POINT OF TERROR (1971)
Article 3412 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 11-5-2010
Posting Date: 12-17-2010
Directed by Alex Nicol
Featuring Peter Carpenter, Dyanne Thorne, Lory Hansen
Country: USA
What it is: Overheated Soap Opera

A sexy male lounge singer hooks up with the wife of a record company owner in the hope of using the connection to land a record contract. However, he soon finds himself entangled in murder and intrigue.

I found this movie on a set called “Horrible Horror”, which, given this movie, is a slightly inaccurate title. Not that the movie isn’t horrible; quite frankly, it’s atrocious. It is, however, not really a horror movie. Apparently, the advertising emphasized a masked madman killing a woman with a butcher knife. Make no mistake; the scene appears in the movie, but unless it’s a metaphor for something that escapes me at the moment, it has precisely nothing to do with anything else in the movie, and may just be a figment of someone’s imagination. That scene provides a smidgen of horror content, and the end of the movie has a twist that also adds a little more, but with the first scene being arbitrarily gratuitous and the other being the height of cliched stupidity, I’m ready to disqualify the movie on bad script choices alone. Still, this is one of those movies where the dialogue is so silly, the action sequences so ridiculous, the music so awful, and the plot so overheated that the movie nets a fair share of laughs during its running time. You’ll get the most mileage out of it if you watch it as an inadvertent comedy.