Ein Bulle für alle Fälle

There were a lot of great exploitation movies made in the '70s. This was not one of them.

Dirty O'Neil (1974) is a movie I recently watched on Amazon Prime. The storyline is about a police officer who uses his sex appeal to get in good with all kinds of ladies. As a police officer there seems to be ladies around every corner and every one wants him. Will O'Brien ever be more than a womanizer? This movie is codirected by Leon Capetanos (Summer Run) and Lewis Teague (Cujo) and stars Morgan Paull (Blade Runner), Art Metrano (Police Academy 2 & 3), Jeane Manson (The Piano Player) and Katie Saylor (Supervan). The storyline for this picture is painful. For being a ladies man Officer O'Neil seemed to consistently struggle talking with the ladies. It felt like a writer who was a non-ladies man writing about a ladies man. There are all of the great nude scenes you'd expect from this era - shower scenes, locker room scenes, peeping-tom scenes, soft sex scenes, topless swimming scenes and every other soft porn scenario. I will say the final shootout came out of nowhere and was extremely entertaining and actually raised this grade an entire point for me for what was an underwhelming film until that point. I'd score this a 5/10 and would watch it if you can't find anything else interesting.

While flicking through the Amazon Prime video recommendations, Dirty O'Neil appeared as "something you might like". Never having heard of if and with a poster that looked like a 70's exploitation flick, I gave it a go. Because I currently have a thing for 70's movies due to era being somewhat less cluttered than the current decade.

Dirty O'Neil is obviously a play on Dirty Harry but that is where the similarities end. Because what makes O'Neil dirty is has habit of picking up and sleeping with random women. And this is the main draw of the movie. 1970's women. Women without tattoos, piercings, lip filler, butt lifts, a healthy slim weight and natural hair colour. Never to be repeated. While it has hints of a sexploitation movie, its not quite at the level required to fit into that category. As this has an actual plot. O'Neil works in a small hick town that a bunch of hoodlums invade and its down to him to deal with them. While the first hour is fairly light in tone, the final act is like something out of a Death Wish movie. Also be on the lookout for Captain Mauser from police academy. This must have been the job he had before he moved up the ranks.

"Dirty O'Neil" is something else. It starts with a violent robbery then it becomes a okay T&A movie before wrapping that forgotten robbery stuff up. It plays like an edited soft-core movie. By that I mean it never reaches the sex level of that genre but there is a bunch of welcome nudity. If this movie went for the PG crowd it would have been truly awful. But because it proudly went for the R crowd, it's actually watchable. Pretty stupid but watchable.

1970s drive in curiosity, better production values for this type of film. Small town populated by what seems like models at every corner wearing no bras and willing to immediately sleep with the new office in town. Some criminal action later moves the movie in a different direction. Still a low brow movie given the very prominent role that women's breasts are given here.