Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Blistering performances.

I loved it so much when I first saw this, mainly because I loved watching anything with Roddy McDowall. But it was much more than that. It was so hilarious. And despite what some reviewer said on here about that the girls in the film were really under 18 - 1. How does he know? 2. I'm sure they weren't they were all actresses many of who were around in plenty of movies at the time. I love the sexiness of it. It was a different time and a time I miss in films. I so miss it. It hasn't been repeated on TV for since the 70's. SO many missing gems that I wish would see the light of day again. I know it was a great thriller too, I definitely won't be giving out any spoilers as I can't remember how it ends. That is why I so wish I could view it again. I never new Vadim was the director. I mean as a child back them, I wouldn't have known who Vadim was. And being shown on Australian TV in the early 70's I just thought it was another TV movie. As all those main actors at the time were mainly in TV shows.

Perhaps when this film came out, it was considered "funny" by some people. But it wasn't funny to me then and it's not funny to me now.(What follows should be considered a spoiler.)Pedophilia is nothing to laugh about. And murder to cover up pedophilia is even less funny. But the real tragedy of this film is the teacher's wife ... knowing that her husband had sex with teenage girls, knowing he'd committed murder to cover it up, and then "going along" with him faking his own death so she could rejoin him in his Brazilian hideaway as if nothing had happened.It saddens me that a writer like Gene Roddenberry would pen such a disgusting screenplay and that actors like Rock Hudson, Angie Dickenson, Telly Savalas, and James Doohan would even associate themselves with such a film project.

Really oddball slice of movie-making. Writer Roddenberry apparently wants to say something derogatory about high-school and football, while director Vadim can't seem to train his camera on anything but a girl's groin area. The two threads occasionally cross paths, but not long enough to produce a coherent result. Rock Hudson, of all people, is a high-school coach who dabbles in serial killing, that is, when not testing girls out carnally in his office. Meanwhile, frustrated teenager Carson is having a terminal case of sexual arousal at all the wrong times. At the same time, a half-clad Angie Dickinson is trying to figure out just what her role is supposed to be, while bemused cop Telly Savalas stands by, practicing for his Kojak role. The overall result is a sometimes interesting mess that, nevertheless, remains visually compelling for guys, at least. It's like soft-core porn with a Hollywood cast. I'm impressed, however, by how well Hudson performs as a tough talking womanizer and serial killer, not exactly the actor's stock and trade. Too bad Carson has only one frozen expression for every occasion, as another reviewer points out. Anyhow, if there's a point to the narrative buried somewhere inside the rampant lust, I couldn't find it. The movie is really more like an experience than a story told or a moral revealed.

Another blast from my past! I was a horny college student when this film was released in 1971, and I recall a big photo spread in "Playboy" promoting the film with revealing images of various "Pretty Maids." (Joy Bang? Nothing suggestive there!) I went to see the film based on that promise of titillation, but rather than being turned on, my tender sensibilities were turned off by the amoral characters and plot line.I recently watched the film again on TCM (give them credit for not censoring the mild nudity!), and I can't say that my view has changed much in 35 years. Those who try to excuse this fecal matter as "black comedy" or as an unsung "cult classic" are putting a lot of lipstick on a warthog.Many privileged Baby Boomers (of which I was one) developed in the 1960s a peculiarly self-centered notion that youth is morally superior to maturity, that idealism always trumps experience. The media -- especially a movie industry with a new ratings system that released filmmakers from the restrictions of the old Production Code -- pandered to the Baby Boomers' self-congratulatory moral smugness. This film is rife with such pandering. Rock Hudson's lecherous/murderous teacher is represented as the only cool adult in the film, as much for his "youthful" sense of style as for his unorthodox ideas about educating horny teenagers. The only other remotely hip adult is Telly Savalas' detective, who himself develops a grudging admiration for the murderer. The Angie Dickinson character is an overly earnest teacher who has to be "enlightened" by Hudson into seducing Hudson's sexually frustrated protégé (John David Carson). The other adult characters are essentially movie idiots (Keenan Wynn and Roddy McDowall are particularly offensive -- I hope they were paid well), while the hip, turned-on teens in the film protest the Vietnam war and lecture their elders on sexual freedom and openness.I have nothing against good old-fashioned lust, but even in 1971 I saw the impropriety of Hudson's character having sex with his female students (which he excuses as a way to enhance their psychological well-being). That sort of sexual power-mongering is bad enough, but then the controlling bastard must kill certain sexual partners (and others) who might expose his escapades. Rather hypocritical, isn't it? Advocating sexual license but afraid of having his own licentiousness exposed? (His wife, played by the lovely Barbara Leigh, is strangely passive in all this mess. It's never clear if she's totally clueless or remarkably tolerant of her husband's extramarital liaisons, though the film's ending points toward the latter.) After the Hudson character's demise(?), the newly unfrustrated protégé (who earlier is dismayed by revelations of his mentor's murderous behavior) adopts the same style of sexual duplicity for himself. (He attains symbolic hipness by abandoning his wimpy Vespa for a studlier motorcycle.) Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to argue that the new sexual mores of the '60s were a sham -- just the old, inescapable sexual hypocrisy coated with hip psychobabble – but that point itself is objectionable, and the film's own hypocrisy emphasizes just how disgusting the old sexual double standard really was (and is).One would think that this film was a rather blatant fantasy by that unapologetic libertine, Roger Vadim. But the film was written and produced by that celebrated intergalactic moralist, Gene Roddenberry, for God'sake! This guy gives dirty old men a bad name, and the film makes me yearn for the mindless but honest lasciviousness of hardcore porn. Comedy, even black comedy, still needs a moral center, something we can laugh with rather than just laugh at. This film glories in its amorality and mocks what the many progressive Boomers of the 60s, for all our ignorance and pretense, were trying to accomplish (and to some extent, have achieved) in making society's attitudes about sex more humane.