Escape to Passion

This is typical early 70's softcore sexploitation so, of course, you have a lot of ridiculously gratuitous nude and sex scenes with buxom but not necessarily very attractive skanks--sorry, I mean "actresses"--that slow the plot down to a bare crawl every ten minutes or so. The acting is very bad. The male leads look, respectively, like George Blake and Roy Orbison, but don't have a fraction of the acting or (presumedly) the singing talent. There are lot of strange scenes such as when a female accomplice, for reasons that eluded me, participates in a bank robbery wearing nothing but a scuba-diving helmet (I'd like to see the police sketch of her). There are also a lot of strange shots that look like product placement, but of the kind of products (i.e. RC Cola) that probably wouldn't WANT to be associated with a movie like this.

Nevertheless, this movie has some things going for it. It has some kind of film noir elements to it focusing on this group of marginal and inept criminals trying to pull off a bank heist. "The Killing" might have looked something like this if Stanley Kubrick was a much less competent filmmaker and was making something he could peddle on 42nd Street in the early 1970's. There's plenty to laugh at here, but generally the filmmakers seem to be in on the joke. I actually WOULDN'T recommend it for the sex (unless, of course, you have a fetish for pimply, corpulent early 70's stripper-types who couldn't act their way out of a crisp paper sack). What's good about these movies though is that the filmmakers were often trying, however ineptly, to make real movies (which was not really the case after the advent of hardcore), and because they had a kind of "captive" audience they could sometimes get away with being experimental or different. This isn't "Mantis in Lace" by any means, or even "The Toy Box", but it's better than most.