Category Archives: Movies with Nudity

Porky’s (1981)

Posted on November 21, 2025 | 2 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Revenge on nightclub owner.

Pee Wee (Dan Monahan) is a teen living in the Florida everglades during the 1950’s who suffers from a small penis size, which has prevented him from losing his virginity. He and his high school pals have hatched a plan of pooling their money together and then hiring a prostitute, which they can then all have sex with. Their first attempt doesn’t work out, so they decide to go to a nightclub that sits in a lagoon on stilts and is called Porky’s, which is the nickname of the owner of the establishment, ‘Porky’ Wallace (Chuck Mitchell) that he attained for being overweight. The boys feel they’ll be able to hire one of the strippers at the club to have sex with and Porky agrees to ‘set it up’ and takes their money only to then have the teens fall through a trap door and into the water below. This enrages Mickey (Roger Wilson) who set-up the deal and he becomes consumed with getting revenge on Porky, but when he goes there to ‘settle things’ he gets badly beaten-up, which sends him to the hospital and convinces his friends that even sterner justice is needed in order to get the proper payback.

I remember when this movie came out and there were TV ads capturing people as they left the theaters and getting their first reaction. At the time this was considered ‘outrageous’ and many of the folks in the ad seemed either shocked or embarrassed. Nowadays though it’s unlikely most will consider it extreme, and some might even call it boring particularly in between the moments when it’s raunchy. The idea for it was conceived in 1972 by writer/director Bob Clark who based the story on his own experiences as a teen going to school in rural Florida during the 50’s. The studios though didn’t like the script, and it got shopped around for years before finally getting modest funding out of Canada where it could be used as a tax write-off and thus even though it was filmed in the U.S. by an American director it still gets labeled as one of the highest grossing films in Canadian movie history.

The critics like with the studio heads, didn’t care for it with both Siskel and Ebert naming it one of the worst movies to come out of the 80’s though when compared to the other teen sex comedies from that decade this one doesn’t seem all that bad. The characters have distinct personalities and much of the dialogue while raunchy seemed realistic for that age group and not all that different from what got talked about during my own high school days. The film also manages to tackle some serious topics like antisemitism, which was also a part of that era, so it has an adequate balance and doesn’t just stay hyper-focused on the sex.

On the negative end Nancy Parsons as the female coach version of Nurse Ratched is one-dimensional and Kim Catrall, playing a cheerleader nicknamed ‘Lassie’, plays too much of the bimbo caricature to be even remotely interesting. Neither is the fault of the actresses, who are okay, but more the writer. On the other hand, I loved the bit part of Susan Clark playing a prostitute. She had been in a few Disney movies just before this and later the TV-show ‘Webster’, so seeing her playing against the family image is fun.

I also loved Kaki Hunter who seems just as dirty minded as the guys and how she’s very average looking as I’ve found those types tended to be a little more ‘easy’, as evidenced by her doing it with Pee Wee, in order to get the guys’ attention and make up for not being as attractive versus in other teen flicks where it’s only the super-hot ones that sleep around. In that vein too I enjoyed the fact that during the shower scene when the boys are peeping at the girls there’s an overweight one impacting Pee Wee’s ability to see the thin ones, which is realistic too as in most high schools there’s a mix of body types and not all skinny like most other teen comedies would make you believe.

I did have some problems though with the nicknames mainly with Pee Wee and ‘Meat’ the name for Tony Ganios’ role. Supposedly this is for their penis size, but how would anyone know what their penises looked like? Normally one gets nicknames for physically attributes that everyone can see for instance if they’re a short height they could be called ‘shorty’. Yes, there is a scene where all the boys strip naked together, but their nicknames had already come about long before then. One could argue that maybe it started while they took showers after gym class, but in my high school if some guy was caught looking at another’s genitals, they’d be accused of being ‘gay’, which during that time period would be considered a stigma.

While the plot is lean and there are a few lulls there are enough comical moments to keep it afloat. The segment dealing with Nancy Parsons character going to the principal to ‘report’ seeing a penis in the girl’s shower and advocating for all the boys to undress so she could spot which one had a dick with a mole on it, is a gem especially with the way the camera zooms in on a hanging portrait of a smiling Dwight Eisenhower like even he too is in on the humor. The demolishing of Porky’s bar, which comes near the end, isn’t bad either and helps to make this thing a minor cult classic.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: November 13, 1981

Runtime: 1 Hour 38 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Bob Clark

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD, Blu-ray

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Posted in 80's Movies, Adolescence/High School, Crude Comedy, Movies that take place in Florida, Movies with Nudity

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I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

Posted on October 31, 2025 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Assaulted woman gets revenge.

Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton) is a writer who has decided to get away from the bustle of New York City by renting an isolated cabin by a river that’s just outside of Kent, Connecticut. It’s here that she hopes to finish her novel but finds it hard to do when she inadvertently attracts the attention of Johnny (Eron Tabor) a gas station attendant and two unemployed men named Stanley (Anthony Nichols) and Andy (Gunter Kleeman) who routinely upset her quiet environment with their motorboat. When delivery boy Mathew (Richard Pace), who is mentally disabled and social awkward, comes back to the men describing how when he delivered groceries to her, he ‘saw her breasts’, it gives them the idea to attack her and then ‘offer her up’ to Matthew, so he can finally have sex with a woman. The men chase Jennifer down while she’s relaxing in her rowboat and take her to the backwoods where each of them takes turns raping her over an extended period. Once they finally leave, they give Mathew a knife and tell him to kill her while they wait outside. Mathew though is too afraid to stab her, so he lies and tell them he did when he really didn’t. Eventually, after several weeks, Jennifer recovers from her injuries, both physical and emotional, and decides to seek out the unsuspecting men by killing them off in gruesome ways one-by-one.

