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The Centerfold Girls (1974)

Dir: John Peyser

Clement Dunne (Andrew Prine, “Simon; King of the Witches”, "The Town that Dreaded Sundown") stalks the Centerfold girls of the month from a nudie magazine in a Bible hugging crusade to rid the world of sinful young babes who show their naked bodies (and won’t give him any) for pleasure and profit.
We join Clement as he’s burying his latest bimbette of the month victim and then follow him as he stalks three more unlucky models;

First up is Jackie (Jaime Lyn Bauer) who goes for a nursing job near her rich parent’s home in the mountains.
On the way she picks up scheming hippie bitch hitchhiker Linda (Janet Wood, “Terror at Red Wolf Inn“) and on arrival finds out from the sleazy owner of the local camping site, Mr Walker (Aldo Ray, “Death Dimension”), that the doctor who offered her the job has had to go away.
She and Linda then head up to Jackie’s house to wait until the Doc comes back.
Jackie gets a nasty fright though when Linda’s Scumbag hippie freeloading friends gatecrash the house and get nasty. And all the while be-speckled Clement watches and waits…

Next up is fun loving Charly (Jennifer Ashley) who goes to a remote island for a weekend photo shoot
With two other models and a squabbling crew that includes sleazy model agency exec Harry Sutton (Ray Danton, ‘Legs Diamond’ himself) who likes the girls pander to him for extra privileges.
While everyone tries to bed everyone else, when not shouting at each other, Clement sneaks onto the island to brings about his own brand of retribution.

Lastly we meet Air Stewardess Vera, (Tiffany Bolling, “The Candy Snatchers”) who, already freaked by the flowers and accompanying phone call from Clement, hits the road to get away from things.
Only to bump into some less than helpful Sailors as good old Clement steams up his glasses in anticipation of his next kill…....

 

Aside from it’s 70’s TV style yellow credits, the opening of “The Centerfold Girls” delivers everything a good slice of Exploitation should.
As Rob Zombie would do rather more explicitly many years later in “The Devil’s Rejects” (thus the power of 70’s cinema goes on) Director John Peyser opens “The Centerfold Girls” with it’s killer dragging the corpse of his latest victim along the ground.

Shown from the start in only panties, with her slit throat dribbling blood down her naked breasts, the victim is coldly dragged to her sandy grave as the camera lingers on nakedness.
It’s the kind of dark opening that signposts the bleakness to come in the rest of the film.
All this is backed with a genuinely creepy and schizoid score by Mark Wolin (performed by ‘Wheeze’) which flicks from typically funky 70’s cues to delightfully effective harpsichord moments that sound like they came from a Walerian Borowczyk film.

The film’s first story also gets the post credits bulk of the film off to a strong start.
Here is a genuinely nasty tale with an already stalked and scared young women finding no respite from the horrors even away in the mountains.
The house invading hippies carry a strong Manson Family vibe and when their amazing unpleasantness is added to the sly betrayal of Linda they become truly repugnant characters and we hate what they put Jackie through.
This is the 70’s comedown from the fairyland falsehood of 60’s ‘peace and free love’ movement at, it’s most non-Manson, strongest.
The addition of Aldo Ray’s scummy, supposed good Samaritan adds yet more woe and downright bitterness to the movie as well as even the most base attributes of reasoned humanity are thrown onto the garbage heap.
Prine’s Clement Dunne is basically just a living, breathing ‘plot twist’ in this tale, playing no part in the main hippie invasion storyline, and is at his most effective as he realistically bides his time, waiting like a vulture to have the final feed on Jackie’s abused being.

Clement does far more in the (far less effective) ‘island shoot’ middle story where he sadly becomes a kind of pre-Slasher era Slasher tracking multiple victims down (including men), with a guile and strength he seems not to have throughout the rest of the film, thus giving him the kind of physical power and killing skills that don’t go with your realistically grounded 70’s psycho.
The addition of two other girls and three photo ‘crew’ also means that the main target of Dunne, Charly, becomes simply just another would be victim in a rather dull hodge-podge of superfluous characters and sub-plots (all shot in murky, drab, semi-darkness) and so it feels even more distant from the rest of the film than it already is.

