Giallo Movie Reviews: Naked Girl Murdered in the Park

It’s remarkable that I’m only discovering a movie with a title like Naked Girl Murdered in the Park. Chris Buyer (Robert Hoffman) is hired to investigate the murder of a man killed hours after having filed for a one-million-dollar insurance policy. Buyer infiltrates the dead man’s family to uncover family secrets and perhaps even discover a killer amongst them. Here, he becomes entangled in a web of lust and mystery among the women. The suspect list is varied as well as the red herrings which will keep you guessing until the very end. The opening of the film is seemingly out of place but, rest assured, it is. vital to the plot and its. inclusion into the film will make sense later in the film although by the time it is revealed you may have forgotten about it.

Buyer catches the attention of the murdered man’s daughter, Catherine (Pilar Velazquez) who is receiving calls from a mysterious man taunting her about her father’s death while also being stalked and watched. Her paranoia is on high alert and depends heavily on Chris to stand by and protect her when they become romantically involved with one another. Unfortunately, her role is downgraded when she and Chris visit her family in the countryside and her character is pushed to the side to give the other characters the limelight including the drunken mourning widow Irina (Irina Demick), her seductress sister Barbara (Patrizia Adiutori), and the mute, yet menacing, stable “boy” Gunther (Howard Ross) who, no doubt, seemingly has ulterior motives.

Naked Girl Murdered in the Park is what I would consider a low-key Giallo movie. It is one that I have not heard of before, so I knew nothing about it or what to expect. The title is rather misleading, and I expected this film to be a sleaze-fest but Naked Girl Murdered in the Park was a slow burn, some might say a very slow burn with a lot of mystery and not a lot of “action” happening. The film Naked Girl Murdered in the Park, released in 1972, surprised many by not adapting many of the Giallo tropes, despite being just two years after the release of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

Although Naked Girl Murdered in the Park is a slow burn, I found its charm and intimacy intriguing, along with the mystery surrounding the killer. I couldn’t guess who the killer was, which I really appreciated, I was pleasantly surprised when the revelation happened. Sure, there are many flaws to the film, such as the pacing of the film and the core of the narrative to get moving as it took its time. Other things about the movie that I could not get past were that there were still questions, I felt, about some of the occurrences that were not made clear and left me pondering. Still, I enjoyed the film despite its shortcomings. I will admit, though, that the title is the best thing for the movie.