This film was and still is highly controversial, some might say it’s the most controversial film ever made and universally condemned by both Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel on their show where they described it as ‘the worst movie ever made’. Ebert even went as far as to write in his review that it made him physically sick to watch it. His review though had a Streisand effect as it garnered it more attention and got people to come to the theater to ‘see what all the fuss was about’ eventually making it quite profitable and a cult classic that’s turned the franchise into marketable one that has given it several sequels and even a 2010 remake.

The inspiration for the story came in October of 1974 when writer/director Meir Zarchi was traveling with his friend and daughter in New York City neighborhood of Jamaican Hills where they came upon a naked, beaten-up woman who told them she had just been raped. When he escorted her to the police, he was appalled at the indifferent treatment she was given and he came home and almost immediately began writing the script.

Almost 2 years later, in August of 1976, he had acquired enough funding so shooting could begin. The argument though was whether this really was a ‘trenchant’ drama meant to expose the brutal nature of rape, versus sanitizing it as other movies at the time tended to do or was simply a cheap way to exploit a difficult subject for money. In a lot of ways, it seems to be the later as gang rapes like the one portrayed here don’t happen too often and it’s usually just one attacker. The fact that the men seem to go away and then suddenly reappear again unexpectedly out of nowhere makes it feel like it’s being played up for tension’s sake and attempting to get the most out of the horror then simply trying to intelligently examine the cruel event.

There’s also no scene showing Jennifer going to the police and being treated poorly, which was supposedly what enraged Zarchi so much during the real event. Without that element it’s harder to justify the plot and there really needed to be a segment showing that.

On the flip side I was impressed with the film’s overall grittiness. It’s like Zarchi had watched Last House on the Left but decided to take out the ill-advised ‘comic relief’ scenes and weird music and just left in the unrelenting tension and to that level it succeeds. Having no soundtrack at all, outside of some organ music that gets played when Jennifer visits a church, helps give it more of a realistic effect almost like we’re watching a documentary where the camera is simply turned-on and whatever terrible things happen is allowed to simply play-out unabated. This along with Keaton’s dynamic performance, where she essentially plays two women, one a victim and the other the perpetrator, is what helps the movie stand out and gives it it’s legs.

Spoiler Alert!

The complaints I had comes more with the third act where Jennifer carries out her revenge. The segment where she entices Matthew to have sex with her again in the woods by the river, so she can put a noose around his neck and hang him, didn’t feel genuine. I would think anyone who had been raped that they wouldn’t want anyone to touch them, or get intimate after such a traumatic event, so allowing herself to get naked and letting a man, one of her former attackers no less, get on top of her, just didn’t seem plausible from a psychological perspective. On the physical end it didn’t seem possible that a young thin woman would be able to pull the rope tight enough to hang someone who clearly weighed more than she.

The second killing where she takes Johnny back to her place and they get naked in her tub had the same problematic issues. She had a gun in her hand when she got out of her car, so why not just shoot him then and get it over with? Why take the chance of bringing him back to her house where he could overpower her? Also, how dumb does this guy have to be that he would completely let down his guard and not think that this woman, who’s assault he happily took part in, could be completely trusted and not try to lure him into a trap?

Her final attack on the two other men is flawed as well as it has her swimming out to the boat that one of them is on, but she comes onboard carrying no weapon. She only gets her hands on the ax when the other guy accidentally drops it into her boat as she tries to side swipe him, but that’s still a very stupid and dangerous way to go about things. If she’s fully intending to kill the guy she should come prepared with something already in hand when she confronts him.

Alternate Title: Day of the Woman

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: November 22, 1978

Runtime: 1 Hour 42 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Meir Zarchi

Studio: Cinemagic Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, PlutoTV, Roku, Tubi, YouTube

 

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Horror, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity, Rape/Revenge

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Tragic Ceremony (1972)

Posted on October 20, 2025 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Witnessing a black mass.

Jane (Camille Keaton), Joe (Maximo Valverde), Bill (Tony Isbert), and Fred (Giovanni Petrucci) are four young adult friends traveling the Spanish countryside in their uncovered jeep. When their car runs out of gas they come upon a large estate whose owner, Lord Alexander (Luigi Pistilli) allows them to stay in order to seek shelter from the rain. During the course of the night Jane starts to hear strange music and chanting coming from another room and when she enters it, she finds a group of people performing a satanic ritual. Jane then realizes she’s the one chosen to be sacrificed, but before they can do it her friends come in to save her, but this leads to more violence and the four attempting to flee only to be followed by grisly mayhem wherever they go. 

Unusual horror opus starts out almost like a dreamy romance with the four riding on a sailboat and soft melodic song played over the credits. The scares and tension don’t come quickly, and the first act has a relaxed direction that doesn’t grab the viewer and is too leisurely paced. The ceremony scenes are done with no imagination and seems to bask in every cliche making it more appropriate for parody. Director Riccardo Freda complained that the project was taken out of his hands and scenes added in by the producer to bolster the runtime. It took all the way until 2004 when a full restoration of the director’s cut was finally made available, but when this got shown at the 61st Venice International Film Festival it was met at the end by a chorus of boos.

