Let Me Pose a Question: What Was the Point?
This weekend's review: The Centerfold Girls.
I decided to watch The Centerfold Girls because the summary on IMDB made it sound like a thriller of the “cops have to defeat a serial killer” variety. Furthermore, said serial killer had an interesting hook, so I was reasonably hopeful going in. Unfortunately, what I actually got was a deeply unpleasant movie.
The movie does indeed focus on a serial killer (Andrew Prine), and as you can probably guess by the title, his M.O. is to kill women who were centerfolds in one specific magazine (I can’t remember what the title was, but it wasn’t a name that’s immediately recognizable like Playboy). But instead of being one straightforward narrative that focuses on the cops trying to catch the killer, the movie is made up of three vignettes, each focusing on a different victim. The killer himself only appears sporadically, mostly in the form of disturbing phone calls or brief shots to establish that he’s stalking his target. The rest of the time, we follow the girls and the things that happen to them before the killer finally gets his opportunity to strike. In a way, the movie winds up being a horror movie, not only because of the lurking killer but because the women always turn out to have a horrible time even before the killer gets involved.
It turns out that this movie was an exploitation movie, and thus primarily existed as a bit of softcore titillation. So naturally, the girls are seen topless quite a bit, especially so in the second vignette, where model Charly (Jennifer Ashley) and some other girls go to a mansion on a secluded island to do a photoshoot. Given the title, I was prepared for that. What I was not prepared for was how horribly the women would be treated. Our first heroine, Jackie (Jaime Lyn Bauer) winds up in a situation that was transplanted from another horror movie, wherein a young girl (Janet Wood) she allowed to stay the night is actually part of a group of hippies who make themselves at home before deciding it would be fun to torment Jackie in increasingly unsettling ways, including making sure she can’t leave the house. And after she escapes that situation, she gets leered at and worse by the hotel owner (Aldo Ray) she went to for help. And it’s only after that that our killer finally makes an appearance. Charly’s story winds up playing out like a slasher movie, as the killer makes his way through the house, killing everyone one by one. The only difference is that he seems to be killing the others mostly because they’re in his way. As for the third woman, Vera (Tiffany Bolling), not only does she spend most of her story attempting to flee the killer (the police finally having gotten involved at this point), but she winds up in a horrific situation with two sailors. I was more upset by the gratuitous cruelty than the gratuitous nudity, and can’t help but wonder why or how anybody would find this sexy. Then again, this was made in the 1970’s, by all accounts a pretty unpleasant decade, so it fits right in.
On the few occasions I could look past the nastiness taking place on screen, I found myself either shaking or scratching my head at some of the decisions people were making. For example, if you felt you absolutely had to split up when a killer was on the loose, and your friend had a gun to protect herself, wouldn’t you give her a heads up that you were about to enter the room she was in? Or if your friend had been told to hide somewhere so a killer couldn’t find her, and you were one of the few she trusted with her location, would you blithely give out the address to someone who called asking for it, even if they claimed to be a friend of hers? Or, if you started getting a series of threatening phone calls from the killer, and you called the police after being told to do so by a detective only to learn that it’s that detective’s day off, wouldn’t you be more likely to tell the operator what was going on so she could direct you to someone who could help rather than hanging up the phone and trying to handle the situation yourself? Even the killer does something a bit inexplicable to me. He keeps a copy of the magazine that has an insert with all the centerfolds in it, and after killing one of the girls, he cuts her photo’s head off. I had assumed that he would be killing the girls in order, i.e. Miss January, Miss February, Miss March, etc., and that each girl got her own page in the insert. Instead, the pages of centerfold pictures appear to be double sided, because he actually goes after Miss January, Miss March, Miss May, etc. Since most stories featuring serial killers with specific themes have them strictly follow the proper order (see Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders as well as And Then There Were None), this was very jarring to me, especially since there was no explanation for it and it didn’t feel like a subversion of expectations. Though maybe I was just clinging onto that detail because it was one of the least awful things on display.
Stay far, far away from this movie. To quote Hobbes, it’s nasty, brutish, poor, and short (well, 90 minutes, but it’s short by today’s standards), and has pretty much no redeeming qualities. While horror and exploitation movies aren’t genres I’m very familiar with, I’m almost positive you can do much better than this on both counts. Heck, given how slasher movies seem to work, there’s probably plenty of movies where you can get both at once and still have it be more wholesome than this movie.
CAT ALERT: During the second vignette, there are occasional shots of a cat wandering around the grounds of the house. It adds nothing to the story, but I appreciate it being there. Especially since nothing bad happened to it.
