Né pour l'enfer

An earnestly crafted psycho thriller infused with a bit more constancy and seriousness than the median example of its type. Making it especially unsettling is the factual bedrock which underlies the grim story...this is most certainly a laundered elucidation of Richard Speck's notorious killing spree, to at least some degree of accuracy.

A communal household of young nurses in Ireland becomes a hellhole of horror when they are collectively besieged by a criminally disunited male youth, a recent veteran of the war in Vietnam.. His deep-seated anti-female resentments ignite with a flicker, and gradually escalate to a firestorm...the ensuing terror, torture, and death are gruesomely depicted with a straightforward, blank-faced directness that sensitive viewers might find disagreeable. Those of a tougher skin, however, may appreciate NAKED MASSACRE for its surprising testicular brass...a rattling nightmare to challenge the viewer's emotional acumen. Gritty, grievous, and plegmatic, this film is certainly not without its flaws, but it does answer loud and clear to its grim calling.

6/10

This could have been some sort of "Taxi Driver". Could, if they just could have pulled it along with Scorcese's skills. After all, low-budgeter "Taxi Driver" had all it took to make an exploitation movie. This one has the gritty realism, the context (Visions of some overall violent world from Ireland to Vietnam, even more relevant nowadays), the disturbing elements… But does not seem to know what to do with them. We had an understanding of what Travis Bickle was up to, even if we were not in his head, we had enough to go with and sympathize (just like in real life actually), which makes even the botched attack on a political candidate an anti-anticlimax. Here, despite Mathieu Carrière's excellent acting, we have only disjointed things : he's a Vietnam vet, his wife cheated on him, he might be impotent and might have a death wish (though his actions denies it). How did it all comes together in one long, violent episode is anyone's guess. M. Carrière manages to keep the character's desperation obvious, but to what end ? It's not really a chain of events that leads him to his horrific deeds. The cheesy dialogue does not really helps, like a reference to lesbianism, fortunately without any moral tut-tutting, that leads nowhere. The whole things feels just like an experience in exploitation with some hints at social comment, or the other way around, if you feel so inclined. It's not bad, but it's one movie that could have been so much better if its various interesting elements have gelled into something coherent.

I sometimes question the motivations of a director who chooses subject matter such as this as material for a film. There is such a sadistic vent to this that it has kept me thinking for days. This is obviously a retelling of the Richard Speck story where a psychotic ex-Vietnam vet terrorizes and kills a group of nurses in a residential house in Northern Ireland. The movie is pretty well done in that it gets us involved with the women and with their assailant. They are real people with prospects; one is even pregnant. I think that's why this so affected me because when you see those teenage slasher movies you say to yourself that no one could be so stupid. The violence is amplified and unrealistic. This one is so close to home. The business of why people don't defend themselves is an issue, but when you see the connection to terror and to humanity, you see why this could happen. Still, I could never watch this again and I'm not sure it needed telling.

"Naked Massacre" is pretty strong stuff; a disturbing thriller definitely NOT for squeamish or faint-hearted people! It's not that gory or exaggeratedly sleazy, like the two key words of the title lead you to believe, but it's truly intense and filmed in such a sober way that you'll feel VERY uncomfortable. The story is something like Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians", only in this case it's Eight Pretty Nurses. Actually, that's not funny since this movie is inspired by the murders committed by real-life madman Richard Speck in 1966; Chicago. The setting of this notorious case has been moved, very ingeniously I may add, to Ireland in the mid-70's, when there was the post-Vietnam depression as well as the Irish civil war and bombings. On his way home from Vietnam, a young American soldier ends up in Belfast with no money or acquaintances. He's traumatized, has a very nihilistic world perspective and a petrifying hatred for women. It doesn't take long before he breaks into a mansion and starts terrorizing the eight young nurses that live there. "Naked Massacre" is obviously cheap and poorly edited, yet the atmosphere is constantly grim and the murders are genuinely shocking. The girls are physically abused, emotionally tortured and eventually stabbed to death with a BIG knife. There are no morals, comic reliefs or happy endings here, so only people with an iron stomach will be able to sit through this movie without suffering from nightmares afterwards. The acting performances are pretty decent, despite some of the dialogs being extremely inept and cheesy. Highly recommended in case you're searching for a horror/thriller that will really get under your skin.

Even though the Richard Speck student-nurse murders took place in America, most of the movies inspired by the incident strangely enough were foreign. These include the disturbing Japanese film "Violated Angels", the relatively shocking ending to the ho-hum Italian giallo/sex romp "Slaughter Hotel", and perhaps to some extent even the Canadian proto-slasher flick "Black Christmas". This movie, however, is probably the closest in circumstances to the actual incident. Not that it doesn't make some unusual choices, especially for what is basically an exploitation film. It's set in Belfast, North Ireland, for instance, during the height of "the troubles" when bombs were exploding and Catholics, Protestants, IRA terrorists and British troops were fighting in the streets. Also, the murderer (played by Mathieu Carrare)is an American Vietnam vet where the real Speck was merely a merchant marine. The movie doesn't do much with this though as the Speck character seems far more motivated by his wife's infidelities than any trauma he suffered in Vietnam, and any on-location realism that is achieved is ruined by the bad dubbing (the Irish and English nurses and American killer all speak in the same stilted continental accents of the usual gang of Euro-idiots that dubbed these things).

The movie was distributed mostly under the more lurid title "Naked Massace", and after a strangely large amount of character development of both the nurses and the killer, it lives up to that title when they finally meet and he ties them up and starts bumping them off one by one. The real-life Speck only raped one of the nurses (although far more graphically than what is shown here), but the guy here sexually abuses nearly all of them (one of whom, perhaps in a nod to Sharon Tate, is even pregnant). The most lurid scene is when he forces two closeted lesbians to have sex with each other. Although, it's hard to do such a scene sensitively, this scene is handled even less sensitively than the similar scene in the much more infamous "Last House on the Left".

The director, Denis Heroux, interesting enough, is French Canadian and got his start in superior "maple syrup porn" films like "Valerie" and "L'Initiation" but had his career ended when he was made the scapegoat for the failure of hack British producer Milton Subotsky's idiotic horror movie "The Uncanny". This film, made in the middle of his short career, shows an interesting but obviously declining talent. The cast includes Carol Laure and pretty Italian starlet Ely Galeani. I got this as part of a cheap 50 DVD horror collection. If you can find THAT, it's definitely worth watching. Otherwise, well. . .