kolobos strip nude

A fresh-out-of-film-school production, Kolobos (1999) certainly wasn't the launching pad it cast and crew expected it to be. But its early skewering of MTV's Real World clichés and pre-torture porn slashers like Saw make it a bit more worthwhile for forgiving lovers of the genre. There are plenty of clever homages to Italian horror, but you have to be willing to put up with roommates with weak back stories and bad acting habits to get there.

Responding to an ad for participants to shack up in a fully-wired rental home and allow their daily lives to be recorded 24/7, five ambitious 20-somethings wind up under lockdown with a serial killer who has rigged up laser-beam deathtraps throughout the property. The weakest link seems to be Kyra (Amy Weber, now best known as a WWE diva!) whose visions of a mutilated madman make the rest of the group suspect she's partly to blame. But as the finger-pointing increases so does the body count and it's likely they all will wind up "cut" from the show.

Kicking off with an Argento-inspired montage set to familiar Goblin music cues, its clear that co-directors Daniel Liatowitsch and David Todd Ocvirk's agenda involves paying tribute to the work that inspired them. And Kolobos' death scenes are definite highlights; the film becomes much more interesting when the focus is on the camera not the characters. Classic kills from Deep Red and Zombie are recreated with a lush (and completely unrealistic) color palatte that no fan of Italian horror could miss while the music score pumps out an accompanying greatest hits of cues from Suspiria and The Shining.

But, as they say in the real estate game, location is everything; and Kolobos' cut rate suburban home setting is about as visually interesting as a model home. The actors give their all but are obviously still learning their craft. It all adds up to an endearing effort that, I'm sure, plays great at cast reunion parties, but is a bit too underdeveloped for major motion picture status.

Arrow Video's Blu-ray special edition contains a brand-new 2K restoration and a copious amount extras includes a Making Of, interviews, shorts and collector's booklet.

In exploitation movies, a good title probably puts more butts in the seats than the finished product ever will. So behold the power of Strip Nude for Your Killer, a title that could apply to most of the slasher flicks released from 1978 to present. But the Italians got there first with this 1975 giallo – a genre of spaghetti thrillers whose main ingredients are sex, blood and a black-gloved killer…in no particular order.

Starring the strikingly beautiful Edwige Fenech (here sporting a fashionable pixie hairstyle), the film ticks the marks on all the giallo clichés established a few years earlier by Bava and Argento, even cribbing the fashion industry background from Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. Fenech plays as assistant photographer whose beautiful co-workers keep winding up dead at the hands of a motorcycle-clad killer. Don’t bother trying to sort out the mystery; like most of these films the murders are tenuously connected by a tragic back-story one could never have guessed. Instead, soak up all the campy sleaze on display from writer/director Andrea Bianchi who uses any excuse to get his scream queens disrobed. Sporting one of the most uncomfortable punchlines in screen history (until The Kingsman went there, that is), Strip Nude for Your Killer is a clumsy progenitor of all those Cinemax thrillers from the '90s...if the men all wore ill-fitting tighty-whities.

Release twice by Blue Underground, Arrow Video picks up the torch with a new 2K restoration that looks at least twice as good, adding an optional tint to the opening scene, Italian and English versions, along with new interviews, commentary and a collector's booklet.