Just grabbed this recent release from After Hours of this grindhouse offering from director Shaun Costello. Has anyone seen this at all? Thoughts, but please no major spoilers unless warned about, thx!

It's a shame that the risk of getting these through UK customs is too high. As 'Alpha Blue' especially have some very interesting 70's Grindhouse porn.

Any way I reviewed this a long while ago: Here's a drastic edit:



What makes "Forced Entry" into something far more than the sum of its plot is the use of hardcore sex, violence, blood and authentic newsreel/camera footage of the war in Vietnam.

Opening on a green tinted still of a Vietnamese woman punting a canoe, scored with a haunting Vietnamese song, we are instantly warned that there is something very different about the porn film that is about to un-spool in front of our unsuspecting eyes.

During the first attack scene the fact Harry Reems' commonly used 'peeper' character is fondling a gun and licking the tip of his knife as he watches the (explicit oral and penetrative) sex…signposts what is to come.

Most of the film is basically the same set-up of stalking, knifepoint/gunpoint sexual attacks, extremely nasty verbal assaults and ultimately murder. All played out with the ever present, shockingly effective, 'Nam footage.

The film does tend to play out the 'rapes', the gun or knife aside, as 'normal' sex sequences and sometimes the actresses play the scenes like any other porn set-up and don't play on the 'victim' angle, looking rather unconcerned about the whole thing.
Which in itself seems dubious as we seem to have the oft familiar 'she really likes rape' attitude going on, whether intentional or not.

Sex, as this is the 70's, is close-up, rough, naturalistic.
People are imperfect, of various sizes and shapes and are of course… hairy.
But this adds a natural energy to the sex and also to the documentary look of the film that this plot really benefits from.

Violence? Well, much of the sex is of course very violent and some of the 'Nam footage (especially in the context it is used) is violent as it portrays the destruction of war and it's resulting maimed and dead.
But the main violence is in the murders. There is nothing here that is 'gory' as such, though the knifings are bloody, but coming after the rapes, and having the actresses in states of undress (sometimes fully naked) when they happen, ups the violence level a big notch.
And when you place all these together in the one film, a film made in this way with this attitude, you do get what is a very violent and disturbing creation indeed.

As the stone cold rapist and killer the normally weird but somehow likeable persona of Reems is most definitely missing here. As is his showcase 70's porn moustache.
His rapist may be a ' pop psychology' psycho character…but he is certainly an effective one, and brutally animalistic.

Does the film genuinely have something to say about the horrors of war in general and its trauma on the Vietnam veteran in particular? Well no, not really.
The 'Nam footage, though it works from an 'artistic' point of view as far as it's effect on the rape sequences is concerned, as discussed above, is basically there to shock just as anything else in the film is.

In many ways though the film pre-empts the later movies that would also use the psychologically disturbed 'Nam Vet as their centrepiece. Some for good honest thrills and spills as in "First Blood", some for genuine social comment like in "Coming Home".
But astonishingly this underground, bleak slice of pornography got there before most of them.
But basically the Vietnam angle in "Forced Entry" simply seems to be the preferred method (taking advantage of what is big news at the time) of showing the psycho's 'reason s' for madness. It's purely opportunistic.

So what do we ultimately end up with? Well there is a car crash fascination to this monstrosity.
You know you should not look, you know there is no real need to look, you know you may well be frowned upon for looking and maybe even berate your own self for doing so…But you still look.
It's everything taboo.
It's hardcore pornography, it's sexual and sexualised violence, Its cheap, dirty and nasty. And you still look.
It exploits what it needs to and it exploits it well. For what it is...it works.
You just have to ask yourself if what it is, is something you want anything to do with………

I saw this theatrically in the early 1970s [showing my age!] in a true grindhouse theater and actually reviewed it for a local paper where I contributed as a second stringer. The editor I remember didn't want to run the review. Pretty much the same as the above review I found it repellent, sick, and hard to watch but it somehow is also hard to stop watching it. It's kind of a symptom of its times. It really captures the tone of that era, something which you can't describe in words. You had to be there. It's something you wouldn't want to watch more than once, if even once. I wrote my friend, the French critic Alain Petit about this film recently and he reminded me of an even more offensive remake which he saw a few years later in France that was latter recut.

Speaking of that title, I've been looking high and low for the other FORCED ENTRY from 1975 directed by Jim Sotos. It's got semi-stars to be Tanya Roberts and Nancy Allen in it as victims I believe. Certainly a tough one to find, I've heard it plays like a rape/revenge style TAXI DRIVER.

Anyone know if it's even made it to DVD?

Don't think so.
The VHS can sometimes be found on Ebay though. I've seen it a couple of times on the UK site.
None there now though.

There is this on the U.S. site though! But i don't think you'll be bothering at this stupid price!!!
Link to the auction:
"FORCED ENTRY"

Holy shit! That guy has to be nuts. I mean I know it's rare and everything, but gimme a break!

The search continues...