By Richard Winters
My Rating: 4 out of 10
4-Word Review: Coach kills pretty students.
Ponce (John David Carson) is an awkward teen in his senior year of high school that still hasn’t been out on a date. He suffers from having erections at the most inopportune times and too shy to ask out one of the many beautiful female students that populate his school. He also finds himself dealing with a series of murders of pretty coeds who turn up dead with funny little notes attached to them and he starts to suspect that the killer may be the school’s beloved football coach (Rock Hudson).
The film, which is based on a novel by Francis Pollini with a screenplay written by Gene Roddenberry starts out well with sharp, satirical dialogue and funny situations dealing with the police investigation, but then deteriorates into smarmy sex jokes and becomes nothing more than a teasing T&A flick. The script makes it obvious early on that the coach is the killer and had it not revealed this so quickly it could’ve made the film more of a mystery and given the ending an impactful twist.
My main beef though is that it takes place in a high school instead of a college even though all the students look to be well into their 20’s. The fact that the coach has sex with the female students makes the thing seem off-kilter as does Angie Dickinson who plays a teacher who brings Ponce into her home to help him with his erection problem. If the setting was a college with the student characters over 18 than all this tawdriness would at least be legal and less outrageous.
The female students come off as being too free-spirited and reflect the counter-culture movement that occurred mainly on the college campuses of that era and not the high schools. They also all look too much like models. A realistic portrait of a high school class will have a variety of body types not just those of women ready to become cover-girls. I enjoy beautiful women as much as anybody, but the film should’ve had at least one average or overweight female in the cast simply to give it balance and avoid it from seeming too much like a tacky male fantasy, which is all this thing ends up being anyways.
Hudson, with his monotone delivery, is a weak actor and gave only one good performance in his career, which was in the film Giant. Yet here his discombobulated acting skills successfully reflect his character’s confused personality. Carson is a bland protagonist and his presence doesn’t have much to do with how the plot progresses. His character is put in solely for a dull side-story dealing with his attempts to get-it-on with his teacher in her home, which amounts to being just a dumb comic variation of Tea and Sympathy that is neither funny nor sexy.
The supporting cast is far better. Telly Savalas owns the screen as a relentless investigator. Keenan Wynn is hilarious as a dim-witted policeman in one of the funniest roles of his prolific career and he’s the best thing in the movie.
My Rating: 4 out of 10
Released: February 26, 1971
Runtime: 1Hour 31Minutes
Rated R
Director: Roger Vadim
Studio: MGM
Available: DVD, YouTube
Scopophilia 
Flat and dull. Some of the performances are shockingly amateurish nd the whole film feels like a put on.
Ok, Rock was never a Burton or an Olivier, but one good performance?. No, he was perfectly good in films like Ice Station Zebra or Tobruk, and was vg in Seconds (1966). That’s his best.
I agree, I liked him SECONDS, but in most of his films he came off as stiff and his monotone sounding delivery was always an issue.
He’s cast against type which works here and is the only thing about this tawdry MGM release that does work. The film is tone deaf and the comedy never really works and some of the acting is incredibly bad. So bad in fact that you feel like you’re watching outtakes. At least Hudson seems professional.
And Hudson was at his very best, in my view, in the superb Day-Rock comic trilogy (Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, Send Me No Flowers); and of course in the Sirk films like Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels etc.
Agree about this one however, and gave up half-way through …