Vicious and Nude (1980) User Reviews

Spanish take on Death Game

[BandSAboutMovies · 6/10 · 1 June 2022]

The third time that Death Game would be made happened not in America but in Spain.

Vicious and Nude is a cultural remix of that American film, casting Jack Taylor - whose career started on The Jack Benny Show and went from Mexican horror (the Nostradamus films) to Jess Franco films (Nightmares Come at Night, Female Vampire), giallo (The Killer Is One of 13), Spanish horror (The Ghost Galleon, The Vampires Night Orgy), Paul Naschy movies (Dr. Jekyll vs. The Werewolf) and stuff like Pieces, Conan the Barbarian and Edge of the Axe - as Juan, a married writer with a gorgeous home and great family.

Just like the first two films that inspired this movie - Death Game and Little Miss Innocent - this all changes when he picks up two young women that ruin his life. Here, however, the film is inspired by both Charles Manson and Dr. Seuss as they're called Hippie 1 and 2 (Adriana Vega and Eva Lyberten). Even wilder is this movie takes the nihilistic ending of Death Game and ups it to challenge Thelma and Louise by eleven years.

Director and writer Manuel Esteba made mostly adult and horror films - surprise, he's on our site - like Horror Story, the gravity disaster film Spectrum (Beyond the World's End), Bloody Sex and El E. T. E.y el Oto, which IMDB claims is about an alien meeting Spain's youngest psychopath.

I feel that Death Game is an essential film and while this one isn't in the same class, I always find it so wonderful to explore how another part of the world interprets the same story. Here's hoping you feel the same.

Spicy sleaze Spanish style.

[TheAgonyOfPlasma · 8/10 · 19 November 2008]

Adriana Vega and Eva Lyberten, two starlets of Spanish sleaze and wonderful actresses both, are two hippie adolescents who, after car break down, go to the house of restless writer and seduce him, and immediately later force him undergo the majors barbarisms. The affection shown by the producer Manuel Esteba towards its feminine protagonists, the sleazy atmosphere and the declining and weak rate that is able to inoculate to all the development (deals with a erotic film half an hour with one first without a sex scene) turn the result into much more that a product of sexploitation to the use, far beyond the average of the production of then, and even over the previous accomplishment of Esteba, estimable but the less revealing rape and revenge flick "Sexual Trap". Priceless dialogue, delicious historic interpretations and a final scene that seems to predate "Thelma and Louise" are all mixed in lovingly erotic exploitation film with plenty of sex and full-frontal nudity.

Not a bad effort.

[punishmentpark · 6/10 · 2 March 2016]

'Viciosas al desnudo' is a(n unofficial) remake of 'The seducers' (1977), but the story lacks the incest theme^ of the original (this is my educated guess, and it would surely have been in the keywords list here on IMDb if it was a theme), which makes it less intense in that sense. The cinematography and acting are a lot less intense (or good) as well, though we get to see lots of fun vintage interiors and exteriors and Adriana Vega and Eva Lyberten are quite easy on the eyes. Unfortunately, I could only make out just a few words of the dialogue here and there, so I can hardly come to a fair judgment there.

The soft-porn scenes are quite entertaining, but there's a lot of emphasis on the main theme as well, which deals with the hypocritical, male approach of sex in '80s society - again, for as far as I understand the story. These two elements don't work perfectly together, but somehow the soft-porn versus the hypocrisy surrounding sex does make sense on some level.

The soundtrack is pretty corny and overly present throughout the film, which doesn't help much, either.

6 out of 10 seems in order, though I'll stay on the lookout for English subtitles.

^ This is not a spoiler for that film.