– XXX is Celluloid Dimension’s latest weekly column featuring the hottest and naughtiest side of cinema. –
Directed by Shaun Costello
Written by Shaun Costello
Starring:
- Harry Reems as the gas station attendant (credited as Tim Long)
- Laura Cannon as the lost driver
- Jutta David as David’s wife
- Ruby Runhouse as one of the hippie girls
- Nina Fawcett as the other hippie girl
- Shaun Costello as David (credited as Helmuth Richler)
Rating: 
Who said porno had to be sexy? Shaun Costello sure didn’t. With Forced Entry, the sleaziest XXX filmmaker in America made the ugliest shocker of the Porno Chic era— a porno that’s about as unerotic as a morgue. It’s pure grime, deliberately mean-spirited, and designed to turn your stomach instead of turning you on, serving up sex scenes that feel like punishment instead of pleasure. That’s Costello’s sick little trick: flipping porn’s whole purpose on its head. In the heyday of skin flicks, that makes the film one of the strangest oxymorons of the decade: a porno that hates the idea of arousal. And as if wrecking eroticism wasn’t enough, the film also sucker-punches the countercultural cool that 70s smut pretended to wear like a badge.
Sure, the grindhouses were already drowning in sleaze before Forced Entry showed up. But the deal was always the same: no matter how dirty, no matter how twisted, it had to be erotic — the audience had to get off on playing the voyeur. But Shaun Costello takes a hard left, slicing the erotic charge right out of the formula — and in the process coughs up one of the sickest films the 70s ever spewed. Deliberate or not, the result is pornography with zero sensual appeal, a work no sane viewer could mistake for erotic— unless your kinks involve insanity, misery, and death rattles. Forced Entry lives on the far side of sanity, the zone where porn mutates into something closer to a crime scene. This is porn gone feral, the kind of nightmare that had the FBI kicking down peep-show doors once the legal mess around XXX cinema started oozing out of Times Square’s sleaziest gutters.
At its core, Forced Entry is a study in psychic fracture. Harry Reems embodies a Vietnam veteran whose bifurcated mind leaves him stranded between the battlefield and his menial gas station job in New York. He is grotesque, vile, unable to detach from the war that still haunts him. The film’s very structure mirrors this condition: audiovisually erratic, formally unstable, fractured in direct analogy to the disordered mind of its protagonist. Bang — real Vietnam war crimes footage on screen. Cut — Harry Reems stalking some unwary woman in New York. Cut again — napalm, bodies, jungle fire. Back again — rape, murder, the same routine over and over. There’s nothing poetic about it, nothing classy— just a blunt-force analogy. It’s not clever, it’s not pretty, but the analogy still sticks: what looks like a sleazy cliché takes on the stink of war. The sicko picks his prey as stand-ins for the ruling class he hates. He’s a bitter Vietnam vet turned reactionary psycho, foaming at the mouth about hippies and liberals. You’d think all this would come through in some terrible monologues — but nope. Costello makes it work with film grammar: brutal juxtapositions, nasty montages, and cuts sharp enough to carve the message in.
The true horror of Forced Entry lies in its editing, in the way Costello fractures perception itself. A sequence that might otherwise read as standard hardcore voyeurism — Harry Reems silently watching women in the intimacy of their homes — becomes something far more sinister. The montage denies erotic payoff and instead reframes these intrusions as tactical maneuvers, as if each lingering gaze were reconnaissance preceding a strike. In this sense, the voyeurism of Forced Entry isn’t about pleasure but about military occupation, a form of domestic warfare. He’s not in ‘Nam anymore, but his head never left. New York gets remapped into the jungle — the streets feel like sweat-soaked mud, the towers loom like a suffocating canopy, and the city’s concrete shadows press down like monsoon heat. And when the action finally breaks, there’s no seduction, no sexiness, no “lovemaking.” What you get is combat porn: sex turned into bloodsport, intimacy turned into a battlefield. Flesh gets handled like territory, intimacy bulldozed by brute force.
First blood, and it’s grotesque. He spies on a couple getting it on, but where a normal sleazeball would be drooling, he’s seething. Knife in hand, stroking steel while they stroke each other. For him, blade and dick fuse into the same weapon — penetration equals annihilation. She’s forced into oral service, gagged on the war-logic of his madness. The dirty talk is pure gutter bile, meant to corrode, not excite. And when the so-called climax comes, it’s no gush of porno goo — it’s gunfire, the “money shot” as muzzle flash. Then he ices her without a shred of pity, just another casualty in his private war. From there it’s rinse-and-repeat carnage, the same routine played out on different bodies. But the one that sticks like shrapnel is Laura Cannon. Just a year earlier she and Reems shared one of the sweetest, almost tender, hardcore couplings ever put on film in Andy Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street. Fast forward, and now they’re re-teamed for the polar opposite: one of the ugliest, most vicious sex scenes ever committed to celluloid. The irony stings like salt in a wound. Sodomy, degradation, and a crushing sense of emotional collapse. Costello doesn’t let up, grinding his audience into submission until the whole movie feels like a pornographic first draft of Taxi Driver. But instead of Travis Bickle’s righteous paranoia, we get Reems as a deranged vet cutting a swath of violence across 42nd Street screens, rewriting sexual exploitation as a one-man war film. Forget mohawks and mirrors — this one’s all knives, cum, and corpses.
Forced Entry ends up being less about porn and more about pathology — a carousel of rape that morphs into a savage commentary on the state of America. Yes, it’s smut, loaded with the inserts and grotesque theatrics every raincoat crowd came for, but there’s a ferocity here that makes it stick. Rarely did golden age porn hit this hard, or say this much. The result is a nihilistic snapshot of 1970s Americana — a time when the dream curdled into sleaze, when counterculture bled out on the city sidewalks, and when a movie like this could play to packed grindhouses.