The main reason to catch it is for the performance of Camille Keaton. This was the last Italian feature that she was in before moving back to the states and starring in I Spit on Your Grave, of which she’s best known for. Even here though her presence is a bit distorted as she looks beautiful and has a really good topless moment in the bathtub, but her voice gets dubbed by an Italian woman who sounds middle-aged and therefore doesn’t reflect something coming from a delicate young lady that she is.

It’s also never explained why she’s traveling with three guys as normally there should be other female friends riding along in order to keep it an even mix. One lady with a bunch of guys doesn’t make much sense unless she was dating one of them, though that’s not the way it gets portrayed. She does at one point sleep with one of them to the envy of the others, but it’s deemed as a ‘one-off’ moment, which proceeds to make the interpersonal dynamics in the group even more murky and confusing. The guys on the other hand show very little distinction in their personalities and it would’ve worked better had it been simply a couple and let the other two guys written out of it completely. 

Once the violence gets going it is rather impressive in a gory sort of way. The ax cutting through someone’s head was startling, but then the same shot gets replayed 5 different times, as part of a reoccurring nightmare sequence, that makes it very redundant. A good director, even if they are going to show a past event, will, or should, do it from a different angle, or in slow motion, or even an alternative color scheme in order to change it up a bit and not make it seem repetitive and in this case amateurish. 

Spoiler Alert!

The twist ending in which the wife of the homeowner and leader of the black mass ritual, Lady Alexander (Luciana Paluzzi) appears to have completely taken over Jane’s identity to the point that Jane becomes her as the car she’s riding in drives away, which I thought was kind of cool. Granted it does leave open many questions, but I felt a level of mystery in this case helped. Unfortunately producer Jose Gutierrez Maesso, didn’t like this approach as he thought it would cause the viewer too much confusion, so he hired actor Paul Muller to play a psychiatrist who would enter at the very end and essentially explain away all of the loose ends, but this treats the audience like they’re too stupid to figure things out on their own. 

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: December 20, 1972

Runtime: 1 Hour 22 Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Riccardo Freda

Studio: Variety Distribution

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Tubi

 

 

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Posted in 70's Movies, Foreign Films, Horror, Italian Films, Movies with Nudity

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Tenebrae (1982)

Posted on October 15, 2025 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Novelist hounded by stalker.

Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) is a successful novelist who travels to Rome, Italy to promote his latest work titled ‘Tenebrae’. Once he arrives, he is soon met by detective Germani (Giuliano Gemma) who advises him that a murder has recently been committed that was done in the style of one that occurred in his book. Neal scoffs that anything he’s written could’ve motivated someone to kill, but soon after he receives an anonymous letter from the murderer detailing how he’s going to commit more killings using methods that Neal described in his book. This then sets Neal off on doing his own investigation convinced that the police have a ‘tunnel vision’ and only he can find the true culprit using his own detective skills that he acquired while doing research on his book.

The film was inspired by writer/director Dario Argento’s own experiences that he had while meeting a fan via the telephone who initially introduced himself as being a great admirer of his work. The calls were friendly in nature at the beginning but became increasingly more menacing as time wore on. Argento eventually was threatened by the fan who claimed that his film Suspiria had affected him mentally and he wanted to harm Argento in the same way his movie had ‘harmed’ him causing Dario to leave the U.S. and return to Italy for his own safety, which is where he began writing the screenplay for this movie.

The sets are atypical for an Argento movie as they lack the garish colors and shadowy interiors most noted in his other films and this was intentional as he wanted to give the film a more ‘futuristic’ look and a one-note color scheme that more closely resembled cop TV-shows, which he felt the story reflected. Visual change is refreshing and helps the action seem more reality based versus in his other movies where everything seemed like it was set in someone’s dark fantasy in some parallel universe though I wasn’t as crazy about the camerawork, which was highly praised by others. Some may find the three-minute tracking shot that goes from one apartment window and across the complex to be captivating, but I found it more dizzying and unnecessary.

The story holds enough adequate suspense to remain moderately riveting and the pounding soundtrack by the rock group Goblin holds the tension. American actor Franciosa is nicely cast though Argento apparently had many behind-the-scenes conflicts with him, but the guy, despite his career decline, looks almost ageless and I was impressed with the opening bit where; despite nearing 60, he’s seen biking down a busy highway amongst tons of traffic with seemingly no worry or sweat. John Saxon though, the only other American in the movie, is badly wasted in a part that doesn’t give him much to do other than make a big deal about his hat that he seems quite fond of. Thankfully though, despite other performers having their voice dubbed, the film was shot in English in order to broaden its American appeal and so both of these actors speak with their actual voices while it’s quite evident with the others that they’re not.

The biggest disappointment for me were the special effects that look cheap and done with no imagination. The blood is bright colored and looks like dye mixed with water. The victims show no actual cuts, or abrasions and the blood appears painted on, or gently poured on via a cup and didn’t look authentic. There are also some ill-advised reaction shots where the film will quickly cutaway and show the victim looking scared with their mouth agape that came off as unintentionally funny. The only real frightening moment comes when a young lady gets chased down a dark street by a large dog who ultimately traps her inside the house of the killer, but other than that I was wanting way more than this film seemed able to give. I did though like one murder scene, which is purportedly one of Quentin Tarrantino’s all-time favorites, that features a woman getting her arm cut off and then proceeding to turn around and paint the walls of her apartment with its spurting blood though even this gets compromised because you can plainly tell it’s a mannequin arm when the ax goes through it.

