Torso, The Women of Giallo Die so Nicely

Ah yes...the women of Giallo! They are sultry and at times too devious for their own good. Their scheming, though justified, ends up with them getting slashed or cut to pieces. Often nude and always seductive, these vixens have sordid backstories. When not nude, black leather boots, shiny lingerie, and cleavage flattening blouses rule the day. Their demises are so sad...alas, the beautiful seem to always die so horribly. So how about a Giallo film where the babes are just plain stupid and good only for nudity, lesbian love scenes, heterosexual love scenes, and getting slashed...no evidence of intellectual ability? Hence the 1973 Sergio Martino film, "Torso." Good carnal sex and gore with women as mere objects...there is something so right about that.

Jane (Suzy Kendall) is a sultry American art student in Rome. She has sultry Italian girl friends and all of them engage in a lot of heterosexual and lesbian pre-maritasl sex. They dress in either nothing, mini-skirts, or lingerie and quickly begin getting murdered. Flo (Patrizia Adiutori) will be strangled, and slashed after having sex with her boyfriend...he'll be slashed, too. Carol (Conchita Airoldi) will get it after a failed threesome when the killer follows her into a swamp. The babes keep dying and Jane hasn't a clue and keeps doing stupid things and seems in denial that a strangler is offing Italian babes. Her best friend, Daniela (Tina Aumont) fears an ex-boyfriend, Stefano (Roberto Bisacco) is the killer, convinces Jane and other babes to spend some time at her perverted uncle's villa in the country.

The babes go to the villa for some skinny-dipping, lesbian sex, and nude sunbathing. The killer follows and more sultry Italians will die horribly. The clueless Jane will eventually find some gory corpses and finally realize her life may be in danger. Nevertheless, the negligee clad damsel will enter a deadly cat and mouse game with a killer bent on strangulation and slashing the private parts of formerly warm-blooded damsels. It is now apparent that the killer knows these gals well...is it a former boyfriend or perhaps a demented jilted lesbian lover?

Does Jill have any shot at surviving this massacre of Italian babes? If she does survive and earn an art degree from this Italian university, will she return to the U.S. and get a job as a waitress at Applebee's or Hooters? Is the misogynistic nature of these Giallo films a rationale outgrowth of the exploitative nature of the so-called women's lib movement of the 1960s and 1970s? Gratuitous and misogynistic to the nth degree, "Torso" is a Giallo film that has earned affection and praise for some very uncomfortable reasons.