The Centerfold Girls

Superb exploitation nasty. I loved this one. Real dirty and gritty and fast moving. Well-directed with some nice performances.

Andrew Prine is perfectly cast as a saddle-shoe-wearing nerd who is out to "save" all the calender/pin-up girls he can ("save" as in split their head open with a razor). And he really goes about his business. With his ultra-skinny physique and creepy/quirky demeanor he projects kind of a low-rent Norman Bates quality.

Film has three (or is it four?) different stories, each following a girl that Prine is tracking down. The killing is ruthless and quick and somewhat unsettling. Also unsettling is that the girls bounce from one horrific situation to the other like pinballs (ALL the men in this movie are creeps - and most of the women, too!!!).

If you get a chance, and if exploitation with a sharp-edge is your bag check this one out, you might like it.

This film boasts a large cast of beautiful women in various states of undress. For some that may be plenty of inducement to watch. For others it might help to add that it is also the odessey of a serial killer in their midst, slitting throats where he can and extemporizing on other occasions. His motive, he says, is to help these women who have posed nude, or at least topless, in a Playboy-like men's magazine as centerfold models. At a guess, he believes he is helping them abandon their evil ways, the visions of which must haunt his darkest dreams. Though his motive is never explained, his speech patterns, mannerisms, and expressions plainly bespeak a psychopath. Andrew Prine as Clement Dunne shows us quiet madness and menace in a perfect composite. Everything about him, including his wardrobe (black) and living quarters (white) whispers "absolutely unhinged." The film consists of three separate stories, each featuring a different centerfold girl, but all three are bound together by the presence of Dunne and his scalpel. The third and final story may be the most intense as it concludes with a confrontation in a horrible landscape of burnt hillsides and charred trees, a nightmare background against which the violence unfolds. Dunne's third victim, Vera, (Tiffany Bolling) fights back and nobody skates. A truly fine thriller

This is a special exploitation film. There are no possible doubt around the intention of the creators (you have as much sleaze and nudity as you could ask for), but still the film manages to stand out from other similar works thanks to: fist, being a kind of anthology movie, with the common threat of a serial killer that prays on beautiful and successful women, but showing the story of each woman kind of independently. The other thing that makes the movie quite attractive in this subgenre, is its low budget and naturalistic attitude, that the natural grittiness of 70s cinema enhanced even more. From the first sequence of the burial of a body without any music or dialogues, the mood sets in immediately.

This is the Grindhouse feature that Quentin Tarantino tried to make but failed.

Director John Peyser had a solid filmography for episodic television going back to the 1950s.

Here he turns is hand on a low budget sleazy horror thriller with equal aplomb. He just knew to give the audience lots of bare breasted women.

Andrew Prine is tall creepy Clement Dunne a religious fanatic who is turned on by the naked women who pose for men's magazine but also repulsed by these brazen hussies. Dunne wants to help these centrefolds out which means slashing their throats.

The film has three chapters each featuring a centerfold of the month. The women disrobe easily. The men are all scumbags willing to rape at the drop of a hat.

It has all the ingredients of 1970s Grindhouse but Peyser brings an artistic quality based on his production experience. The acting is better and there is a great scene at the end as Dunne gets his comeuppance.

A men's magazine with beautiful women nude... a deranged killer who fights in the name of modesty. What happens when he gets their names and traces their private numbers? As you can imagine, bloody mayhem. And this is all before the hippies and rapists show up...

"Centerfold Girls" (known some places as "Girl Hunter") is a strange film... not visually strange, not strange in its telling... but strange in that the plot shifts in ways you will not expect it to at first. We seemingly follow Jackie, a nurse and former model, as she befriends Linda and stays lodged out of town... confronted by wild, rapist hippies (including one who wears a Coors box for a hat). But despite all this, Jackie is not the main character... we don't see much of her after the first half hour.

This film has a style that is hard to dislike. The murders are simple but effective, with the killer being a truly likable character with horn-rimmed glasses and saddleback shoes. (Don't worry, I'm not giving away anything -- he stands in the open throughout the film.) And the cast and crew is largely unknown, at least today. You may have heard of Aldo Ray or Ray Danton, but I doubt this. The director (John Peyser, mostly known for television work) and writers (Bob Peete and Arthur Marks) are obviously talented, but not household names in the world of horror.

Even the "star" (if one can call him that), is largely a television actor with bit parts. Andrew Prine, who plays killer Clement Dunne, is the glue that holds this entire movie together. Yet, as much as I loved him, I'm hard-pressed to name another movie he's in. Okay, that's not entirely true. The mid-70s saw him not only in "Centerfold Girls", but also in the now classic "Town That Dreaded Sundown" and "Crypt of the Living Dead" (directed by Ray Danton, and available in certain public domain horror collections).

My one concern, and this has been raised by other reviewers, is the lack of background on Clement Dunne. What does he do for a living? What made him want to kill women, and why did he pick the particular magazine he did? How does he track down the addresses and phone numbers for his victims? This lack of information did not take away from the picture, but makes me wonder. A sequel would probably have worked well, but it's a bit late now.

The box calls this a movie from the "sleazy" 1970s, an "exploitation" film in the "grindhouse" tradition. Now, I don't know if this is grindhouse, but they are dead-on with the exploitation and sleaze comments. Nudity abounds in this film, and if more than five minutes go by without someone getting topless (often for no reason), I'd be surprised. And then the (attempted and successful) rapes... not just one, but more like three. In one movie!

Dark Sky Films offers a nice, crisp picture and sound on this disc, while still capturing the gritty quality of the original film. While the special features are somewhat lacking (an audio commentary would be nice), the 15-minute featurette "Making the Cut" offers a great look back and really puts the picture in perspective. That, and a "musical cues" feature, which makes sense to me since the music was very unique and apparent throughout the picture (next to Prine, the music of Mark Wolin is my favorite thing about this film -- and this was his only work). I would encourage anyone to give this title a fair chance.