The story gets a bit convoluted too as it adds in a flashback scene, without telling us it’s a flashback, involving a prostitute, played by Eva Robin’s, who really does spell her name with an apostrophe, and some teen boys that she meets on a beach. Only at the very end does it come into focus what this scene, which gets interspread throughout, means to the story, but until then it’s rather confusing why we’re seeing it and even a bit off-putting. It also features the prostitute as having a perfectly chiseled super model’s body, which I didn’t feel was realistic, and even though it’s supposed to be set decades earlier from the present day no effort was made to make it seem like it was shot in a bygone era.

Spoiler Alert!

The twist ending may be a surprise to some as ultimately, we learn that there wasn’t just one killer, but two of them. One being a TV interviewer named Christiano, played by John Steiner, who kills the first several due to his feelings that the victims were ‘immoral’ and then the last few committed by the protagonist himself. However, I started to suspect Franciosa when he’s found conveniently hit over the head by a rock, which supposedly ‘incapacitated’ him though I thought it was simply a ploy to divert attention away from him, so for me the final reveal was very predictable. Logically it doesn’t completely hold up either as his friend Gianni, played by Christian Borromeo, witness Christiano getting killed by Franciosa, though in disguise, and then runs back to the backyard bushes where Franciosa is supposedly hiding, but it didn’t seem like Franciosa would’ve had enough time to leave the murder scene and get back to the bushes before Gianni got there.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: October 27, 1982

Runtime: 1 Hour 41 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Dario Argento

Studio: Titanus

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Plex, Tubi

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cult, Foreign Films, Horror, Italian Films, Movies with Nudity, Slasher/Gore

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Giallo in Venice (1979)

Posted on October 6, 2025 | Leave a comment

giallo2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Investigating a couple’s murder.

Inspector Angelo (Jeff Blynn) heads the investigation of the death of a couple (Gianni Dei, Leonora Fani) who were murdered brutally in broad daylight along the riverside and in full view of the public though only an old man living in a nearby apartment is able to offer any tangible eyewitness testimony. The odd thing is that the killer for some reason saves the woman victim from drowning only to then stab her later once he brings her to shore. To learn more about the couple Angelo speaks with a local prostitute named Marzia (Mariangela Giordana) who confides that Fabio, the male victim, had deep seated sexual perversions that came-out during his marriage to Flavia the female victim. His drive to pursue these dark fantasies, which we see through flashback, and forcing his wife to play into them, she believes in some indirect way is what lead to their deaths.

This film is considered to be the final word in giallo shock cinema that permeated the Italian movie scene all through the 70’s and into the early 80’s. Not only does it contain some remarkably savage deaths, which get captured in explicit detail, but an extraordinary amount of sex, which has made some liken it to a porn film. It was directed by Mario Landi, who got his start in the 60’s making dramas and even spiritual films before moving into the tawdry drive-in fare of the 70’s that featured stories dealing with prostitutes and drugs. It wasn’t until the end of 70’s when he finally ventured his way to horror, but because of his late arrival and because there were so many other bigger names already in the genre he decided in order to draw some attention and have his movie stand-out in a cluttered field by taking things to the most extreme violent and sexual level he could, which in that respect you could say he succeeds valiantly.

Of course this has lead it to be quite controversial even to this day and very hard to find a complete director’s cut. The version currently streaming on Tubi is heavily edited and runs only 1 Hour 15 Minutes, but the full version, which is 1 Hour 39 Minutes, can be obtained through Full Moon Features, which released the DVD with all gore and sex fully intact in 2022 and this review is based on the viewing of that one.

Many commentors on Amazon and IMDb argue whether this is even a horror film as so much is loaded with sex, and a blaring melodic music score that seemed better suited for a blissful romantic flick, that it gets hard to tell. Some will accuse this of being a cheap soft core porn flick, and they have a point while others will insist that because it has a plot to it and mystery that puts it outside of being an adult film as those focus only on the sex and nothing else. Personally I think both sides could be right and this could easily be labeled the first porn horror film.

While the sex is excessive I did find these moments intriguing simply because of Favio, who I suppose could be considered an early example of what we would now call a porn addict who looks at old pictures of perverse sex acts and then forces his wife to play them out, sometimes with him as a participant, or having her do it with strangers. Things become progressively more extreme as that’s the only way he can continue to get-off making these scenes far darker and creepier than the violent ones featuring the killer. In fact this becomes one of those very rare horror films where the killer is quite forgettable and doesn’t stand-out at all while it’s the victims who are memorable.

The film though is most noted for its graphic violence with the highpoint, or low point depending on your point-of-view, being when the killer slices into a naked women’s leg as she’s tied to a kitchen table, which is prolonged and leaves little to the imagination.  While this is certainly gory what I found more disturbing was when the killer burns a man alive and then, once the flames have been stamped out, you see nothing but the victim’s eyes moving back and forth inside his otherwise blackened, charred head.

