Forced Entry (1974, Review)
Note: Everywhere I look the release date of this movie is different. IMDB has it as 1973. Wikipedia has it as 1972. My date comes directly off of the After Hours Cinema website.
Writer/Director: Shaun Costello
Cast: Harry Reems
After Hours Cinema / Color / Rated X / NTSC R1 / Fullscreen 1.33:1 / Mono / 80 minutes / Purchase from DiabolikDVD.com
Harry Reems plays a no-named Vietnam Vet/rapist/serial killer with PTSD and suffers from flashbacks. Along with that comes his need to make up enemies and kill them as a way to deal with the pain. So, he uses his job at the local gas station to get girls’ addresses. Once he gets their info it’s on to the stalking, raping and finally the slashing. He uses the old “We don’t take cash here, I need a credit card along with your address for verification” bit… amateur.
But leave it to the free love and drugged out hippies who opposed the war to also bring down the murderous Vet. After a couple stalk/rape/slashes, he breaks into the loft of a couple of hot lesbian hippie chicks while they are having a drugged-out carpet munching party but they turn the tables on their would-be assailant. They completely take away his power by not only succumbing to him, but aggressively try to sex him up! What’s a delusional rapist to do?
“Sleazy, Graphic, Bloody and Dirty”. That’s the tagline and motto of Cinesploitation and this movie embodies all of these. Everything about this movie is dirty; the New York City locations, Harry Reems, the “plot” and even the actual film transfer. The camera shots are leering and intrusive. The whole movie is inter-cut with horrible footage from Vietnam and the War to bring everything down to a lower level. It’s just a filthy, grimy piece of celluloid.
Now, I didn’t enjoy the content of the movie, it would be very hard to, but I marveled at the absolute disregard writer/director Shaun Costello had for any sense of class or taste. He takes the camera to places it shouldn’t be. Extreme close-ups, almost fish-eye views of the horrified looks on the victim’s faces with Harry’s hairy shlong bouncing off of their nose and an actual “money shot” directly on the lens so that the rest of the scene is seen through a nice layer of Reems Juice. That’s just wrong in every possible sense.
Speaking of Mr. Reems, he was without his mustache and kind of reminded me of Henry Winkler…that made everything even creepier. They must have had a few lines of his in the can and ran them over and over throughout the movie. For every victim he could be heard saying stuff like, “I’m gonna like this”, “You do that real good”, “Don’t you stop”, “Prima-donnas with your big cars…”, and “That wasn’t so good”. But the nastiest line that was used only once while anally raping a girl, “You bleeding a little bit in there? I’ll show you bleeding”. Such a sweet talker.
With all of that being said, every exploitation, porn, extreme and “grindhouse” movie fan needs to see this movie. I loved the aesthetics and feel of the movie. If it would have had more of a plot, it would have been a perfect movie. But really, who wants a perfect full-on porn movie about a serial rapist/killer?
I do.