I decided to watch The Centerfold Girls because the summary on IMDB made it sound like a thriller of the “cops have to defeat a serial killer” variety. Furthermore, said serial killer had an interesting hook, so I was reasonably hopeful going in. Unfortunately, what I actually got was a deeply unpleasant movie.
The movie does indeed focus on a serial killer (Andrew Prine), and as you can probably guess by the title, his M.O. is to kill women who were centerfolds in one specific magazine (I can’t remember what the title was, but it wasn’t a name that’s immediately recognizable like Playboy). But instead of being one straightforward narrative that focuses on the cops trying to catch the killer, the movie is made up of three vignettes, each focusing on a different victim. The killer himself only appears sporadically, mostly in the form of disturbing phone calls or brief shots to establish that he’s stalking his target. The rest of the time, we follow the girls and the things that happen to them before the killer finally gets his opportunity to strike. In a way, the movie winds up being a horror movie, not only because of the lurking killer but because the women always turn out to have a horrible time even before the killer gets involved.
It turns out that this movie was an exploitation movie, and thus primarily existed as a bit of softcore titillation. So naturally, the girls are seen topless quite a bit, especially so in the second vignette, where model Charly (Jennifer Ashley) and some other girls go to a mansion on a secluded island to do a photoshoot. Given the title, I was prepared for that. What I was not prepared for was how horribly the women would be treated. Our first heroine, Jackie (Jaime Lyn Bauer) winds up in a situation that was transplanted from another horror movie, wherein a young girl (Janet Wood) she allowed to stay the night is actually part of a group of hippies who make themselves at home before deciding it would be fun to torment Jackie in increasingly unsettling ways, including making sure she can’t leave the house. And after she escapes that situation, she gets leered at and worse by the hotel owner (Aldo Ray) she went to for help. And it’s only after that that our killer finally makes an appearance. Charly’s story winds up playing out like a slasher movie, as the killer makes his way through the house, killing everyone one by one. The only difference is that he seems to be killing the others mostly because they’re in his way. As for the third woman, Vera (Tiffany Bolling), not only does she spend most of her story attempting to flee the killer (the police finally having gotten involved at this point), but she winds up in a horrific situation with two sailors. I was more upset by the gratuitous cruelty than the gratuitous nudity, and can’t help but wonder why or how anybody would find this sexy. Then again, this was made in the 1970’s, by all accounts a pretty unpleasant decade, so it fits right in.
On the few occasions I could look past the nastiness taking place on screen, I found myself either shaking or scratching my head at some of the decisions people were making. For example, if you felt you absolutely had to split up when a killer was on the loose, and your friend had a gun to protect herself, wouldn’t you give her a heads up that you were about to enter the room she was in? Or if your friend had been told to hide somewhere so a killer couldn’t find her, and you were one of the few she trusted with her location, would you blithely give out the address to someone who called asking for it, even if they claimed to be a friend of hers? Or, if you started getting a series of threatening phone calls from the killer, and you called the police after being told to do so by a detective only to learn that it’s that detective’s day off, wouldn’t you be more likely to tell the operator what was going on so she could direct you to someone who could help rather than hanging up the phone and trying to handle the situation yourself? Even the killer does something a bit inexplicable to me. He keeps a copy of the magazine that has an insert with all the centerfolds in it, and after killing one of the girls, he cuts her photo’s head off. I had assumed that he would be killing the girls in order, i.e. Miss January, Miss February, Miss March, etc., and that each girl got her own page in the insert. Instead, the pages of centerfold pictures appear to be double sided, because he actually goes after Miss January, Miss March, Miss May, etc. Since most stories featuring serial killers with specific themes have them strictly follow the proper order (see Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders as well as And Then There Were None), this was very jarring to me, especially since there was no explanation for it and it didn’t feel like a subversion of expectations. Though maybe I was just clinging onto that detail because it was one of the least awful things on display.
Stay far, far away from this movie. To quote Hobbes, it’s nasty, brutish, poor, and short (well, 90 minutes, but it’s short by today’s standards), and has pretty much no redeeming qualities. While horror and exploitation movies aren’t genres I’m very familiar with, I’m almost positive you can do much better than this on both counts. Heck, given how slasher movies seem to work, there’s probably plenty of movies where you can get both at once and still have it be more wholesome than this movie.
CAT ALERT: During the second vignette, there are occasional shots of a cat wandering around the grounds of the house. It adds nothing to the story, but I appreciate it being there. Especially since nothing bad happened to it.