The Zodiac Killer (1971)

 

Director: Tom Hanson

Screenplay: Ray Cantrell and Manny Cardoza

Cast: Hal Reed as Jerry; Bob Jones as Grover; Ray Lynch as Sgt. Pittman; Tom Pittman as Officer Heller

Ephemeral Waves

 

Numerous Plot Spoilers Throughout

The Zodiac Killer is literally a film made to catch the real Zodiac killer. Why not begin the review with the truly infamous aspect of a production even when it is screened? Helmed and created by director Tom Hanson, there was even included a prize of a motorbike which was designed to catch the killer during screenings. Whilst the Zodiac Killer was still out there terrorising San Francisco, Hanson, who had previously owned a chain of Pizza Man restaurants¹, decided to enter cinema, the same year Dirty Harry (1971) came with a Zodiac killer stand, with the attempt to catch the figure that would be ultimately uncaught. Considering that Dirty Harry with its "Scorpio" killer came to theatres six months later¹ to The Zodiac Killer adds the cherry on the cake of this film's deeply strange origins. Well, that and Paul Avery, the journalist famous for investigating the Zodiac killings, who was even brought in as a consultant at one point¹, so this strange film has even further links to the real killer. The entire aura of this figure never captured for their murders, which many will know in cinema through David Fincher's Zodiac (2007) from decades later, has left its mark on cinema, and a production like The Zodiac Killer deserved preservation for how idiosyncratically part of the history it is, even if it also happens to be a bizarre crime narrative in itself.  

Unlike another film from this era riffing on real killers, Another Son of Sam (1977), which has nothing to do with the Son of Sam murders later in the seventies, The Zodiac Killer neither lingers, starting with random murders whilst the killer monologues that he could be the person next door and the regular person on the street. It is also the miserable life of a mailman named Jerry (Hal Reed), a bizarre melodrama of one who hates people, hates women but loves rabbits, weeping at their graves of why bad people still live when the bunnies die. He is also effectively Satanist, least in iconography though the logic to his killings is revealed later. The true Zodiac killer as depicted in this world, with the spice of Reed's melodramatic acting performance in depicting strange rollercoaster of characterisations throughout, openly improvises on this elusive figure of real crime in its own logic. Nowadays this would be a more contentious and controversial thing to do in a film, and none would be able to get away with depicting an ongoing spree of murders without moral outrage online, but seen in the modern eye, it is strange and Something Weird Video approved, Something Weird where this film was preserved with before being inherited by the American Genre Film Archive in collaboration.

The Zodiac Killer is of its time in many ways, as a fascinating cultural item, but also because casual misogyny is up the wazoo here, with everyone sexist or even misogynistic as a man; one older man's rant of younger women turning in crabbing older ones is exemplifying this, especially calling for "leftovers" from Jerry's courting. Some of this dialogue is undefendable, but it does have more to it even accidentally. All the toxic masculinity is still un-pc - where if you do not like girls, you're the f word, and they prefer "dumb" women, even use the paper bag metaphor for physical appearance - but it is noticeable none of the misogynists are good people. Jerry is revealed to be the Zodiac killer, whilst his friend Grover the truck driver, when not wearing a ridiculous fake wig to impress the ladies on dates, is a detestable man who gets mistaken as the killer to his doom. Due to his violent outbursts, caught in a domestic antagonism with his ex-wife, waving a handsaw of all tools to have acquired, before dying in a pool by the police, Grover looks the buffoon and the deviant especially nowadays with his misogynistic language.  

A female diner waitress, an older woman, when she chides Grove for calling her cheap in drunken comments the day after really exemplifies it was also clearly meant for point, as much as this is the dated nature of the film, especially as she is soon after a victim of the Zodiac killer. With the purpose of the film meant to catch the real one, it feels on point for Tom Hanson and his screenwriters to create one, alongside a maelstrom of conflicting emotions, to have this rancid attitude to people in him. It also presents the erratic nature of these types of films, of their slips in tone and whimsical music cues. Shot as an independent American production, it is a weird film. It recreates the Lake Berryessa killing among others, which David Fincher did in Zodiac, only with the killer in an all-black costume with a white target on his chest to be instantly recognised by; inherently the Zodiac killer in their attitude, with cryptic codes sent the newspapers, is a strange concept, yet one entirely real as a figure who was doing this, but this film manages to go further with the same film, recreating murders like this, having an extended sex gag of this killer being dragged into a house by a lusty woman, or leaving zodiac signs in salty on a bar counter.

The film's qualities are definitely in mind to its lacksidasical pacing and tone, a curiosity whose notoriety in what it was made for is matched by how odd it is onscreen to, especially when Jerry the postman posits a new theory of the Zodiac Killer, that of having killed people so they became his followers in the afterlife when Atlantis rises again. That was made up, confirmed when in an interview decades later the director summed this as "made-up shit,"¹, but even this adds to this as a cultural item as, made in the early seventies, occultism is naturally here too. This includes the Zodiac Killer talking about Atlantis, one of his female victims claiming to be psychic, or when Mr. Castro the psychic briefly makes an appearance, a character brought in for one of the most surreal and best scenes; hired by the police, and also evoking the ESP psycho craze that would culminate with the likes of Uri Geller in popular culture, in this film Mr. Castro in his short time onscreen, a David Lynch character who never was, has credible powers to add more to the film's psychotronic strangeness.

Considering this is a film where anything can happen the next minute, the fact its history as a production as much as the content is as idiosyncratic makes this a true one-off even if some, understandable, may be put off by its chaotic nature. It befittingly stays this curious throughout its running time too. At its end we see the Zodiac Killer having the psychological conflict where his father is in a mental institution, Hal Reed's chewing the wall acting notwithstanding an attempt to humanise this real world killer, only to follow this with a disabled man being pushed down a hill like a Naked Gun gag. That just exemplifies the absurdity of this, and finishes this curiosity perfectly.

========

1) Taken from Zodiac Hunter: An Interview with Tom Hanson, a blog interview for the Temple of Schlock published on December 31st 2012. With a fragment included in the AGFA 2022 British release Blu-Ray as a booklet, the content related to the film's intentions, and the many possible brushes with the real killer, are as curious as the film's fictional content itself.