From Four Rode Out director John Peyser, The Centerfold Girls depicts what happens when a holier-than-thou man with a dubious grasp on reality gets a hold of a straight razor and the special, year-end issue of the fictitious Bachelor skin mag. Played by Andrew Prine (Simon, King of the Witches), Clement Dunne fancies himself a moral guardian who rings up these nude fantasy ladies, threatens to make them pay for their sins of the flesh, works toward and achieves that lofty goal, and then moves on to the next one. Making that premise unique is its three-in-one structure that hoists each story to stand on its own. If not for the running thread/threat of Dunne, it could be an anthology film; with each segment running roughly half an hour, it plays like Sex Pervert Stalker: The Series. That’s a compliment.

After disposing the corpse of Miss January in the opening credits, Dunne puts away his trademark souvenir (one of the victim’s shoes) from the felonious act and begins targeting Miss March (Jaime Lyn Bauer, Mysterious Island of Beautiful Women). She’s a nurse en route to a job interview when an act of Good Samaritanism backfires in the form of rape-happy hippies who may beat Dunne to the punch (so to speak).

Next up is Miss May (Jennifer Ashley, The Pom Pom Girls), a model on an overnight shoot on a private island, not unlike the setting for Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None — especially since Dunne has to slay a few extra bodies to get to his intended one.

Finally, Miss July (Tiffany Bolling, Kingdom of the Spiders) is a flight attendant whose grounded exploits accidentally answer the immortal question of what to do with a drunken sailor — two of ’em, in fact. When she eventually crosses paths with Dunne, she’s been through so much that our killer just might find the proverbial table turned.

The law of diminishing returns applies to The Centerfold Girls’ troika of tales, but its one-of-a-kind architecture makes it unlike any suspense slasher you’ve seen. Peyser throws as much female nudity at the camera as he does buckets of bright-red blood, thus satisfying the baseline requirements of 1970s sleaze. Even though he didn’t have to, Prine raises that bar with an actual performance as the omnipotent (and possibly impotent) murderer who has the ability to appear at the perfect place at the perfect time; after a short while, you’ll stop wondering of whom he reminds you. (The answer is Ben Folds.) —Rod Lott

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Whereas Betsy Russell (co-star of 71.43% of the Saw films) makes an improvement over Donna Wilkes in pure sex appeal, Avenging Angel makes a massively disappointing sequel compared to its 1984 big sis. This is all the more baffling when one considers that director and co-writer Robert Vincent O’Neill remains in those roles; therefore, blame cannot be ascribed to a case of franchise takeover.

A year after the original Angel, the honor student by day has given up being a Hollywood hooker by night. Having slept with “hundreds of men,” Molly (Russell) now opts for running the 100-yard dash as a track star at college. Inspired by her L.A.-cop guardian, Lt. Andrews (Dark Night of the Scarecrow’s Robert E. Lyons, replacing Cliff Gorman), she is studying to be a lawyer. But when the police lieutenant is murdered in the line of duty in Chinatown, Molly teases her hair, whores up and drags out her Angel alter ego to get answers … and revenge. Forget it, Molly; it’s Chinatown.

There is nothing wrong with pursuing that setup. There is something very wrong with following our heroine’s intensely personal tragedy with about 20 minutes of screwball comedy, as Angel and friends try to bust ol’ pal Kit Carson (returning Rory Calhoun, Motel Hell) out of the sanitarium in which he clearly belongs. With dopey music and all, the prolonged sequence feels like a deliberate stalling tactic to reach feature-length as O’Neill attempts to navigate between the emotional tones of oil and water. Neither works.

As a result, Avenging Angel hastily becomes a sad parody of itself, one franchise entry earlier than the standard. This is best exemplified in saddling Angel’s lesbian former landlord (Susan Tyrrell, Forbidden Zone) with an infant that is not hers, and then involving that child in a hysterically edited climax that sends the tearful tot plummeting from a rooftop at half-speed. Photographed in extreme close-up so we don’t see the hands of whoever is holding him, the baby falls upright, then upside down, then upright again before — spoiler — being caught by Kit. Wouldn’t a true piece of ’80s sleaze give the old man a curious case of the butterfingers?

What, too dark? —Rod Lott

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A few things I legitimately do not understand about the Canadian indie thriller Death Do Us Part:
• whether the scenes I scoffed at were supposed to elicit that response;
• if its real-life married leads — who also share credit as the film’s writers, producers and executive producers — realize they made every character patently odious;
• and how someone simultaneously can be a producer and an executive producer.

Those real-life married leads portray an about-to-be-wedded couple: the seriously uptight Kennedy (Julia Benson, née Anderson, Chupacabra vs. the Alamo) and, purely from a sexual standpoint, the seriously lucky Ryan (Peter Benson, Dead Rising: Watchtower). With each bringing one bestie and one family member, they rent a lake house overnight for a joint-gender stag party.

The six immediately are put off by the dead birds coating the porch, not to mention the creepy caretaker (Dave Collette, Intercessor: Another Rock ’n’ Roll Nightmare); viewers are more apt to be put off by the snobbish and/or self-indulgent behavior of the sextet, especially Ryan’s perpetual frat buddy, Chet (Kyle Cassie, Lost Boys: The Tribe), who near-exclusively says things like this for the movie’s entirety: “Chicks: If they didn’t have tits, we’d throw rocks at ’em.” (Unfortunately, on-the-set glimpses of Cassie on the DVD’s making-of featurette suggest he’s not far removed from his character.)

