The Centerfold Girls

It seems that women who take pride in either their bodies or their sexuality deserve to get raped, tortured and murdered, at least according to male filmmakers in the mid-'70s. It's a lovely message and really speaks to the age-old adage that life is beautiful. The Centerfold Girls examines not only this charmer of an insight but the vast lexicon of bare boobies, as exposed in virtually every scene of the film, since watching a woman's throat get cut is only sexy when her breasts are flopping around, right? The killer here is a man of God (Andrew Prine) that's so outraged by pin-up girls with the audacity to bare their bosoms that he decides to help by murdering them. While his serial killing expeditions are the fulcrum of the film, his three victims each have a storyline of their own, to ensure maximum female suffering prior to their inevitable deaths. For example, Jackie (Jaime Lyn Bauer) gets harassed, tortured and eventually winds up in a rape scenario at the hands of crazed pot-smoking hippies, and Charly (Jennifer Ashley) struggles with exploitation while off shooting yet more nudie photos. The final girl, Vera (Tiffany Bolling), exposes her breasts less frequently, which indicates her potential survival, but she does get gang-raped by sailors, so it's a tossup. The entire ordeal would be contemptible if it were competently made but the cheesy dialogue, dreadful cinematography and amusing plot points make it laughable and hardly worth getting up in arms over. As it stands, the only folks that would take crap like this as seriously as the filmmakers clearly did are the illiterate boys on the horror sites that think misogyny is "edgy." As far as supplements go, there is a red band trailer and a 14-minute "looking back" featurette where actresses discuss nudity, or lack thereof, and Andrew Prine demonstrates a little bit too much identification with his serial killer character.