STRIPPED TO KILL (1987), STRIPPED TO KILL 2 (1989)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

The above illustration for Katt Shea Ruben's STRIPPED TO KILL, showing a stripper using a slasher's knife as her stripper-pole, is more imaginative than anything in the film proper. 

Reportedly Ruben had visited real strip-clubs, which gave her the notion of trying to incorporate the strip-experience into a film for Roger "Blood and Boobs" Corman. But in this film, Ruben was far too literal-minded about simply filming a bunch of stripper-routines, tenuously linked by the plot-thread of a psycho targeting the club's workers. A couple of cops, Cody (Kay Lenz) and Heinemann (Greg Evigan), hunt for the murderer.

Often the serial killer is the star in such productions, but here he commits so few crimes that the audience's attention revolves back to the cops-- or, more specifically, to officer Cody, since Heinemann is her support-character. Cody, vaguely configured as a sexless tomboy, is forced to summon her inner temptress in order to ferret out the mystery killer-- and to some extent, she finds that she enjoys being a girl, years before MISS CONGENIALITY mined the same terrain. 

Kay Lenz does a nice job portraying the officer's reluctant transformation, and she gets the most kinetic sequences, uncovering not one but two demented killers. But the various strip-routines come close to making female nudity boring.

STRIPPED TO KILL 2 is a sequel in name only, and given its genesis, it ought to have been even worse than its predecessor. Corman had the use of a strip-club set for a few days, so he hired Ruben to churn out another slasher-vs.-stripper opus. Ruben admitted that her filming-time was so restricted that she had to script sequences on the fly.

Ironically, Ruben's scenes of beautiful women bumping and grinding is much more involving this time around, for the setups have a certain ethereal mystery to them, for all that they don't technically display any more epistemological content than those of the first film. They just look better, and thus all the scenes of a hard-boiled cop looking for a slasher become more engrossing as well. This time the central heroine is a stripper named Shadey (Maria Ford), who suffers from hallucinogenic dreams and doesn't know whether or not either she or one of her fellow workers may be the killer. I think the true killer is supposed to have suffered some sort of molestation, but the point is never made explicit. A minor bonus is the appearance of Marjean "BEASTMASTER TV show" Holden, who gets to punch the cop out. No wheels are invented here, but things roll along from start to finish with respectable alacrity.