If Forced Entry proves anything, it’s that cinema has no bottom—only progressively darker floors. Shaun Costello’s infamous 1973 adult horror mashup is less a film and more a cinematic war crime, awkwardly welding hardcore pornography to Vietnam trauma with all the subtlety of a barbed-wire noose.
A Descent into Psychosis—and Bad Taste
The plot—or what passes for it—follows a nameless gas station attendant, played by Harry Reems under the pseudonym Tim Long, who unleashes a postwar reign of sexual terror on unsuspecting women. This is not a horror film in any conventional sense—it’s an endurance test, a 75-minute exhalation of moral rot framed as commentary on war trauma. What it actually becomes is a sleazy, shock-for-shock’s-sake indulgence, hiding behind an aura of “relevance.”
Costello opens with actual Vietnam footage, as if tossing in a reel of real-world misery will somehow lend gravity to what amounts to one of the most sadistic films ever pitched as “psychological.” It’s a manipulative bait-and-switch. The war is used not as a thematic lens but as a decorator’s choice—to slather the walls of a brutal rape-revenge flick with grainy, green-tinted gravitas.
A Showcase of Suffering, Not Substance
There’s no narrative momentum here, only repetition: woman arrives, woman is stalked, violated, and murdered. The structure is as rigid and joyless as the act it repeatedly depicts. While many exploitation films of the 1970s masked subtext under pulp and provocation, Forced Entry has no such depth. Its nihilism is total. It’s the kind of film that doesn’t flirt with the line of decency—it hijacks it and runs it off a cliff.
Harry Reems, best known for Deep Throat, later disavowed this project. It’s not hard to see why. Even judged by the permissive standards of 1970s grindhouse cinema, Forced Entry is morally bankrupt and artistically barren.
Laura Cannon: A Glimmer of Humanity
And yet—somewhere in this abyss—there is Laura Cannon. Her performance, though given little space or dignity by the script, manages to inject a ghost of humanity into a film otherwise devoid of it. She plays the “lost driver,” a victim, yes—but with poise, subtle fear, and brief moments of emotional authenticity that transcend the lurid material. Cannon, with her expressive eyes and understated presence, walks into this cinematic landfill and somehow walks out as the only salvageable relic.
She deserved a better film. Frankly, she deserved a better genre. There are moments when she silently conveys more terror and revulsion than the entire production’s gratuitous violence ever could. Her beauty is not merely aesthetic—though that too is undeniable—it’s the inner poise she manages to retain while trapped in a film that offers her none.
Final Verdict
There are disturbing films that provoke thought, that confront, that challenge. Forced Entry is not one of them. It titillates under the guise of trauma, confuses shock with substance, and drapes its moral emptiness in the borrowed tragedy of war. A vile, joyless dirge of sex and death, its only redemption is the accidental dignity brought by Laura Cannon—a small, sorrowful candle flickering in a pitch-black void.
Grade: F (Laura Cannon: A)
