Inside Amy (1974)

The basic premise of low-budget exploitation flick Inside Amy is solid enough that if the picture had been written and directed with a modicum of skill, it could have become a memorably sleazy thriller. Charlie (James R. Sweeney, billed as Eastman Price), a successful lawyer hurtling toward middle age, has grown bored with marriage to alluring but straight-laced Amy (Jan Mitchell), so when he learns about a local nightclub catering to swingers, he pressures Amy into visiting the club with him. This inevitably leads the couple to a wife-swapping party. At the moment of truth, Charlie can’t perform with a stranger, but Amy gets it on with several partners, even though she says afterward she still loves her husband. Driven mad by jealousy, Charlie systematically hunts and kills Amy’s playmates. In an alternate universe, some imaginative striver made this picture with Charlie and Amy as fully rendered characters, thus yielding a morality tale about the tension between sexual fantasies and marital reality. In this universe, director Ronald Victor Garcia—later to build a respectable career as a cinematographer and occasional director, mostly for television—executed Helene Arthur’s lifeless script clumsily. The kills are bland, the sex is tame, the film has virtually zero tension, the acting is mostly terrible, and the finale is thoroughly anticlimactic. Inside Amy doesn’t even rate highly in terms of kitsch, except perhaps for the scolding title song (“Amy, you better straighten out or be prepared to meet your fate”). As if Inside Amy wasn’t sufficiently lurid, the picture was later released as both Super Swinging Playmates and Swingers Massacre.

Inside Amy: LAME