The hypocrisy and crack smoking antics of our 40th president of these United States really has nothing to do with Nude For Satan though, so let's not dwell like the big beast in Jeffrey Combs' cellar... little Cellar Dweller humor there, but since I had to explain it, that pretty much ruined what little humor there might've been in that paltry little joke (as if you'd seen that friggin' movie to begin with), so again, let's not dwell. Lost in somebody's mom's basement for years, Nude For Satan was the Cats Don't Dance of Italian exploitation horror. After it's premier to less than 500 people, it was immediately dubbed as one of the biggest failures in Italian movie history and locked away like the proverbial freak child in the fruit cellar, fed fish heads for dinner and picking at silverfish and pill bugs for late night snacks. Well, much like young Georgie, the titular character of Castle Freak (hmmmm, two Jeffrey Combs movie references already...), once the movie's ashamed old keeper died and the fish heads stopped rolling in and the vermin just weren't cutting it, Nude For Satan bit off it's thumb and ventured out into the world to search for a normal life, despite being a freak amidst the norms... wow, now that I think about it like that, Nude For Satan is EXACTLY like Castle Freak!... uhm, the character, not the movie itself, which was so much better than this...

Our movie opens well enough, with a very doable brunette traipsing through the foggy forest floor late one night, her see through nightie undone and wide open, flowing around her succulent feminine form, framing her milky breasts and elegantly prancing legs, and thrusting some full frontal in our faces from the get-go... somehow I think this movie would've done better than 500 people JUST for the nudity! And to think, over here Halle Berry's getting an Oscar for the same thing... From this image stolen from a D&D player's wet dreams, we escape to our opening credits, displayed proudly on the hood of a Volkswagen bug (home to the 2nd most uncomfortable place you can fuck a girl) for several minutes. But, it's not just any VW these words are projected on, but the VW of Dr. William Benson, hero of our tale and man destined to go on the crazy, non-drug induced hallucinogenic nightmare anyone's ever been on, not including Freddy Got Fingered, which managed to ruin sausages on strings, wearing S.C.U.B.A. gear in the shower and smacking crippled chicks in the knees as a means of sexual pleasure. Tom Green, you're a prick, and a decidedly amusing (and trust me, VERY agonizing) fate awaits you once I get the contract on your head...

While on call one dark and stormy night (you expected something different in such a movie), Dr. Benson finds himself witness to an accident. Not just any accident is this, but one of the most unintentionally funny instances of twisted metal since, well, Race With The Devil, though not in the "bad stunt work" sense, but in the "you'd only catch it on a Warner Bros. cartoon" sense. Yep, the accident not only takes place off-screen so as to save money on wrecking an actual car, but the only evidence we see of it ever occurring is a tire that roles comically by our hero as he looks on stunned... I can already see Porky Pig popping up at the end of the movie in a devil costume and eye liner, stuttering like a nit in Italian. From the "wreckage", the good doctor pulls a piece of Italian cuisine by the name of Susan Smith and takes her to his car, so that he may find her some medical attention for any injuries she may have incurred... or maybe to stick it to her once or twice if she doesn't make it...

Dr. Benson comes across a man standing by the road who looks like he's standing guard. Over what it is exactly that he's standing guard I'm not sure, but when Billy tries to ask for help, the man simply says that he can't leave his current spot as per someone's orders, and instead directs the doctor elsewhere to a nearby castle to find help for Susan. When he's let into the castle by mysterious, unseen forces (I love it when the wind unlocks doors for me), William lets himself in to have a look around. Instead of help, the doc finds trashed furniture, puffy rodent tenants and various cheap and bountiful hallucinations that leave him dazed and confused with respect to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Not long after, Susan seems to appear from nowhere, grinning and playing on as if she were blond and calling Billy her beloved Peter, decked out in a green dress and claiming she's been waiting forever for her beloved hunk of man... some chicks do crazy shit to get into a doctor's wallet, but I'm not sure where exactly this approach is going. And when Pete/Billy tries to talk a little sense into the broad's noggin? She shoots him down with a volley of philosophical bullshit... it always sucks when you peg a girl as being borderline retarded then she gives you a mental bitch-slapping courtesy of some notes she took in her freshman philosophy class.

The following morning, Susan emerges from Dr. Benson's car to come find the big lug and see what happened to getting her that medical attention he promised. She runs into a dapper chap in a black overcoat and cane who offers to take her inside the castle and help her out... okay, this guy radiates evil like a Bond villain and Susan's gonna be strolling into uncharted territory with the man... there should be t-shirts made for women like Susan that say "future rape victim" on them in big bold letters to help potential criminals weed out their victims easier. Oh, and considering the movie's title, I wouldn't be shocked to learn that this cane wielding fiend is either Satan or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Whatever his true identity, Susan follows him inside, where she too is eaten up with Technicolored trippiness and checks out a monochromatic portrait of a goon resembling Dr. B in some old English attire. She then may or may not have completely lost all of here clothing for a moment when her new boyfriend furrows his brow, followed by the consumption of some evil red Kool-Aid™ given to her by a twisted old man with tooth-black gobbed on his cracked and yellow ivories.

