Halloween Edition: The Centerfold Girls (1974) Movie Review

The Centerfold Girls (1974) Movie Review

**SPOILER ALERT! This review contains the movie ending**

The premise of this movie is that Clement Dunne (Andrew Prine) stalks and kills centerfold girls that he finds in a men's magazine for making the world a "flithy" place.

This movie is comprised of three completely different stories with the only similarity being Celment stalking all three women. The first part of this movie follows Jackie (Jaime Lyn Bauer) who offers to drive a women, who's waiting for her boyfriend, closer to a town she needs to be at. She lets the woman stay overnight at her cabin only to have it be a trick and her crazy hippie friends show up, trash the house and attempt to rape her. When she runs to the neighbors to get help, the wife calls the police and after Jackie is finished giving her information the husband escorts her home. After bring her back into her cabin he attempts to rape her and she doesn't have any fight left to fight back. Since she was wasn't fighting back he just leaves her instead. Minutes later Clement comes into her house and offers to help her. She figures out just seconds to late that his voice is the same one as the creepy guy who keeps calling her and he kills her.

This is by far the worst of the three stories and I almost completely gave up watching it during the weird hippie cabin party and the two near rape scenes. 

The second story followed Charly (Jennifer Ashley) who is with a group of models that go to a secluded beach house to do a photo shoot. She also receives calls from Clement and he follows them to the beach house where one by one he ends up killing all the girls including Charly. 

It's the best of the three stories because it's the one that is closest to being a slasher film and didn't involve any rape (or possible rape) scenes though it did feature one of the photographers getting sexual favors in the hopes of him introducing her to famous people. 

Barbara is the third girl who takes off for a new location when she receives flowers and phone calls from Clement. He stalks her, finds her and she tries to get away again by hitching a ride from two sailors headed back to her hometown. But in the style of this movie, they instead drug and rape her. Clement comes in with the police to try and "protect" her while making up a story about his wife and offering to drive her back to where she was trying to go. She goes with him and during a gas station stop she notices the open mens magazine in the backseat with her face circled. When he comes back to the car he sees that she's seen the magazine and drives her to a secluded area where he he attempts to kill her which backfires after she knocks his glasses off and in the final movie scenes it shows Barbara killing Clement.

This movie is ahead of it's time as "torture porn" movies didn't really become popular for several more decades and features more topless scenes than any other 70s movie I have watched. There were to many downsides for this movie. Having three different movies mashed into one was hard because as soon as I got to know each girl, they were killed (or in the third girls case, the movie ended). This movie could have improved greatly if the whole movie had taken place at the beach house and all three girls he was stalking were located there which would make it much easier to tie the stories together. As much as I hate when there is too much back story told, I also hate it when there isn't any. Other than the claims he made about these women "dirtying the minds of others" I don't really know why he wanted these women dead. Also if you decide to give no back story to your main character, it comes across really awkward and confusing to give him quirks that the viewers notice but will never understand because they don`t have any back story. Why will he only use his switchblade (which he refers to as "his friend") to kill the girls but use other devises to kill other characters? Also why does he keep a shoe from each of the centerfold victims? We will never know.

In the end, this movie made all men out to be rapists (since almost every main male character raped a woman, attempted to rape a women or used blackmail in order for sexual favors). It also made every woman out to be a complete bonehead who can`t seem to learn from their mistakes. 

I would only recommend this movie to people who enjoy watching "torture porn" movies with the 70s era stamped all over it. To everyone else, avoid it like the plague.

Grade: D-

Check back tomorrow for a movie review from a 1981 title!