You’ll want to hurl objects toward the bunch, regardless of organs. Chet’s asshole embodiment aside, Kennedy is a cold-hearted bitch, while Ryan is a contemptible cad who happens to be having an affair with his fiancée’s sister (Christine Chatelain, Final Destination), this trip included! He takes her from behind against a tree while on an afternoon excursion through the woods; unbeknownst to them, their animalistic act is witnessed by Kennedy’s clingy, needy BFF (Emilie Ullerup, Leprechaun: Origins), who also manages to observe Ryan scuffle with his ex-con cousin (Benjamin Ayres, Dead Before Dawn) over some so-far-secret criminal shenanigans.

For their own reasons, they’re all hateful — and I typically quite admire Ullerup’s and Lady Benson’s work — so it comes as a relief when someone gets around to axing them up. The film could be classified as a slasher (albeit a rather tame one) or a mystery (albeit an easily solved one) if feature-debuting director Nicholas Humphries grasped the material in order to guide it either way. As is, Death Do Us Part is merely a bunch of dot-to-dot clichés of the peeps-in-peril thriller, complete with the elbow-nudging “C’mon, it’s one night! What’s the worst that can happen?” You know the kind: no power, no phone, no car ignition, no imagination … and no need to subject yourself to this one. —Rod Lott

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As Angel’s notorious tagline says (and says it all), “High school honor student by day. Hollywood hooker by night.” Played with babyfaced conviction by Donna Wilkes (Jaws 2), the straight-A Molly ditches the pigtails and shortens the skirt for her extracurricular activities, turning tricks as “Angel” on Hollywood Boulevard. More or less orphaned, she feels she has no other choice. It’s a living …

… until it’s not. Currently, the nighttime streets are a feeding frenzy for a necrophiliac serial killer (John Diehl, Jurassic Park III) who slays only hookers, and a couple of Angel’s pleather-wearing colleagues already have fallen prey to his twisted desires, going from the mattress to the morgue. Assigned to crack the case is Lt. Andrews (Cliff Gorman, Night of the Juggler), who becomes something of a father figure to our title character in the process.

Forming a surrogate family along the Hollywood Walk of Fame is Angel’s greatest asset, particularly with the amusing performances from comedian Dick Shawn (1967’s The Producers) as a cross-dressing prostitute and Rory Calhoun (Motel Hell) as an aging, possibly mentally ill cowboy who roams the sidewalks as if he were El Lay’s unofficial deputy sheriff.

But family schamily — Angel ain’t no touchy-feely drama. Directed and co-written by sleaze specialist Robert Vincent O’Neill (The Psycho Lover), the crime thriller soaks in a general malaise of sickness, sin and dysfunction, and is energized by bursts of action. (Surprisingly, almost all of its bountiful female nudity takes place in the girls’ locker room at school than with the ladies of the night at work.) In other words, Angel, which spawned three sequels, is a quintessential ’80s product of New World Pictures. I miss the times when trash like this earned a wide release, even though I was too young at the time to see it. Luckily, its themes are still relevant because the world’s oldest profession … well, let’s just say its product remains in high demand. —Rod Lott

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In Airport ’77, the third in the Airport series, a private Boeing 747 is transporting the art collection and friend of multimillionaire Philip Stevens (James Stewart, Vertigo) to the opening of his new museum. Says Stevens to a throng of reporters, “It’s going to be a real wingding.”

Based on that jet alone, the old man ain’t joking! Under the control of Capt. Gallagher (Jack Lemmon, Glengarry Glen Ross), the aircraft boasts three luxurious levels that include bedrooms, office space, tabletop Pong, copies of Ebony magazine and even a blind lounge singer/pianist (motivational speaker Tom Sullivan) whose dark glasses look specially designed for Elton John to wear for an hour after getting his eyes dilated. Unbeknownst to Stevens, Gallagher or Gallagher’s mustache, the night flight also hosts a cadre of art thieves who gas the crew and passengers asleep so they can take over and make off with the priceless paintings. But art thieves do not double as ace pilots; a clipped wing sends the Boeing to the bottom of the ocean, square in the Bermuda Triangle — for no reason other than Trianglesploitation was a trend at the time.

With the submerged plane taking in water, Airport ’77 appears to be cribbing from The Poseidon Adventure of five years earlier. No stranger to the disaster genre, director Jerry Jameson (Raise the Titanic!) spends ’77’s second hour detailing and depicting the rescue efforts of Gallagher on the inside and the combined might of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard on the outside. However, this removes focus from the most fun part of these exercises in cinematic calamity: the all-star cast. This TV-looking sequel is as overstuffed as the rest, with faded idols (Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotten), up-and-comers (Kathleen Quinlan, M. Emmet Walsh) and then-current leading ladies (Brenda Vaccaro, Lee Grant — the latter cutting the largest slice of the overacting pie). Returning as Joe Patroni, George Kennedy shows up just long enough to allow ’77 a direct connection to the previous two pictures.

Many of the actors’ clothes sport gaudy, checkered prints that create moiré patterns on your TV screen. Those have more life than poor Stewart, so folksy and noncommittal that one half-expects him to recite that poem about his dead dog. Haven’t heard it? Oh, it’s a real wingding. —Rod Lott

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