Stripped to Kill (1987)

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) It makes perfect sense that Roger Corman’s name is listed as executive producer to Stripped to Kill: After all, there hasn’t been a single exploitation angle that Corman hasn’t liked, and setting a crime thriller inside a strip club seems like a perfect idea. (Strip-club culture would later explode into the mainstream, but it was still something transgressive in 1987.) The plot summary is simple, silly but clever, as a policewoman infiltrates a strip club to catch a serial killer. There’s quite a bit of nudity (most of it dull) and a number of serial killings (also dull), hitting most of the essential high points of a sexploitation film. Alas, there isn’t much here to care about: the serial killer’s identity is crazy in the kind of over-the-top way that 1980s slashers settled into, and there isn’t much to the lead performances by Kay Lenz and Greg Evigan. Katt Shea’s direction (in her first film) is fine—as much of Stripped to Kill can be summarized as such. It’s gory but not overly so, filled with nudity but not crossing the line into harder material, and with a story just good enough to keep going but not to leave any lasting impression. In other words, it could have been much worse and isn’t—not high praise, but sufficient for a film that was designed to titillate more than anything else.