Shaun Costello, Forced Entry, 1973
Not for the faint hearted, be warned. Harry Reems, who said it was the film he regretted making the most (I think he was wrong on that one), plays a seriously deranged Vietnam vet who "came home from the war with a party in his head".. Spoiler alert! He works at a gas station, and tricks young women into giving him their addresses on the pretext that the credit card machine isn't working, after which he follows them home with a bowie knife and a pistol, rapes and kills them. Until, that is, he meets a couple of seriously stoned hippie girls who aren't in the least bit scared of him, and turns the gun on himself. Not much of a spoiler really, as the first thing we see in the film is Harry's corpse with brains spilling over the floor, so we know he's due for a nasty end. What's truly bizarre is that the sex scenes - this is X-rated, btw - are absolutely not exciting (you'd have to be a pretty sick pup to get turned on by this stuff), and don't even seem intended to be: the first extended sex scene, which doesn't feature Reems at all - he's peeping through the window - is actually accompanied by a baroque concerto, hardly the sleazy funk usually associated with the genre.. And all of Reems' scenes are intercut with real, grainy footage of Vietnam war atrocities. And I mean atrocities. Plus there's plenty of Vietnamese traditional music - hardly the kind of stuff you'd put on the 8-track cartridge if you wanted to get it on with the love of your life! It's a trip, really. The script is terrible (that doesn't matter though since nobody can act), but the filming and editing is, in its vicious cut-up way, quite impressive: one wonders what point, if any, Costello wanted to make. It's too rough and ugly to be "artistic", but far too grim and repugnant to please the thrill-seekers of 42nd Street, where I assume it played. I'm no expert in squelchy, hairy 70s porn / exploitation films, and have no real desire to be, so I doubt I'll be watching any of the 60-odd skinflicks the director went on to make, but if you're interested in cinema as subversive art, you might, just might, want to try it. I suppose this is for the kind of "discerning punter" who'd pay $$$ for a VOD boxset of Sutcliffe Jugend. Best of British.
) is impressively autistic. Several questions remain tantalisingly unanswered, but the one that most readily springs to mind is: is Guy Pearce's moustache real?
If you want real angst I'd go for the one inside the cave I mentioned a few weeks ago, but if home-movie zombie bloodbaths are your cup of sangria, go for it!
