Enter... if you dare, the bizarre world of the psychosexual mind!
Torso is a 1973 Italian Giallo Slasher Movie.
A masked killer is haunting an Italian city, strangling women with a bright red scarf. An American exchange student sees somebody with the exact same scarf around the site of one of her classmates being slain. After the madman tries to intimidate her into silence, she decides to bring her friends to her uncle's villa to let things blow over. Unfortunately, the fiend has followed her, and starts picking off her friends one by one...
This film contains examples of:
- Asshole Victim: Nearly all the victims.
- Flo and Carol, who were blackmailing Franz.
- Gianni Tomasso, who tried to blackmail Franz.
- Baloc, who was peeping on Ursula and Katia
- Stefano Vanzi, Dani's crazy ex-boyfriend.
- Big Bad: Franz is the killer.
- Blackmail Backfire:
- The shopkeep who sold the killer his scarf tries to blackmail him for 2 million lire, but the killer simply runs him over.
- The murders began because a couple women tried to blackmail Franz with his impotence, driving him into murderous insanity.
- Closed Circle: The villa is on a high mountain miles from the nearest village, the windows are barred, and the phone is broken.
- Clothing Combat: The killer's weapon is a black-on-red scarf, used for strangulation.
- Creepy Doll: The kills are interspersed with shots of a child poking one of these in the eyes. This is because he's reliving the trauma of watching his brother fall to his death while trying to retrieve said doll.
- Dehumanization: The killer doesn't view his victims as human, instead describing them as flesh dolls.
- Disney Villain Death: Franz is flung off a cliff while trying to kill the final girl and her rescuer.
- Dude Magnet: One scene features a literal crowd of men all ogling Ursula's legs. Unfortunately for them all, she's a lesbian.
- Evil Plan: The killer's end goal is to eliminate a witness to his crimes. As it turns out, his initial murders were motivated by a desire hide his impotency from blackmailers.
- Fan Disservice: A topless prostitute getting strangled for calling a client impotent.
- Fanservice: Nearly every female character gets naked at least once.
- Freudian Excuse: As a child, Franz watched his brother fall to his death while trying to retrieve a doll for a mutual friend. This led him to despise all women, viewing them as manipulative shrews and being physically unable to have sex with them. He started killing when some other women tried to blackmail him with his impotence.
- I Love the Dead: The killer loves fondling his victims after strangling them.
- Leave No Witnesses: The killer follows Dani to her uncle's villa because she saw him a while before Carol's murder, wearing the black-on-red scarf. This also is revealed to be the motive behind Stefano's murder.
- Peek-a-Boo Corpse: The killer rings the villa's doorbell in order to frighten the girls with Stefano's corpse.
- One-Word Title
- Red Herring: Stefano is briefly suspected to be the killer due to having a similar scarf, but it's shown to be just different enough to exonerate him.
- Too Dumb to Live: The scarf vendor, who tries to blackmail someone he knows had killed three people already.
- White Mask of Doom: The killer wears a black trench coat and a white mask.
