Naked Fear

"Rated R for terror and violence, nudity throughout" - perfect line for your average snuff movie.

Yet, this movie has a bit more quality. The nudity is non-pornographic. The sexuality shown is sometimes erotic, but not perverse.

The plot: Sadistic killer versus innocent, naive, girl. Seen often before.

After the first 10 minutes I thought of giving this a 4 out of 10 or less, for its stereotypes, standard patterns of story development and rather bad acting and camera work. But as the story developed, it actually became an entertaining movie. I thought the naive girl was believable in her actions, and somehow the camera and sound work seemed to improve as well. Even the nudity was fitting in without being exploiting.

I try to avoid spoilers in the first comment for this movie, so I just try give you an idea of what you might like about it: You don't have to turn away every other scene thinking: wow, this is stupid, why in world would he/she do that? Meaning it's mostly believable. And it's not explicit - meaning that even thought this movie contains cruelty, it does not show it off with lots of gore. It's quite subtle at it.

It's still your basic thriller with some mild horror elements mixed in. No greatness in the dialogues or in the action scenes (well, the ending line it great). I found it enjoyable, only the acting of the supporting cast and the sound sometimes irritated me. I'd recommend this to anyone wanting to see a not-too-violent thriller with some depth and a few surprises.

I suspect some might question my reasons for liking this movie, but I actually liked it a lot. While movies on terror nowadays seem to involve gore and torture, this one is more mental. Oh yes, the title does say naked fear and it does involve nudity, but for me the real horror here is where it should be - a mental thing. I do think for many of us perhaps the most frightening thing is for us to be vulnerable and scared - even more so than the events themselves that scare us. And what could make one more vulnerable than to be naked, alone, and fearing someone out to kill you? If you can identify at all with this actress, you might come away with something of real horror and true fear - and yet have that fear without the chainsaws and other items of gore so frequent nowadays. It would be wrong to say what happens, but I do think the plot developed well and led to a story that I felt perhaps was more believable than some who rated this movie. And maybe since this is situational mental horror, the movie just might stay in our minds more than the simplistic slasher movies.

In the intro we see a naked woman out in the fields while a stranger shoots at her. He's hunting her like an animal.

The lovely Diana arrives in a small New Mexico border town for a job. Little does she know it's to be a stripper. She has no money and is now indebted to the "talent agency manager". She has to share a room with a fellow stripper who's also a prostitute at night and a junkie.

Parallel to this story we meet the local law enforcement, the corrupt Sheriff and his hunting buddies, as well as the new deputy who arrived from LA. The local cops are corrupt and the new guy is not quite used to that.

Diana's salary as a stripper doesn't really amount to much. Junkie stripper tells her all the ways she can make more money- take off more clothes, interact with patrons, and offer other services. At first Diana isn't interested but she needs the money so she gives it a try. It yields her more money and the night she meets a patron and drives away with him she ends up changing her mind about offering him other services. But he won't have none of it. He ends up kidnapping her.

Next, she wakes up out in the desert nude...as prey for our hunter. He gives her a 15 minute head start. He catches up with her but he likes a challenge so he doesn't make it that easy for himself. And Diana, is also a bright girl. She tricks him and escapes from him repeatedly, bloody and bruised. Eventually she gets the upper hand and runs into a family camping, the dad and his two teenage sons, who are stunned to see a mostly naked girl who now is in shock. Dad does the right thing and leaves to get help. But the hunter isn't done yet. Nor is Diana.

Naked Fear is an excellent movie for what it is- a well-done B movie with a great story and good acting. Of course seeing the lovely Danielle De Luca run around naked for a good while doesn't hurt a bit. Her performance overall is remarkable, downright award-worthy, given what she has to go through. It obviously suffers from B-movie weaknesses- low budget, not so good acting by secondary characters, an unpolished look indoors, etc. It's a tad bit too long, certain things could have been cut out or shortened. At the same time another victim should have been added, just to make our villain more despicable.

The movie succeeds at presenting the hardships of small town life and the risks of trying to make it elsewhere pretty well. And it does so without being condescending and offensive. You do end up empathizing with the main character. The movie is never exploitative but manages to humanize our characters and give the story a lot of meaning. Naked Fear is admirable for the risks the filmmakers took and how they managed to deliver their vision perhaps without compromise.

Its been a long time that there has been an effort to re create the genre of Exploitation. The main stream is busy at making films from cartoons, comics and books.

real creativity of art is lacking these days. This movie could be have much better, but at least some one dared to make it, so my hats off to director. But more than that, it is the actress who has done a worth-looking role. Running around naked for around 30 minutes of the movie length is not an easy job.

