1974
Quentin Tarantino probably loves "The Centerfold Girls." That's a compliment.
This 1974 obscurity is a fairly decent suspense/slasher film with buckets of bright-red blood and scads of gratuitous nudity. What makes it unique, however, is its three-story structure. It's almost like it should be called "Sex Pervert Stalker: The Television Series."
Andrew Prine is the little-seen running thread through a troika of terror tales, all of which follow the same formula: Sexually warped, moral-minded social outcast (Prine, who looks oddly like singer Ben Folds and sounds like Dwight Schrute on "The Office") rings up a centerfold model on the pay phone, threatens to make her pays for her sins of the flesh, and then carries it out. The end. On to the next nudie cutie.
Victim No. 1 is a Good Samaritan nurse whose kindness backfires on her. Victim No. 2 (and 3 and 4 and ... ) is on a magazine shoot at a remote island. Finally, a stewardess is drugged and raped by two sailors before meeting our killer, who just might find his proverbial tables turned.
Dark Sky Films' disc gives the movie a treatment greater than most of its ilk are granted, with the most welcome extra being a 15-minute retrospective documentary interviewing several of the actors and filmmakers, who were just trying to do the best they could with what little they had. If you're not allergic to a little sleaze, you're apt to think they succeeded.
"?Rod Lott