The story is not as well thought out as the effects. The opening murder happens in the daytime in a public area with the victim’s screaming out loudly as they’re stabbed making it hard to believe it wouldn’t have drawn more attention than just one lonely old man. The police inspector looks like he spent more time on his perfectly blow-dried hair than the case and his constant egg eating and having one always in his hand gets overplayed. The ultimate killer reveal isn’t surprising nor captivating making this one of the weaker giallos case-wise but makes-up for it with the violence if that’s what you’re into.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: December 31, 1979

Runtime: 1 Hour 39 Minutes

Not Rated 

Director: Mario Landi

Studio: Variety Distribution

Available: DVD

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Posted in 70's Movies, Foreign Films, Horror, Italian Films, Movies with Nudity, Mystery, Slasher/Gore

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Sudden Impact (1983)

Posted on September 29, 2025 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Harry investigates revenge killings.

Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) continues working in the San Francisco police department despite his perpetual disregard of proper police procedures, which gets many of the crooks that he has arrested freed due to legal technicalities. His superiors are frustrated with him, but since he does get results keeps him on the force though reassigned to the small town of San Paulo where he works with a sheriff Jennings (Pat Hingle) in hopes he’ll be less problematic. It’s there that he comes upon a case of various men being found shot to death in similar ways. This is being done by Jennifer (Sondra Locke) an artist in residence who 10 years earlier was raped along with her younger sister by a group of men and now she’s out to get her revenge by killing them off one-by-one. Harry is starting to piece together the clues but is surprised that Jennings is reluctant to follow-up on them giving him the impression that the sheriff may have something to hide.

The story is based on a script written by Charles B. Pierce better known for his rural horror movies from the 70’s that were shot in Arkansas and loosely based off of real events like The Town that Dreaded Sundown. This was meant to be a starring vehicle for Locke, but when Eastwood decided to renew the franchise after several years of dormancy, he felt the plotline here would be a good fit for the next Dirty Harry movie and thus hired Joseph Stinson to revise it.

The result is a mish-mash that’s never quite as compelling as it should. For the majority of the runtime Eastwood’s heroics and Locke’s crimes are working in a parallel universe and not connected making it seem like two different movies. Harry’s non-stop shootouts with crooks becomes redundant and cartoonish while Locke’s killings and flashbacks make it too reminiscent of other better-known films like I Spit on Your Grave and Death Wish. The bad guys are caricatures to the extreme making their moments boring and predictable. If the violence wasn’t so over-the-top you’d be convinced, like critic Pauline Kael mentioned in her review, that this thing was meant to be a parody.

Locke and Eastwood are both good and this is the last film that they did together as a couple before their break-up. In Locke’s case I liked how her cynical and brash persona mixes with Eastwood’s brooding and quiet one. Eastwood speaks more here than in the previous entries, but the character doesn’t seem to be evolving. The opening scene inside a courtroom where Harry is shocked to learn that the criminals he apprehended will be set free because he didn’t get a search warrant seemed ridiculous as after being on the force for so many years, and going through the exact same predicaments in the earlier films, that you’d think by now he’d learn his lesson and do things that conform within the legal framework, or at the very least not be so surprised when a judge sees it differently. The number of near-death shootouts he goes through is exhausting making me wonder how he maintained his mental state and didn’t take the vacation time when he’s asked even if he’s ‘not up for it’.

My biggest grievance though is with the structure. I really felt it would’ve worked better had it been approached as a mystery. We could’ve still seen the killings being done, but the identity of the killer would’ve been masked. Instead of Locke being an artist she could’ve been on the police force working on investigating the case and Harry could’ve started up a friendship/quasi relationship with her and at the start been impressed with her work only to slowly become aware that she was intentionally mudding the evidence. Sheriff Jennings too could’ve initially been portrayed as a ‘good guy’ with down to earth sensibilities that Harry liked and then as it progressed would his intentions become more dubious. The flashback sequences, which get interspersed throughout, could’ve instead been saved until the very end.

Spoiler Alert!

The film also continues to reveal Harry’s zig-zagging moral logic. In the first film he was all for playing outside the rules, then in the second installment he came to determine that vigilantism wasn’t the answer. Now here, by letting Locke off-the-hook and not arresting here, he’s acting like street justice is okay. It makes you wonder; is he really growing as a person and seeing things differently or simply floating along with whatever way the plotline wants?

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: December 9, 1983

Runtime: 1 Hour 57 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Clint Eastwood

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Movies with Nudity, Police Drama, Rape/Revenge, Sequels

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The Enforcer (1976)

Posted on September 26, 2025 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Partnering with a woman.

Bobby Maxwell (DeVeren Bookwalter) leads a group known as the People’s Revolutionary Strike Force that is made up of young adults engaged in underground criminal activities. Harry (Clint Eastwood) must work with Big Ed (Albert Popwell) the leader of a black militant group, in an effort to track down Bobby before they do any more damage, but his efforts are stymied by his superior Captain Jerome Kay (Bradford Dillman) who arrests Big Ed before Harry is able to get the information he needs. Things are further complicated by pairing him with Kate (Tyne Daly) as his new partner. Harry doesn’t think much of having women on the force and feels she won’t be able to meet the demands of the job though Kate is intent to prove him wrong.

The original script was written by two young San Francisco area film students who based it off of the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Then after watching some Dirty Harry movies, they decided to rewrite it by incorporating his character into the story. They then visited the Hog’s Breath Inn, a restaurant owned by Eastwood, and handed the script to his business partner Paul Lippman, who in turn gave it to Eastwood. Another script by Stirling Silliphant had already been given to Clint that involved Harry being partnered with a lady cop, a concept that he liked, though he didn’t feel there was enough action in it, so he hired Dean Reisner for a rewrite that would combine elements of both scripts, which is what ultimately became this movie.

