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Zero in and Scream (1970)

Dir: Lee Frost (as Les Emerson)

A sniper is roaming the Hollywood hills! He's targeting sexually active males and the Police seem helpless!

The Sniper (Michael Stearns) sits cleaning his rifle as he listens to the news reports of his killing spree and the calls for him to give himself up. But he's on a mission.
It turns out he's a warped moralist who is angered at the exploitation of women by men…and the loss of their purity by sexual contact!
"When a man climbs on top of a woman she becomes ugly" he declares later on.

While in a counter top strip/nude dancing club (stripping is fine as he sees it as a women taking pride in her God-given body) he meets a blonde dancer and takes an instant liking to her.
Seeing as this is the free and easy 70's she eventually invites him to a 'party'.

The party is full of groovy 'kids' are screwing, smoking and swimming...But Sniper only sits in a chair, cradling his drink and looking on in a barely concealed mix of disgust and jealousy.

Sniper just can't seem to pluck up the courage to groove with the 'chicks' and the 'cats' and so leaves the party with frustrated images of what was going on, and what his stripper must be up to with the guy who told him the party was over and it was time to blow.
And sure enough, because he didn't get his weapon out…he goes and gets his weapon out!
His long range, scoped weapon which deals death!
Goodbye to the 'Groovy Cat' who's, sure enough, screwing the stripper in the pool.

Where will this madness end!??

Basically this is a softcore sex flick with a loony on the loose subplot tagged on.
The entire plot literally stops for 10-minute chunks of slow motion sex and nudity.

The nude dancing sequence brings lots of welcome full frontal nudity and it's a groovy slice of 70's life…But the dancing is pretty lifeless or just plain bad (and not always in keeping with the music being played on the soundtrack) and the atmosphere of the club is zero due to the lack of any other sound other than the music, there's just no ambience to the club setting.
It also stops the film stone dead before it's really got going I'm all for pubic proliferation…but a 10-minute downtime in any plot propulsion is a bit much.

The next big sequence (in a film clocking in at barely an hour) is the swinging party.
The low-key jazz soundtrack heard in the club carries on into this sequence and pretty much the film as a whole.
It definitely adds an unusually dreamlike feel to the movie, but it also has the rather less welcome effect of nearly lulling the viewer to sleep! Especially when accompanied by slow and languid (and again, overly long) naked underwater swimming.
It's like a Naturist relaxation film!

Languid (of course) Lesbian love on a lilo follows before a spot of Hetro fondling with unexpected penis close-ups (there are in fact many gangling appendages on show just to add to the overall sleaze factor. Which is of course excellent!), so lets hear it for equality!
But for this scene the music gets even worse, with dreary cello playing that sounds like a funeral dirge. This would be a welcome change from the normal groove and grind funk that normally accompanies 'Grindhouse' groping, but there's just too much of it!
On a hot afternoon in a sweltering 42nd Street dive, this must have put at least a few patrons into a deep sleep.
It's a nice touch, but only in moderation. Come on people! Funk this thing up a bit!

One underwater fantasy sequence, where Sniper imagines himself making love to the stripper, features some superbly staged and filmed nudity and actually leads into an effectively nightmarish conclusion…but you could have cut the scene in half and it would have been far more effective.

But at least the nudity is open and honest with plenty of female groin close-ups and between the leg shots during the swimming pool sequences.
And also welcome is the total lack of grotesque plastic boobs and 'Barbie doll' shave jobs. It's the 70's people, and bodies were real, natural and a damn sight more sexy.

The sex itself is, as said, only softcore but the many oral/penetration couplings are as explicit as you could get at the time without actually showing anything close-up or 'real'.
Also, like the nudity, the sex is free and natural and really does come across as a bunch of kids just letting rip with that free love feeling. A lengthy Lesbian lovemaking sequence (viewed via the Sniper's annoyingly small scope lens) is perhaps the best example of this, as it paints a n uninhibited picture of two people simply enjoying each other. It's groovy man. It's righteous!

Director Lee Frost is one of the best known names in the world of exploitation, helming such well loved Grindhouse faves as "The Defilers", the 'Video Nasty' branded "Love Camp 7" and the cult Blacksploitation title of unwarranted infamy "The Black Gestapo".
I have sadly not had the chance to view the much admired "The Defilers", but having seen "Black Gestapo" and Love Camp 7" I can certainly say that the same lack of energy to the proceedings that those two movies suffered from is just as evident here.

Of course it has a certain charm, the charm that these Grindhouse oddities always bring with them due to their very nature, and the prolific and open nudity is most welcome, but it's most certainly a film of extreme schizophrenia.
A 'killer on the loose' flick that spends too much time being a sex romp and yet is just too morbid and maudlin in it's style and pacing to appeal as a groovy skin flick.
A nice try with some nice touches…But ultimately it's just too damn uncertain of what it wants to be and too 'dreamy' in it's execution.
And there is so much potential in the basic story that a far more interesting film should have come from it.