Movie Reviews : Some Bad Things Happen During ‘Stripped to Kill’

Horrible fiends seem to be whispering down a wind tunnel at the beginning of “Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls” (citywide). “Waarr-woooo-wifffle-waar!” they chant and gargle ominously, part of a monochrome nightmare in which a hapless blonde stripteaser, gyrating in a small room, is lewdly assaulted by what looks like a satanist dominatrix in a leather Batman outfit.

For a while, it’s an effective gimmick. Then the dream ends and reality begins, with two roommates, one of whom is suffering from those awful visions, and these girls seem to be whispering down a wind tunnel too.

Ten minutes later, 50% of the dialogue remains inaudible, even when angry stripteasers at the Club Paragon begin bitching at each other and the cops start grilling them and muttering cop cracks. Is it just the downtown theater where we caught “Stripped”? The print? Are we going deaf? (Perhaps not. Another Times reviewer saw 10 minutes in Pasadena, and he claims he couldn’t understand what anyone was saying either.)

So, there will no nasty remarks about dialogue, since we have only a foggy idea what it was like. Writer-director Kate Shea Ruben (“Stripped to Kill 1”) does have some visual style, though. Her model seems to be Brian De Palma back-lit by Adrian Lyne, and she works through numerous smoky scenes of her ecdysiasts and their sensuous splits, while developing a simple psycho-killer plot.

In the film, the beleaguered stripper, a gorgeous redhead (Maria Ford), continuously dreams of her co-workers, only to find out, upon awakening covered with blood and passed out somewhere in the naked city, that they’ve been murdered with razor blades. Naturally, she’s upset. Meanwhile, a handsome cop with sexual dysfunction (Eb Lottimer) and no partner, works desperately to prove her innocent, and her fellow strippers wander around blithely as if nothing much was happening. A surprise ending reveals the source of that wind tunnel gargling, but not of the muffled sound track.

The dreams are an interesting idea, Ruben moves her camera with imagination and panache, and there’s a laudable attempt to show the camaraderie of the strippers: their special little twilight, grin-and-bare-it world. Much of the time, though, watching “Stripped to Kill 2” (MPAA rated R for sex, language, nudity and violence) is like being whispered to. Ominously.