So, salute to bravery.

The good part is that there is sex or profanity in the movie and can be watched any where and any time. The nudity is tasteful and at one time, you are more interested in what is happening next and not what is in front of you.

I just wish that other actors could have done a better job.

Now, question is. Will there be more movies like this or not?

I seldom watch horror movies - natural disasters such as volcanoes, tisuni, hurricanes or earthquakes, together with violent crimes, serial killers and terrorist suicide bombers, provide enough real horror to make any fictional additions redundant. This leaves me no time for films about aliens, imaginary new diseases, and monsters from the deep or the swamp. Once I would have included many films featuring man's inhumanity to man in this no-no category, and some friends felt I was squeamish in my movie selections. This changed when Cecil DeMille's "The Sign of the Cross" was again released after many years on the forbidden list. Although the scenes from the Roman Arena may be tame by the standards of modern horror films with their digital sequences of human bodies exploding into pieces, this film involved the viewer in the lives of the characters in a way that only a few Directors still can today and I reacted with abhorrence. Later I realized DeMille was reminding us how little human nature had changed over the past millennium. Historically speaking most people today live in a very stable society and only by remaining continually cognisant of the depths to which the human ego can drive our behaviour can we hope for this to continue. Roman civilization was a long lasting stable society in which citizens lived in relative security under the rule of law. Romans came to appreciate that in order to maintain this it was necessary for every citizen to be aware of the sheer horror of the alternative, and this need was met by gradual evolution of public entertainment in the Arena from poetry readings to barbaric exhibitions of violence. For us today horror films in movie theatres serve the same purpose as the gladiatorial contests of the Roman Arena.

So much for psychology, discussed here only to help differentiate between horror and sleaze in our entertainment. If you enjoy good sleaze it is irrelevant and unhelpful - this was written for the many reviewers who have condemned Naked Fear for being downright sleazy, which it is not. It is the story of a girl who is raped by a madman and then set loose naked in a forest knowing that she has a 15min head start after which he hunts her down for "sport", and shoots her before she can tell the police. Films about people being hunted in this way go back a very long time but "The Most Dangerous Game", filmed concurrently with the original King Kong over 70 years ago, is still far the best (see my review in this database). I well remember the sense of shock and horror I felt when I first saw it. It had very well controlled changes in pace, well rounded characters - not just cardboard cutouts - and many carefully planned details, even down to the knocker on the door of the villain's home. By comparison, the many remakes have all been relatively crude. Of them, Naked Fear, released in 2007, is probably the best. It is based on the story of Robert Hansen, an Alaskan who raped and hunted 15 girl strippers in this way before he was caught. There are always a few men who use the services of prostitutes, but still feel they are so disgusting that the girls should be killed. Making us aware of how far a hypocritical attitude towards violence to prostitutes has permeated into our society was one of the objectives of this film, and there is no reason for calling it a sleazy remake of TMDG just because the victim was a girl who was stripped before she was hunted. This not only provides a link to real events, greatly increasing its sense of reality, but also adds to the horror viewers feel when they see the totally unprotected victim being released into a forest replete with sharp twigs, thorny shrubs, and dangerous wildlife. I doubt if any viewer can watch it without sensing how impossible it would be to flee effectively under such a handicap. No doubt Danielle de Luca was provided with some sort of stick on soles for her feet during the filming, but she was still very brave to accept such a role and I greatly admire her for doing so.

Although a few badly lit night sequences leave the viewer guessing, the quality of this film comes closer to that of TMDG than most (if not all) of the other remakes released over the years, with its powerful final sequence effectively showing the deranging impact such encounters have on any victims who survive. The introductory sequences are long enough to give depth to the characters, and the actual hunt sequences are not overextended lasting about 20min with Diana clothed again and, perhaps more important, something round her feet for the last five of them. But at 108min overall this film remains too long, and does not maintain the tension achieved by TMDG which had the tautness of a 63min film. Its ending was overlong, overdark and overdrawn - the main climax was the scene on the rocks, the remainder was probably designed to fend off sexploitation charges. Overall I rate it at a solid six.and recommend it to everyone who enjoys horror films - particularly anyone believing these films require mythical monsters and or supernatural events to create real horror.

One may hope films dragging such subject matter out from under the curtain of obscurity may make it much less likely that characters such as Robert Picton (believed to have fed the bodies of more than 20 girls he killed to the pigs on his farm) can operate for so long before their atrocities are revealed.