The franchise seems to have lost some of its magic. Watching Harry come upon a crime in progress and casually blow away the criminals is no longer as riveting, or shocking and in many ways comes-off as predictable and even cartoonish. The first film did a good job of showing how police work wasn’t always exciting and sexy and could entail doing some boring duties, but here it creates the idea that it’s one pulverizing shootout after another. I didn’t care for the pounding score played over the chase sequences, which the first one didn’t do and was better for it as the music gets a bit distracting and more formulaic like something out of a cop TV-show. Bradford Dillman’s character, as an exasperated police chief, is a complete caricature like a puppet created solely so it can yap at Harry and get him to snarl in return. I wasn’t so crazy either about the humor that seeps in as the first two films had a very serious tone though the scene involving a group of old ladies sitting around a table writing love letters while inside a whorehouse is a definite gem. 

The casting is unique particularly Bookwalter as the head of the criminal gang, who up to this point was best known for starring in Andy Warhol’s experimental film Blow Job, which was a 35-minute movie that had the camera focus solely on Bookwalter’s face as he received fellatio. He also had a brief bit in the second installment of the series playing a naked man who gets killed in a shootout during a sex orgy. Here though he doesn’t have enough of an acting presence to make his moments onscreen interesting like Andrew Robinson did in the first one. He pretty much just seems like a male model with an angry stare and a gun. It’s the same result with popular radio deejay Machine Gun Kelly (Gary D. Sinclair) who gets cast as the priest who runs cover for the bad guys but clearly doesn’t have much acting ability and it’s quite possible that Eastwood intentionally put these guys into these roles knowing this, so that way they’d have no chance of upstaging him. 

I did though like Tyne Daly as Harry’s new partner. She had rejected the role three times due to issues with the script and how her character was portrayed but eventually agreed to get on board once her demand for revisions were met and I’m sure glad she did. She’s not sexy, or beautiful, which is good, and portrays a no-nonsense quality and genuinely seems like she wants to prove herself and dedicated and thus making her appealing right from the start. The only issue is that she’s constantly carrying around a shoulder purse, but why? I’ve never seen a policewoman have one and it seems ridiculous as it impedes her ability to chase after people as she has to grab a hold of it so it doesn’t flop against her body as she moves. 

Spoiler Alert!

Fortunately, the two don’t end up falling in love, the original script had this happening, but this was one of the things Daly insisted had to be taken out before she’d agree to do it, which is good because in real life, especially between professionals, that shouldn’t be occurring. Having her die at the end took me by surprise but is good too as it shows how dangerous police work is and how not every time is the good guy going to come out of a shootout unscathed. 

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: December 22, 1976

Runtime: 1 Hour 36 Minutes

Rated R

Director: James Fargo

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Magnum Force (1973)

Posted on September 24, 2025 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 8 out of 10

4-Word Review: Harry battles renegade cops.

Somebody is killing San Francisco’s well-known criminals who have been able to manipulate the courts in a way that they’ve gotten off and have not served any time. “Dirty” Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) isn’t sure at first who’s behind it, but every time he tries to get investigate his superior, Lt. Neil Briggs (Hal Holbrook) tells him to essentially ‘back off’ and go back to stakeout duty of which he’s been assigned, but in his off hours he continues to pursue it. He comes to the conclusion, after a pimp is shot at close range while sitting in the driver’s seat of his car, that a policeman pretending to be a traffic cop is behind it. He then begins to focus in on four new recruits (David Soul, Robert Urich, Kip Niven, Tim Matheson), who all show remarkable aim on the gun range, as being the ones behind it, but how does he prove it before they kill again, or set their sights on him in order to keep him quiet?

In this follow-up to the classic Dirty Harry the direction isn’t as stylish as Don Siegal didn’t return to helm this one, so the reins were handed over to Ted Post who’s better known for his TV work and which Eastwood knew through them working together on the ‘Rawhide’ TV-show from the 50’s. While not all bad there were certain segments that appeared a bit off like when the motorcycle cop pulls over the mob boss, played by Richard Devon, who’s riding in a limousine. The car clearly comes to a stop on a well-traveled bridge, but when the men inside the vehicle get shot you can see through the rear window that the car now appears parked in some urban neighborhood street. The segment where Harry drives into the parking garage of his apartment complex and then gets out of his car after parking it only to be surprised when the four renegade cops, who are also parked there on their motorbikes, begin speaking to him, is botched too as Harry would’ve seen them already there when he drove up and thus the scene should’ve been shot from his point-of-view through the front windshield of his car.

The action segments though are top notch. The scene inside an airplane where Harry disguises himself as a pilot in order stop hijackers from taking it over is both funny and tense as is his shooting down thieves trying to rob a grocery store. The gun range segment, where he and David Soul compete to see who’s the most accurate shooter, is well-handled as is the final chase inside an abandoned airplane hangar in a shipyard. There’s also a cool, but grisly sex orgy shootout in which a naked woman’s body tumbles out a high-rise apartment and then down several flights. You can also spot a nude Suzanne Somers during a poolside massacre.

