance firm finds this very suspicious so they send out a detective to look into the death. The family is receiving strange phone calls and soon the man’s oldest daughter is found murdered in the park. **Spoiler Alert**
I went into this one extremely excited but after about 15 minutes or so I found myself bored out of my mind. The movie doesn’t fit into any real genre and feels like a made for television movie with some audio issues. I’ve watched some pretty low brow gialli over the years but this one was one of the dullest and poorly put together I’ve seen in awhile.
The acting in this one is just as dull as the story. The cast is extremely unenthused and have no energy at all. Even the scenes that require the smallest amount of energy just feels slow and drab. The story for this one is a murder mystery crime drama that is almost paint by numbers. The “twists” you can see coming from a mile away and the length between the murders is so far apart that you are stuck with almost an hour of scenes between the detective and the murdered man’s daughter doing very little to move to story along. I don’t know much about the history of this film or any of the behind the scenes going ons but I feel like this movie was intended to be something else and then edited differently in post. I couldn’t imagine someone went into this with the intent to make the movie the way it was released.
Finally, the kills in this one are off screen and boring as hell. They are approached in a manner you would expect death scenes would be handled in a made for television movie from the early 70s. A little spot of blood and that’s the extent of it. Overall, Naked Girl Murdered in the Park was a huge let down. I respect Full Moon and if you look at my other reviews you will see that I am a huge fan but this is one I cannot recommend. The blu doesn’t look bad but is close to DVD quality and the film suffers from audio glitches throughout the running time of the film. I stopped counting around 5 when the audio would dull or change in tone. Skip it.
Special Features
Uncut
Restored from Original Camera Negative
