In Denis Héroux's gritty Belfast-set thriller Naked Massacre, Cain, a sexually-confused psychotic switchblade-wielding Vietnam veteran, breaks into a house and submits a group of young nurses to a night of terror, leaving only one survivor to tell the tale.
With a plot offering sexual degradation and brutal violence, the film succeeds in being disturbing thematically, but it is missing either the sense of nerve-wracking tension or the no-holds-barred attitude necessary for it to be a totally effective experience.
Had Héroux added more in the way of creepy atmosphere (a decent score might have helped), or ramped up the sleaze levels by being more explicit with the gore and depravity, then I feel that the film would have been much more successful. Just as it seems the director is about to deliver a classic scene of celluloid nastiness, he tends to bottle it. For example, a scene in which the killer hooks up with an ageing prostitute, promises to be both extremely sordid and potentially very violent (think of Cropsy's encounter with the whore in The Burning and you get an idea of what could have been) but ends with a whimper, with the loony simply pushing the topless crone to the floor and running away.
Likewise, a later scene, in which Cain tries to force a nurse to perform oral sex on one of her house-mates before making the poor girl kill her friend, cheats the audience by neither showing the unsavoury sex act (almost, but not quite) or the gruesome death. Other deaths also wimp out on the good stuff, happening off screen or in the dark.
A film that is bloody scary can afford to be light on the gore; a film that is very gory can afford to ignore atmosphere in favour of stomach churning effects. Naked Massacre is neither. It tries hard, with a fair bit of nudity, an efficient and cold-blooded killer, and a nasty scene at the end which involves a touch of DIY tattoo removal, but in the end I couldn't help but feel that the film would've been so much better if it had gone the extra mile to offend.