As if going into strange buildings with sinister men wasn't bad enough, now she's drinking oddly colored liquid refreshments given to her by guys who could pass for Renfield understudies... the woman deserves whatever it is she's setting herself up for. What it turns out to be is a softcore lesbian scene, as Susan suddenly finds herself engaging in soft heavy petting with a member of the same sex in a bathtub!... I'm starting to expect there were only 500 straight men in Italy circa 1974. Back to Billy, he's busy being wrestled to the ground by pseudo-Susan. But, in a fashion that has all sexually healthy heterosexual males watching with an expression of "wha?!", the good doctor insists that Suse keep her distance and not get anywhere near coming between he and his Calvins... or his Hobbes for that matter... ouch, Sunday funnies joke that just wasn't funny... might've worked some 5+ years ago... though I still doubt as such.

On the other side of the castle grounds, Suse is getting the same undesired attention from a clammy type of goon resembling Dr. Benson in a too-close-to-being-called-pink-for-my-comfort colored Victorian costume. Stand-In William is obsessed with Suse much the same way that the false Susan is obsessed with our hero Bill/Peter, only since now it's a man-on-woman situation it's much more creepier and much less "lucky bastard!" in feeling. The heroine shakes off her honey-roasted escapee from a Pay Day™ as being William, a few seagulls short of a flock... and no matter how far she ran (you know, cuz she ran so far away), she couldn't get away... No sooner has crazy Bill arrived then he's gone again, replaced by that same cane wielding embodiment of Lucifer, who escorts Suse to her room... and here I thought this was a residential castle and not just another middle ages motor lodge.

Upon entry to her quarters, noon suddenly turns to midnight and Susan's swallowed by all the Argento-esque colors of the hallucination rainbow, engaged in Fillini-esque fantasies about her clam hungry amiga from the bathtub romp, more specifically a fantasy complete with satin sheets and auto-erotic asphyxiation. She snaps out of it before we get to see anything too graphic and finds herself in a cold sweat between her bed sheets, paranoid out of her gourd, convinced the castle's haunted and she's there to join them... against her will of course. After shooing a black cat away from her bedside, Susan makes the classic mistake of the horror movie standard and explores the dark depths of the house in search of the origin for noises that shouldn't be there. Instead of a machete carrying madman in sports equipment though, Suse instead eavesdrops on a strange late night ceremony that sees Satan Guy and his crooked grinning sidekick Gummy Joe torturing the lesbo slave girl with a cat o' nine tails. Following a post-whipping glass of Cherry Blast Kool-Aid™, the disgustingly thin wench goes into a downward spiral of her own sanity, babbling on in a fervor about a demonic entity by the name of Astheroth who's come to challenge Satan for control of the realm of shadows... did I miss an exit on the What The Fuck Memorial Highway?! Whatever the explanation, when lesbo girl fails to overcome the usurper to his thrown, the prince of darkness hands her her pink slip in the form of a dagger to the tit... whoa, let me get my frontal lobe back on the track of the logic train and I'll get back to you.

Speaking on the titty subject, Suse runs from the scene with the volume on high and falls down a deep pit materializing from nowhere, ending up in the sticky clutches of a giant spider web that looks about as real as one you might find mongrel children clinging to at Chuck E. Cheese's™, only I doubt you'll find a brunette in a torn nightie with one of her tits hanging out broad as day at a kiddie restaurant... well, except maybe Albania, but that was a night I'd rather not go into too much incriminating detail about. Leaving her to her entrapment, we rejoin Dr. Billy and his mystery date, the Susan doppleganger, as they get all greasy and sloppy on each other. The pawing and uncoordinated slapping of lips is prematurely ended though, when Billy hears the real Susan's cries for help from the basement, prompting him to put the monster away for the time being and gallivant off to play hero, the ruse of false Sue now shed. And what a hero he is, as William arrives just in time to save the damsel in distress from the film's most startlingly nothing-special-about-it effect that's supposed to be a giant spider, but comes off as a milk carton covered in ragged gray fur complete with black pipe cleaners for legs (which don't move by-the-way), pushed along on the end of a stick... ouch, we've just stepped out of potential flavor and stumbled embarrassingly into Corman crap country.

Blowing away the over-sized $2 arachnid with his always handy handgun, William saves the day and the two make for the front door. The story's not nearly over yet though, so there's still some time for redemption from the previous scene. Instead of tasting the sweet nectar of freedom though, the couple is roadblocked by Monsieur Satan, who gives the two a verbal spanking and stern lecture about being rude guests before sending them to their rooms like kiddies caught sucking mommy's coffin nails. Too terrified to go back to napping alone, Suse insists that William and his man sausage bunk with her till morning to protect her from any more bad dreams, recount their mutual turmoils and contemplate the state of their sanities. Once the little lady's passed out though, Dr. Benson goes for every good man of healing's first instinct: his gun. Properly armed, Billy the Kid goes out to chase down mysterious strangers through the grounds, picking out a guy in a top hat who doesn't seem especially interested in answering questions, gun or not. After wading through various camera jumps, a dirty camera lens and a frantic beatnik rhythm section (and narrowly escaping a disorienting glass prism someone decided to pass across the screen), William catches up to the goon to reveal him as... himself.