The film also features the infamous Drano scene where a pimp, played by Albert Popwell, forces a prostitute, played by Margaret Avery, to swallow drain cleaner, which inspired a group of criminals in Ogden, Utah to try and replicate it when they robbed a record store and took the employees hostage on April 22, 1974 in what became known as the Hi-Fi Shop murders. However, instead of instantly killing the victims like it did in the movie it instead created blisters on their mouths and internal burning, which caused them to go through extreme suffering for hours.

My biggest complaint is how Harry is too nice and has lost some of his edge that made him so interesting. In the first film he was described as someone that didn’t like minorities, but here he’s matched up with an African American partner, played by Felton Perry, right off-the-bat with no complaints. He’s also seen with children in one segment and seems to enjoy them, but I’d think with Harry’s irritable temperament he’d find kids running around and making noise to be annoying. A downstairs neighbor lady, played by Adele Yoshioka, comes on to him quite strongly, she literally walks out into the hallway as he’s coming home and asks him what she needs to do in order to go to bed with him, which seemed too forward even for the carefree 70’s. I agree with John Milius who wrote the original draft of the screenplay where that scene was not in there but got added later at Eastwood’s behest. Harry was not the sociable type and if anything, he’d be doing prostitutes simply as a release for his sex drive. The character really didn’t have the capacity nor desire for a relationship and if he was married to anything it would be his job and mowing down bad guys making this romantic segment forced and not believable.

The bad guys are a bit too cliched and dull, especially the mob bosses, which is a far cry from the first one where Andrew Robinson made his psycho character quite distinct and intriguing. One scene has a group of mafia guys sitting around a table eating Chinese food, but none of them says a word, which to me was not realistic. Even bad people still follow sports, weather, and current events and would like to chat a little with those around them, supposedly these are their ‘friends’ since they work closely together, and not just eat in stone cold silence, which paints them too much as robots with no life, or personality outside of being killing machines.

While it’s fun seeing Urich and Soul in early roles and in Urich’s case looking downright boyish, the four renegade cop’s presence onscreen is quite flat. There’s no distinction between their personalities and no backstory given to how they came together, or what brought them to becoming vigilantes. Did they have a loved one, for family member die at the hands of a criminal who then was given a lenient sentence? This is never explained, or elaborated on, but really should’ve.

It’s also confusing to have Harry, who in the first installment was fed-up with the politics of policework and looking to work ‘outside the system’ suddenly dislike these guys for doing what he himself had previously advocated. Would’ve been more interesting had they invited him to join the group, and he initially obliged thinking this would be a good to solution to criminals getting off easy only to eventually realize the group was taking things too far and then work to stop them. 

My Rating: 8 out of 10

Released: December 25, 1973

Runtime: 2 Hours 3 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Ted Post

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Dirty Harry (1971)

Posted on September 22, 2025 | 7 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 10 out of 10

4-Word Review: Cop doesn’t like rules.

A psychotic who goes by the nickname of Scorpio (Andrew Robinson) has pledged to kill one person a day unless the city of San Francisco forks over $100,000 with his first victim being a woman (Diana Davidson) taking a swim in a pool on a rooftop of a high rise. The mayor (John Vernon) agrees to give into the killer’s demands much to the objections of Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) a hard-nosed cop who believes criminals are coddled by the system at the expense of their victims. Yet Harry, who’s known by his fellow cops as Dirty Harry, which he acquired for his well-known ability to circumvent rules that he doesn’t agree with, must go along with the demands of his department forcing him to act as the delivery of the ransom. This causes him to go through the humiliation of running all around the city at the whim of Scorpio who gives him directions of where to go next via different pay phones in the area. When Harry almost gets killed by doing this and then asked to be the delivery guy again, he walks out insisting that appeasing the killer is the wrong way to go. This causes even further irritation when Scorpio is later caught by Harry and then freed on a technicality convincing him that he must work on his own time in order to get the Scorpio put away permanently.

The script was written by the married team of Harry Julian Fink and his wife Rita. The inspiration came from the real-life Zodiac case who terrorized the city of San Francisco during the late 60’s and was never caught. The main character was supposed to be someone in their 50’s and was originally offered to Frank Sinatra, who had difficulty holding the Smith and Wesson gun, and decided to bow out. It was then offered to Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, who had just gotten done playing a cop in a movie and didn’t want to have to do another one, as well as George C. Scott and Burt Lancaster who both rejected it due to their feelings that the story’s theme was right-wing.

As a cop film it’s by far one of the best and has a lot of unique moments. Because Bullit had come out just a few years earlier, which featured a very famous car chase, it was decided not to replicate that one and instead we get treated to some very exciting foot chases with one occurring inside a factory mill and another at Kezar Stadium late at night. What makes these chases so interesting is that there’s no musical score played over them like in most movies, but instead we hear the pounding of their feet on the pavement and other outside ambience that helps to make these sequences grittier and more captivating. When the music does get played it’s when Scorpio is aiming his rifle to kill someone, but has the distinct sound of female vocals, which composer Lalo Schifrin put in to represent the voice he felt Scorpio was hearing inside his head.