Although with more screen time again Clement goes back to mostly being the curtain call boogieman in the 3rd and final part of the movie where once again we follow the screamingly unfair perils of our Centerfold girl Vera knowing all along that despite all that is happening…she has still to face the stalking Clement before the end credits roll.
At least, as this is the last story, we have some chance at hope that all may work out well at the end for our would-be victim. Something cruelly and obviously not present during the other parts.
This also features a top class finale with ash covered scrubland dotted with blackened tree stumps providing the backdrop for the final confrontation between victim and killer to play out.

Although the nudity sticks firmly to T & A territory as with all these cocktails of sex and violence thee nudity is given an extra streak of sleaziness purely because of context. This also applies to the violence of course which, although it only consists of a couple of cut throat wounds and various blood squirts and splatters, is given an extra boost by the closeness of bared flesh to grizzly death.
The superior first and last tales are packed with nasty incident and evil male characters and carry a sense of utter hopelessness for the women characters.
The film offers a very scary view of what the 70’s were like (at least according to films) for any pretty girl on her own. No male character given any kind of screen time is to be trusted and almost all are brutal rapists, molesters, killers and general low life. Lock up your Daughters indeed!
Thus the film becomes one of the bleakest, all hope dies twitching, exploitation movies of the 70’s.

Performances are almost universally good here, even the support characters.
Although Ray Danton (a true up and down acting career there) is wasted, Aldo Ray has one of his best post-stardom roles (truly a career of great highs and pittiful lows) and makes for a memorable scuzzball and the growling veteran Mike Mazurki has a great moment, as the annoyed ’caretaker’ of the photo shoot island, when he barks out his dislike for the queen bitch running the show in a way the audience surely wants to and it’s sure a big step (down, to be fair, as far as career status goes) from the likes of 1944’s “Murder, My Sweet” and the John Wayne vehicle “Donovan’s Reef” to “The Centerfold Girls”.

As far as the ’Centerfold girls’ themselves go, Jennifer Ashley ("Tinotera") looks nice but otherwise make no impression at all in her cluttered middle story.
Tiffany Bolling does an excellent job though in the third story and is given a wonderful scene of snarling defiance that the other girls are denied.
But it is perhaps Jaime Lyn Bauer (in what seems to be her only theatrical outing as she would later work exclusively on TV) who makes the biggest impression as the poor Jackie and she truly gives it her all as she essays, with great sincerity, one of cinema’s most hapless and luckless heroines.
And out of all the would be razor fodder on show in the film her character is the one we feel the most for.

But it is Andrew Prine‘s psycho who ultimately dominates proceedings and the ‘pure‘ blinding white room that his black clad killer inhabits and the sometimes bizarrely angled close-ups he is given show that Peyser and his cinematographer Robert Maxwell (“The Candy Snatchers”, “Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song”) want to hammer home to the viewer just how damaged Clement is and just how estranged he is from the rest of the world.
Prine has many delightfully twitchy moments and is given a lot of barely controlled rants (“I’m not going to allow you to expose you naked body anymore”!) and Prine shows just why he became such a popular and prolific actor whose truly scatter shot career goes from mainstream studio output like the (yet another) John Wayne vehicle “Chisum” (where he memorably went out in style as Alex McSween, the ill-fated pawn in the battle of wits between the law and Billy the Kid) to out and out Drive-In/Grindhouse sleaze like this and the infamous “Barn of the Naked Dead”, to appearance in almost every popular American TV show every made.

So overall “The Centerfold Girls” delivers all you could hope for from its slightly more discreet brand of 70’s Exploitation and it’s a shame that the two excellent little tales of nastiness, cruelty, tragedy, despair and madness bookend a sadly plodding and needlessly crowded middle section.
But even this problem is ultimately overcome by the film’s many strengths and “The Centerfold Girls” certainly deserves a much higher profile than it has.
As it is this review is the probably the most detailed (certainly the most pictorial) you’ll find on The Net, and that’s quite frankly less than the film deserves.