Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971)

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Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry produced and wrote the adapted screenplay for this supremely odd but beguiling movie directed by Roger Vadim (Barbarella). Rock Hudson headlines as a high school football coach and guidance counselor who gets intimate with the students and faculty behind closed doors. One of his students, played by newcomer John David Carson (Creature from Black Lake), comes to him with — of all things — worries about his constant boners. Hudson tells a substitute teacher, played by Rio Bravo‘s Angie Dickinson, that Carson is an impotent virgin and needs her sexual healing. She obliges, setting Carson off on an awkward, romantic subplot with her. Meanwhile, female students at the school are being murdered. Enter Telly Savalas (TV’s Kojak) as the police captain determined to solve the case.

Pretty Maids All in a Row, based on a book by Francis Pollini, is a murder mystery mixed with a teen sex flick and a horror comedy before either of the later two became established sub-genres. Films like Scream and Heathers owe a debt to this bold, bizarre movie — one that could never be made in today’s prudish times, given all the sexual impropriety the script contains. So it also has a lot of kitschy time capsule appeal.

Vadim’s direction feels more TV-oriented than cinematic at times, and fails to land some of the comedic moments. Tonally, the film has trouble balancing the horror and comedy — but it’s interesting watching a film try to shuffle the two at a time when it was groundbreaking and brave to do so. Hudson is miscast, lacking the charisma and mystery his character needs. But Carson carries the movie as its adolescent protagonist, and Telly Savalas steals the show with his supreme confidence and swagger. His performance is basically a sneak preview of Kojak, which would hit the television airwaves just a few years later. The wonderful Angie Dickinson makes the most of her part, but she’s more of a plot device than a fully-fleshed out character. Roddy McDowall (Fright Night, Planet of the Apes) is fun as the school’s oblivious principal.

Pretty Maids All in a Row took me by surprise. In some ways, it’s ‘so bad, it’s good’. And in other ways, it’s genuinely remarkable in its experimentation and audacity. Even though I knew who the killer was the whole time, the film’s tonal back-and-forth had me guessing what the hell this movie was trying to accomplish. The film is sure to confound some viewers, but it’s certainly not boring. More than anything, it feels fresh. ‘Good’ or ‘bad’ don’t matter so much when the effort is this weird and interesting.

With James Doohan and Keenan Wynn, and music by Lalo Schifrin.