Have you ever read or heard about the story "The World's Most Dangerous Game"? Well, Naked Fear could have been titled "The World's Most Dangerous Naked Game". And when it focuses on the nudity, it's trashy, vulgar fun. When the clothes go on, however, it's an amateurish disaster.
The main story involves a pretty redhead named Diana Kelper (Danielle De Luca) who winds up stuck as a stripper in a New Mexico town, the victim of a half assed white slavery scam. Diana eventually winds up kidnapped by a psycho who drops her, buck naked, in the middle of the New Mexico wilderness so he can hunt her like she's a deer with boobs. While that's going on, there's also this other story about a new sheriff's deputy named Dwight Terry (Arron Shiver) who never really does anything important in the movie. There's something about him butting heads with the local sheriff (Joe Mantegna) and something about Dwight losing his job in California because he tried to arrest the local mayor for drunk driving and something about Dwight looking for redemption, but again, he never really does anything important in the movie. It's like some producer told screenwriter Christine Vasquez that her script needed a male lead, so she wrote one it without bothering to give him anything to do.
When Danielle De Luca is totally nude and being chased by the psycho for about a half hour in the middle of this film, Naked Fear does generate some cheap, prurient interest. The combination of De Luca's beautiful body and the utter vulnerability of her character has an almost irresistible appeal. As soon as Diana finds an old shirt in the woods and puts it on, that appeal disappears. What's left behind is a ponderous and ugly glop of bad plotting, terrible dialog, awful acting and bizarrely horrible editing.
The evidence that director Thom Eberhardt has no idea what he's doing is all over this movie. Exhibit A would be the casting of swarthy Italian-American Joe Mantegna as a good ol' boy sheriff. Mantegna is a very good actor, but he's probably given better performances on the toilet while having a particularly difficult bowel movement than he gives in Naked Fear. If you didn't know better, you'd think Mantegna got the role because he's a bookie one of the producers owed money to. He's so out of place, Nathan Lane would be more believable playing a dirt farming redneck from rural Alabama.
Exhibit B in Eberhardt's incompetence would be the way shots of New Mexico scenery and stuffed animal heads mounted on a wall just pop up as the film goes along. It's not even like the images serve as some sort of segue in the story. They simply show up and then are gone, like a form of visual Tourette's Syndrome.
Naked Fear is a completely crappy movie that manages, by going right at the lowest common denominators of fear and lust, to actually hold your attention for a bit. The second it tries to be anything more than crude and exploitative, the barrage of pathetic acting, imbecilic writing and just plain odd direction makes it impossible to sit through. If you want to see a lot of female nudity but have a moral objection to pornography, this film was made for you. It doesn't have near enough to offer to the rest of us.
The main story involves a pretty redhead named Diana Kelper (Danielle De Luca) who winds up stuck as a stripper in a New Mexico town, the victim of a half assed white slavery scam. Diana eventually winds up kidnapped by a psycho who drops her, buck naked, in the middle of the New Mexico wilderness so he can hunt her like she's a deer with boobs. While that's going on, there's also this other story about a new sheriff's deputy named Dwight Terry (Arron Shiver) who never really does anything important in the movie. There's something about him butting heads with the local sheriff (Joe Mantegna) and something about Dwight losing his job in California because he tried to arrest the local mayor for drunk driving and something about Dwight looking for redemption, but again, he never really does anything important in the movie. It's like some producer told screenwriter Christine Vasquez that her script needed a male lead, so she wrote one it without bothering to give him anything to do.
When Danielle De Luca is totally nude and being chased by the psycho for about a half hour in the middle of this film, Naked Fear does generate some cheap, prurient interest. The combination of De Luca's beautiful body and the utter vulnerability of her character has an almost irresistible appeal. As soon as Diana finds an old shirt in the woods and puts it on, that appeal disappears. What's left behind is a ponderous and ugly glop of bad plotting, terrible dialog, awful acting and bizarrely horrible editing.
The evidence that director Thom Eberhardt has no idea what he's doing is all over this movie. Exhibit A would be the casting of swarthy Italian-American Joe Mantegna as a good ol' boy sheriff. Mantegna is a very good actor, but he's probably given better performances on the toilet while having a particularly difficult bowel movement than he gives in Naked Fear. If you didn't know better, you'd think Mantegna got the role because he's a bookie one of the producers owed money to. He's so out of place, Nathan Lane would be more believable playing a dirt farming redneck from rural Alabama.
Exhibit B in Eberhardt's incompetence would be the way shots of New Mexico scenery and stuffed animal heads mounted on a wall just pop up as the film goes along. It's not even like the images serve as some sort of segue in the story. They simply show up and then are gone, like a form of visual Tourette's Syndrome.
Naked Fear is a completely crappy movie that manages, by going right at the lowest common denominators of fear and lust, to actually hold your attention for a bit. The second it tries to be anything more than crude and exploitative, the barrage of pathetic acting, imbecilic writing and just plain odd direction makes it impossible to sit through. If you want to see a lot of female nudity but have a moral objection to pornography, this film was made for you. It doesn't have near enough to offer to the rest of us.