Forced Entry is a 1973 adulthorror film written and directed by Shaun Costello under the pseudonym Helmuth Richler. It stars Harry Reems as an unnamed and psychotic Vietnam War veteran who sexually assaults and kills women who stop at the filling station where he works as an attendant. Called "one of the most disturbing and unpleasant porn features ever made," the film utilizes actual footage of the war, predominantly in the rape and murder sequences.
Plot
After opening with newspaper articles, footage, and quotes relating to the Vietnam War and the psychological condition of the American soldiers who have returned from it, the authorities are shown investigating a crime scene in which a man was shot in the head. Going back an unspecified amount of time, the man is revealed to be a gas station attendant, and is shown coercing a female customer into giving out her name and address by claiming they are needed for a credit card transaction. After the woman drives away, the attendant goes to her apartment building, and watches through a window as she has sex with her husband. When the husband leaves, the attendant breaks into the apartment and forces the woman to perform oral sex on him while he verbally abuses her, slitting her throat after he climaxes. Back at the gas station, the attendant gives a lost motorist directions, and follows her to the address she was looking for. The man breaks into the house, drags the woman out of the shower, and forces her to fellate him at gunpoint. He then sodomizes her, stabs her, and kisses her as she dies. Later, a ditzy female hippie picks up an equally vapid hitchhiker, and the two travel to the gas station. The attendant tricks the driver into giving out her address, and goes to her home, where she and her companion are doing drugs, and having sex. The attendant sneaks in and tries to force the girls to submit to him, but the pair are too intoxicated to take him seriously, frustrating him to the point of a psychotic break. As he screams "Stay away from me!" and has a series of flashbacks to both the war and the rapes and murders he has committed, the attendant shoots himself in the head. Returning to the intro, the man's body is covered by a sheet, and hauled away by the police.
In his autobiography, star Harry Reems wrote that Forced Entry was the one film he regretted doing. DVD Talk gave the film zero stars, calling it "morally repugnant". Noting the film is "the first film to show a disturbed war vetcoming home from Vietnam," Ed Demko calls the film "one of the more important and relevant films to ever come out of that age of pornography. It’s a film that really transcends the time that it was made and might even be more important now than the age it was made. Sure there’s a ton of nasty sexual activity in the film but the subject matter and what the movie is actually saying goes way beyond that."
Analysis
In "Forced Entry: Serial Killer Pornography as Patriarchical Paradox", scholar Robert Cettl assesses the film's role as pivotal in the history of American serial killer films and discusses its subversion of American patriarchy "by highlighting a paradox in relation to hegemonic masculinity" and how the director turns pornography "into self-conscious political discourse", arguing the film critiques patriarchical reaction to second-wave feminism as grounded in war-mongering and ultimately doomed to self-implosion.
