After nearly 15 years of steady work as a character actor, Bruce Watson (This Property Is Condemned) finally landed a starring role in The Swinging Barmaids. His villainous performance as Tom was so good, so convincing, I wonder if he inadvertently doomed his job prospects as a leading man. Although he racked up credits for another half-decade and then some, he never appeared in a movie again.

Look, I’m no Lee Strasberg, but the lesson for tomorrow’s thespians? If you’re hired to play an exceptionally odious serial killer of seriously sexy cocktail waitresses, maybe you should half-ass it.

Director Gus Trikonis (Moonshine County Express) wastes little time in setting up the bar. Tom takes offense to a casually demeaning remark by a waitress named Boo-Boo (Dyanne Thorne, a few months shy of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS), so he does what any sexually frustrated woman-hater would do: Follow her home, tear off her clothes, commit rape and murder. Because Boo-Boo’s fellow Barmaids (including Supervan’s super-cute Katie Saylor) may have caught a glimpse of him at her apartment, Tom decides they’ve gotta go as well — not then and there, but soon.

Meanwhile, as a detective (William Smith, Terror in Beverly Hills) investigates Boo-Boo’s bye-bye, the wiry and wily Tom puts his plan in action by getting a job. At the bar. As its bouncer.

Hey, you’ve gotta fill 90 minutes somehow, and screenwriter Charles B. Griffith knows just how to do it. As the man who wrote several of Roger Corman’s most beloved productions, including A Bucket of Blood, Death Race 2000 and The Little Shop of Horrors, he has experience balancing the unpleasant exploitation with admirable economy and actual entertainment. It’s as if one of the segments of The Centerfold Girls had enough meat on its bones to merit extension to feature length, and hell to the yes that’s a compliment. —Rod Lott