Original title: Nude… si muore
Despite the original title, which roughly translates as Naked… You Die, The Young, the Evil and the Savage is a surprisingly chaste giallo with assorted starlets stripping down to their underwear or titillating with some mild filmed-from-the-back nudity. It’s stylishly shot by Antonio Margheriti – using his usual pseudonym Anthony Dawson – but not altogether interesting.
There’s not really much point going into any real detail about the plot as there’s very little to tell. It’s set in a girl’s boarding school where the inevitable serial killer with dubious motives is making short work of the pupils. It was originally developed as a project for Mario Bava (the opening bathtub murder perhaps intentionally recalls the one in Bava’s 6 donne per l’assassino/Blood and Black Lace (1964)) for a script written, in part, by Tudor Gates before Margheriti inherited it. He does a decent job, making The Young, the Evil and the Savage an adequate enough thriller but one can’t help wonder what Bava would have done with it.
Everything you expect from a giallo is present and correct – the black gloved killer, plentiful POV shots, the labyrinthine plotting – but also some feeble attempts at humour that sit uneasily with the rest of the film. A lot of this comes from the walkie-talkie obsessed wannabe writer Jill (British actress Sally Smith, who mainly worked on television) who also has a passion for Marvel comics (she can be seen with a copy of Marvel Super-Heroes number 48 among others). There’s the usual shoal of red herrings (the principal (Vivian Stapleton) referred to as “a vampire” by one of the students, the gardener/handyman (Luciano Pigozzi, credited as he often was as Alan Collins) who looks longingly at his sickle and enjoys spying on the girls as they shower, the Lothario stable hand Richard (American actor Mark Damon)) many of who end up dead before the end but it’s a remarkably bloodless film. Margheriti certainly wasn’t the squeamish type as one look at his 80s output, particular Apocalypse domani/Cannibal Apocalypse/Cannibals in the Streets (1980) will attest so it seems strange that he was so reticent here.
That other staple of exploitation cinema, sex, is rather coyly treated as well. Richard gets it on with heroine Lucille (Eleonora Brown) but it’s a notably passion-free encounter and the other actresses (among them Patrizia Valturri, Malisa Longo and Lorenza Guerrieri) are happy enough to take their clothes off so long as the camera stays behind them and shoots from the waist up. The giallo would become far more frank in both sex and violence in the next few years and The Young, the Evil and the Savage looks rather undernourished in both departments.
The cast of familiar Italian popular cinema faces – Collins, Damon, Longo, Silvia Dionisio – is headed by a white-haired Michael Rennie, a long way from Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) as the charisma free Inspector Durand, a role that Rennie wanders through without showing much enthusiasm. Ludmila Lvova gets to follow in the footsteps of “Jean Arless”/Joan Marshall in William Castle’s Homicidal (1961), playing both a male and female role as revealed in the far from convincing finale. As her female role, Mrs Clay, one of the teachers at the school, is so obviously a suspect from the minute we see her the final reveal is both unsurprising and disappointing.
The main title song, Nightmare, strangely recalls the theme from TV’s Batman (1966-1968) though Irish singer Rose Brennan – formerly of the Joe Loss Orchestra – is giving it the full Shirey Bassey on James Bond mode. The rest of Carlo Savina’s score is mostly horrible but the theme song is inadvertently rather amusing.
The film suffered several indignities once it ventured outside its native Italy. In the States it was distributed by American International Pictures who trimmed 15 minutes from it to make sure it fitted a double bill with Witchfinder General (1968) – the latter retitled The Conqueror Worm – and in the UK it did the rounds with The Mask (1961). In Germany it appears to have been uncut but was released in a black and white version, rather dampening one of the few things that the film really has going for it, Fausto Zuccoli’s attractive photography which makes atmospheric use of the unusual locations, chiefly the Castello della Castelluccia in Centro Grande, Rome (now a hotel should you fancy retracing the film’s footsteps).
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