Sex Wish (1976)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
Hardcore take-off on DEATH WISH has Harry Reems playing a mild-mannered architect whose life is turned upside down after a serial rapists sexually assaults and then murders his fiancé. Soon Reems buys a gun and plans on murdering the creep but soon he learns that this maniac has killed others close to him. This film clocks in at only 79-minutes and there were times where tears were nearly running down my face from laughing so hard. I know this is a "roughie" from the period but I didn't find anything here too overly graphic and in many ways the rape sequence in DEATH WISH was a lot more brutal. With that said, I think fans of the Bronson classic would probably get a kick out of this movie. There's really not any scenes that are ripped off or any nods to the Bronson film but they do follow the same storyline with only the hardcore material being the difference. The reason this film kept me so entertained is because of how bad and laughable some of the stuff is. Just check out the scene when Reems returns home to find his fiancé dead. His reaction is incredibly funny as is a later scene where he gets mad at a cop asking personal questions. More laughs follow when he goes to get drunk to forget about his pain only to have two skanks pick him up and pretty much force themselves on him. Even more laughs follow when the rapist breaks in on a black couple where we get some extremely funny dialogue that would make even the blaxploitation genre blush. I think it should go without saying that there's really nothing "good" here in terms of what you'd find in a regular movie. The performances are all rather bad and there's no sense of storytelling but at the same time there are some impressive things here. The killer is some pervert, clearly disturbed in the head, who hands out in a gay club. I found his reasons for doing this stuff to be rather interesting and I thought Zebedy Colt was decent in the role. Reems gives his typical performance, which is good enough for the material but his attempts at crying really don't come off very well. The rest of the cast are what you'd expect to find in a hardcore movie from this era.