Eastwood has made a career of playing this type of role, but here it comes off as fresh and like it was perfectly written for him and no one else could’ve played it better. His patented grimace and squint really work here and it’s interesting seeing the way his crusty exterior softens a bit as the film progresses and I liked the contrast of pairing him with a younger, less experienced cop, played Reni Santoni, that Harry initially thinks very little of, but eventually grows to like and respect. The conversation that he later has with Reni’s wife, played by Lyn Edgington, in which they discuss the emotional toll that being a cop can do to an individual really exposes the challenging job that it is as does Harry’s night on patrol where he’s forced on the spot without preparation to take on many difficult tasks including talking a man down from jumping off a building. This all helps to unglamorized the life of a cop while also revealing the underlying stressful nature of the position and why so many men and women that do it will eventually get burned out. 

Andrew Robinson, in his film debut, is excellent as well with a distinct eyes and face that looks constantly creepy. Normally I’d complain that we learn very little about his character nor the motivation for why he kills, but keeping him as an enigma helps put the focus on the main message, which is the rights of the victims and cops who try to protect them and by making Scorpio have a distinct personality would’ve humanized him and thus deluded the theme. Even so Robinson makes the most of each scene he’s in and he consistently stands out no matter what he’s doing, like the almost comical facial expression he makes when he gets stabbed in the leg. I also liked how after he does get stabbed that he then continues to walk and run with a limp versus other films where someone gets injured and they quickly recover, and it eventually becomes all but forgotten. 

Spoiler Alert!

My only complaint is how at the very end Harry throws away his badge and walks off the job. Director Don Siegel and Eastwood argued about this with Eastwood feeling Harry wouldn’t do this as being a cop was the only job he knew and his relentless pursuit for justice and putting bad guys away would overpower his urge to quit. Even if he was unhappy with some of the police procedures, he’d still put up with it, or fight to improve things from within. This is why at the end he should’ve taken out his badge and looked at it like he was thinking of throwing it, but then eventually put it back into his pocket. 

My Rating: 10 out of 10

Released: December 23, 1971

Runtime: 1 Hour 42 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Don Siegel

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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The Boss’ Wife (1986)

Posted on September 7, 2025 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: She comes on strong.

Joel (Daniel Stern) works at a stock firm and wants to impress his boss (Christopher Plummer) with some stock analytics and competes with fellow employee Tony (Martin Mull), who’s a major corporate brown noser. The boss though is not the smartest and misreads everything including thinking that Joel is a smoker, which he isn’t, and giving him the nickname of ‘smoky’. He also thinks that Joel is gay and having a fling with Carlos (Fisher Stevens), which neither is true, but this allows the boss’ wife Louise (Arielle Dombasle) to openly come-on to Joel while the boss, so worried that Joel may come on to him, feigns naivety at what his own wife is doing. Joel tries to avoid the woman because he fears that if he doesn’t, he’ll get caught, which will not only hurt his job advancement, but also his shaky marriage to Janet (Melanie Mayron). 

The film is the product of Ziggy Steinberg who started his careers in the 70’s writing for episodes of TV-shows and then graduating to feature films like Porky’s Revenge and then ultimately Another You, which to date has been the last writing gig he’s done. This film marked his debut as both a writer and director, but the results are so-so. The concept is predictable and better suited for an episode of ‘Three’s a Company’, which he also wrote for, than the big screen. While the attempt is for screwball the pacing is slow and not a lot of gags going on and as satire/parody its target is so obvious and been done so many times before that it hardly seems worth the effort as one could simply watch How to Succeed at Business Without Really Trying and get a lot more laughs. In fact, the only amusing moment comes when Plummer has a toy choo-choo train ride onto his desk carrying drinks and hamburgers and then Stern fumbling around to get ketchup on his burger, which causes a red mess on the boss’ desk.

The acting from the two male leads is adequate. Stern’s character is benign, but he plays it in a likable way making you connect to him and his quandaries. Plummer is quite good particularly with the way he roles his blue eyes every time he comes to a mistaken conclusion to something. Stevens has some good crude moments who initially starts out as Mayron’s employer only to create a haphazard buddyship with Stern while on the train. 

Dombasle though is quite possibly the film’s weakest link. She enters in almost like a fantasy figure and has little dialogue. Why this voluptuous woman would get so focused on Stern for no apparent reason doesn’t make a lot of sense. He does not stand out in any way and therefore a woman like her would overlook and even ignore him. She comes onto him in such a shameless and extreme manner even while in public you could argue she was mentally ill. Even if she’s desperate for sex cause she’s not getting enough from her older husband she could still, with her money, find ways to get it, through like male escorts, than groveling in such a ridiculous level towards a chump like Stern. Later it does come out that she is ‘attracted to men who resist’, which helps explain her motivations a little, but it would’ve been more entertaining had the Mull character paid her, or worked out some deal with her, to come onto Stern in  order to get him into trouble with Plummer, which would’ve offered a nice unexpected twist, which unfortunately the script doesn’t have. 

Spoiler Alert!

The final 10-minutes in which Plummer corners Stern in his rental home with both his wife and Stern’s and the myriad excuses Stern comes up with to try and get out of the jam is sort of funny, but it takes too long to get there. That frantic, hyper-pace should’ve been present from the very beginning and it just isn’t. Stern’s character arc where he finally concludes that the company culture is too conform-ridden for his liking is strained as well. If anything, he should’ve figured that out long before he goes to a company party and asked to where a silly hat like everyone else, which was one of the least problematic things at that place and yet this is where he suddenly decides to ‘draw-the-line’. 

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: November 7, 1986

Runtime: 1 Hour 23 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Ziggy Steinberg

Studio: Tri-Star Pictures

Available: DVD-R, Amazon Video, YouTube

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