Well, it's official. I always thought Strip Nude for Your Killer and Play Motel were the sleaziest giallo I'd ever seen. Good news. Or bad news, depending on your morals. Ruggero Deodato is here to let you know that there's no limit to the depravity that he can bring to your TV set. Seriously, I feel like I have to wash it now after this one. I guess that's what I should expect from the maker of Cannibal Holocaust.

This movie starts off with a sex worker making love to a ponytailed man in a suit in the middle of her kitchen while her sister watches and touches herself. Trust me, it's not going to get any cleaner as it goes on.

Vida (Katarzyna Figura, The Player),Ludmilla and Sissy (Ilaria Borelli, Life Is Beautiful) are three gorgeous sisters living together in a Budapest apartment. The next day after the opening sex scene, Ludmilla finds the bloody remains of the ponytailed man, a pimp named Yury (Yorgo Voyagis, Frantic),in the washing machine.

Inspector Stacev responds to the police call, but the body is gone. He believes that this is all in Ludmilla's head but soon, he's making time with all three sisters. One by one, they tell him that they are innocent, blame one another and then have sex with him. Obviously, this makes his girlfriend Irina incredibly jealous.

So why are the girls putting him through this? Has there really been a murder? Is he next? How many sex scenes can Deodato fit into a film (the answer is an awful lot)?

Shameless put this out a few years ago and I've heard rumors that Arrow may be re-releasing this soon. It's pretty decent, but you might want to know what you're getting into before watching this with people not ready for the excesses of Italian films.

THE WASHING MACHINE (1993, original title Vortice mortale) is a late-stage giallo from the one and only Ruggero Deodato, of course famous for his notorious CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. Unfortunately aside from one gore scene there are no similarities to that gruelling masterpiece, and THE WASHING MACHINE is an example of the director having a real off day. As with many 1990s Italian films, it's a low budget, cheap-looking affair, set in a single apartment occupied by three strange sisters who discover a hacked-up body in their washing machine one night.

When our cop protagonist, as played by Philippe Cariot, investigates he can find no trace of a murder. Instead he spends most of his time bedding each of the sisters, each of whom has a specific character: the eldest is a brazen prostitute, the middle one an ethereal musician, the youngest a bisexual charity worker. The mystery is certainly convoluted and little happens, so the writer resorts to dream sequences and lots and lots of sex and female nudity which doesn't really make up for it. The solution to the mystery is one of the most ridiculous I've seen, a crushing disappointment and plain silly way to end the film. Unfortunately I didn't enjoy this one.

I recently watched Umberto Lenzi's TV movie House of Lost Souls, in which a boy is decapitated by a a possessed washing machine. Knowing nothing about Ruggero Deodato's The Washing Machine, I half expected a film full of such appliance-based craziness, but was surprised by a distinct lack of killer kitchen equipment. The washing machine in this late giallo from the director of Cannibal Holocaust remains lifeless and doesn't kill anyone; it is merely the receptacle for the dismembered body of a murdered man. Or is it?

Inspector Alexander Stacev (Philippe Caroit) is called to investigate the suspected murder of pimp Yuri Petkov (Yorgo Voyagis),as reported by luscious lush Ludmilla Kolba (Barbara Ricci),who claims that she saw the man's gory remains stashed in the washing machine in the apartment that she shares with her two sisters, buxom call-girl Vida (Katarzyna Figura) and seductive cutie Maria (Ilaria Borrelli). Of course, by the time Stacev arrives at the girls' home, the body has disappeared, leaving the cop to believe that Ludmilla imagined everything, the hallucinations of an alcoholic. Ludmilla continues to press the cop to investigate, and not one to say no to a beautiful woman (or three),he does so, his police procedure involving having sex with all three Kolba sisters (not at the same time - he's not THAT lucky!).

Often, when a giallo goes down the sleazy route, there's some indication of the sordid content in the title: Strip Nude For Your Killer, Naked You Die, Perversion Story, French Sex Murders... you get the idea. Not so here... hidden behind a misleadingly innocuous title lies an endless procession of semi-clothed or naked babes, Deodato filling the screen with as much tempting female flesh as possible: barely a minute goes by without some kind of gratuitous nudity, whether it be from the three sisters, or one of the random strippers that plug the gaps. The film's twisty-turny plot is fairly routine for the genre, and there are no elaborately staged death scenes, so it's a real bonus that there's so much top-notch Italian totty on display, the raunchiness really helping to hold one's interest.

Towards the end of the film, Deodato throws in a wonderfully messy scene in which Vida hacks away at a mutilated corpse, shoving her hand inside to pull out its organs, which will go some way to satisfying gore-hounds, but this film is all about the sexiness, and in that it definitely succeeds.

7/10. Take it for a spin!