Yes, it's the evil twin William, probably that Peter guy that crazy fake Susan/Evelyn was talking about. No longer content with pestering Susan (likely another victim of the "let's be friends" assassination plot), Evil Bill has come to tempt Good Bill into the warm embrace of the darkside. Offering our heroic physician the chance to remain in this place "outside of time and existence" so that the two halves of Bill can be together forever, it's obvious that Bill's evil side is no Monty Hall. Would you want to spend the rest of eternity carrying on conversations with yourself in an alternate dimension, soaking your brain stem in an endless series of disorienting hallucinations? Maybe if you're Bob Denver, but as for me, I'll take the year's supply of Rice-A-Roni™ and what's behind door #3. I know I'm only supposed to get one, but see what happens if I'm denied... When Susan comes into the scene, she finds Dr. Benson talking to himself (since it's an inner struggle and all that) and thinks that she's the source of his yelling and anger, getting freaked out by his dwindling grip on reality. Of course she too finds herself in the same situation, being seduced by her sexier, sluttier side.

Unlike William, who shuns his evil, grinning side, Susan embraces her dark desire to make herself look pretty and become a meat patty wide open for a testosterone injection. Why? Because math is hard, so if you've got it, exploit it... and of course by "it", I'm talking about a vagina. Not only does Susan give in to her sensual side, but she turns outright nympho, jumping into Evil Bill's lap and let him paw and molest her while Good Bill watches on disturbed, either from the horror that his potential love has been charmed by the forces of Satan or because he now wishes he'd gotten in on the action when he had the chance. Meanwhile, more evil joins the festivities, as two unbearably skinny lesbos pop up, get Nude For Satan and start prancing around together, followed shortly by two guys in Technicolor loincloths and body paint... damn, the gifts of Satan lose their appeal the more I see them. Satan and his cane pop-up too to lord over the debauchery, stone faced and seemingly disinterested... obviously even the Devil isn't impressed by the (withered) fruits of his labors anymore... and corrupting souls used to be so much fun for him, especially on those lazy Sundays back in deity trade school.

Again, being a medical professional, Bill decides the answer to all of life's problems is good ol' fire, so he sets the limbo castle/dimension ablaze, causing the misshapen bisexual extras to curl up in terror like big fleshy pill bugs while Evil Bill laughs maniacally and Lucifer sits in the back, cursing at the victorious Astheroth... so, uhm, Bill's an unwilling pawn of this Astheroth character, who we never get to see or hear of aside from the occasional dropping of his name at two points of the movie... so, does this mean that Bill's decision wasn't of his own God given will to resist evil and it's weak attempts at bribery? And if so, why should I give half a bologna sandwich in concern to the matter? Whatever the case, Bill wakes up from his hallucination to find himself at the scene of Susan's accident, this time with Suse dead and hanging from her mildly dinged automobile. Was it all a bad dream? Not when Dr. B notices the medallion gripped in Susan's cold, dead hand, very similar to the one in his pocket, both of which are coincidentally exact replicas of the medallion Evil Bill used to illustrate his "we're two halves of a single being" schtick to Good Bill prior... you saw that coming too? Ah, so I'm not just insane and it really was that obvious. That makes me and the 15 voices in my head feel better...

Nude For Satan was reborn in recent years by a release company called Redemption, who put out a good number of '70s Italian exploitation "classics" that otherwise fell off or under the radar for a long time, either because they were too racy, too unknown or too ineffective during their initial box office releases to warrant anybody bothering to shell out the money for the rights... I'm glad somebody did. Granted, of the movies I've seen from the Redemption label, such as The Devil's Nightmare, The Sinful Nuns Of St. Valentine and of course now Nude For Satan, none of them have been spectacular, but for '70s cheap-o euro-trash, they've been tits and spleens above most in that category. Luigi Batzella's direction leaves my cranium dizzy and confused, as if I just got done watching the debut of a genetic conjunction of David Lynch and Dario Argento on a Roger Corman budget, while his writing is dripping with philosophical and psychological turmoil. In other words, though the constant play with lighting and other visuals was appealing and refreshing for a movie of this type, it definitely could've been handled a little smoother in regards to changing the color films on the lights or Batzella's waving of the fancy new prism he stole from Pink Floyd's yard sale in front of the camera... and there could've been at least a little jump in that spider... I've seen plays that had more action in them than that plastic arachnid, swear to Godzilla! Plays!

What does all of this mean? I'm watching a gangbang video with Ron Jeremy and three other guys in zombie makeup puttin' it to this chick who looks like one of the Go-Gos, and Ronny just moonwalked across the screen complete with a Michael Jackson crotch grab and yelp... I'm disturbed beyond belief and you want my opinion on Nude For Satan?! Just look at the fucking smiley faces at the top of the screen and leave me... I need to be alone right now... so I can HANG MYSELF WITH A BELT IN MY CLOSET!