On 26 August 1975, Nude per l’assassino (also known as Strip Nude for Your Killer) landed in Italian cinemas. It was the sexiest, sleaziest, and most unhinged giallo film of the decade.
Now, exactly half a century after that explosion of eroticism, blood, and pop delirium, Four Flies Records makes a landmark announcement: the original soundtrack, long thought lost to time, has been found. This marks its first-ever release, presented in a lavish LP edition meticulously remastered from the original 8-track tapes.
The score, composed by Berto Pisano and Elsio Mancuso (the latter credited in the work’s registration with Italian PRO SIAE, but unacknowledged in the film’s titles), is an intoxicating and lethal brew: jazz-funk grooves, highly charged lounge atmospheres, chilling dodecaphonic suspense, and sweeping orchestral themes featuring strings, flugelhorn, and the incredible trumpet of Oscar Valdambrini. All of it crowned by Edda Dell’Orso’s magnetic, otherworldly voice at one of her career’s absolute peaks, balancing sensual ecstasy with the breathy whispers you’d imagine in a red-light photonovel.
Believed gone and vanished forever, this soundtrack has obsessed collectors and fans of Italian film scores for decades. And yet, there it was, forgotten in a dusty cellar. It may sound like an urban legend, but it’s true.
So, we can finally listen to a proper, stand-alone, official edition of one of the most beautiful soundtracks from the ‘70s, a true manifesto of the Italian erotic sound, but also a testament to to the skill with which Italians could lift American funk and imbue it with a unique, visionary spin that was entirely their own.
Nude per l’assassino is a cornerstone of Italian genre cinema: lurid, brazen, and utterly iconic, with a sexy-panther Edwige Fenech sporting a haircut that could scar your adolescence, and and the unforgettable image of a killer in full-face helmet and motorcycle suit.
This soundtrack is the very soul of that film, hidden for far too long, now gloriously brought into the light. A forbidden dream made real.