The Gore-Gore Girls (1972)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Alan J. Dachman

Cast: Frank Kress as Abraham Gentry; Amy Farrell as Nancy Weston; Hedda Lubin as Marlene; Henny Youngman as Marzdone Mobilie; Russ Badger as Lt. Anderson; Ray Sager as Grout; Nora Alexis as Lola Prize

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Lt. Anderson, one of my friends seems to have run into a bit of trouble... and lost her face.

Thinking he was ending on this film in terms of his film directing career, Herschell Gordon Lewis felt he wanted to go out with a bang, with more production value and shock as he was closing the door on his exploitation film career. Starting with the image of a woman, Suzie Cream Puff, "being creamed" by having her face hit through a mirror, he wanted to deliver on that premise. Here I will say, as one of the first Lewis films I had seen, I hated this film once. Hated it to the point it was actually held as one of the worst films I had ever seen. What changed in all the time that passed?

The immediate thing is this film embraces its sense of humour. Introducing our detective lead, Abraham Gentry (Frank Kress), stroking a pet cat in his lounge only to insert it into a cupboard when someone knocks outside, he is lured by a female reporter Nancy Weston (Amy Farrell) to investigate a series of gristly go-go dancer murders. The Gore-Gore Girls is a scuzzy and nasty little production, clearly influenced by the Italian giallo from the period as the unseen killer is even wearing black gloves for the job, but it is also a film so proudly with its tongue in its cheek it has pierced through the flesh. Gentry, as played by Kress, is immediately a stand-out even in terms of characters and acting performances in a Lewis film, playing a sarcastic dick but delightfully so, apt for the tone of the production with his many quips to people who irritate him during his work. He eventually even comes to like Nancy, despite their stand-off nature at first and questionable decisions nowadays; though he does nothing and makes sure she gets safely home, getting her drunk off her face on zombie cocktails repeatedly is not something we would consider heroic nowadays even if the joke back in the early seventies.

The film is a procedural where he investigates who the killer could be. Is it Grout (Ray Sager), the man at the Go-Go club bar who draws faces on vegetables and fruits, crushing them in a mania started on corpses in his Vietnam war service, or the leader of a feminist group, whose group storms a Go-Go club halfway through? Lewis even touching upon the Italian giallo genre by accident is a curious nod to this era Lewis would bow out OF, as horror cinema changed in the seventies and diversified further. This is including the fact he might have not been able to match the gore and splatter becoming more acceptable even in mainstream cinema from the period, such as The Omen (1976) having a full decapitation by way of pane of glass shown at multiple angles. Some of this film has aged and is of the era, as Gentry has no time for any woman, even when he is condescending to everyone, and eventually going to bond and have a romance with Nancy. Coming off as a chauvinist, there are many moments, before that romance too, Gentry feels like he is clearly not interested in women at all and could be read as gay.

Thankfully, a bit has aged well. Even with the feminists involved, the film never takes pot-shots with them even when their leader is a possible suspect, their huge storming scene more of a scuffle between actors then anything that comes off as offensive. It feels like Lewis, and his screenwriter Alan J. Dachman, who has a brief scene as a young male bystander asked where a suspect is, just took notice of the world around them and put in a touch for more interest. Gentry is also inclined to screwing with the male police lieutenant, hiding info and telling him the killer is a religious fanatic stealing the victims' Bibles, which is a legitimately funny running joke especially when the cast playing the fellow officers, who Gentry likes more, play it with their senior looking like an idiot.

One of the other aspects of the film was also one of the huge reasons I hated it originally, because I was offended by it, were the gore scenes, not used to the type of films Lewis made and the splatter genre. That they all involve female victims is going to be an issue for many, though Lewis was happy to have violence against men and women; the issue is entirely that, with the plot choice, some will find this uncomfortable whilst for Lewis, wishing to leave his career at this point as the inventor of the splatter genre, he decided to leave as gruesomely as possible. This is as extreme as Lewis could get, even next to Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat (2002), with openly absurd shock value and violent about it, where one person dies to a wooden meat tenderizer to the buttocks followed by salt and pepper being added the wounds. A lot of handling organ meat is involved, and the one scene that is the most infamous was also the one which really shocked me back in the day, still out-there in Lewis' filmography when a female victim has her nipples cut off, one producing milk and the other producing chocolate milk, among the other things that already happened. These scenes, even if played for the bleakest of humour, are going to shock and make people uncomfortable, especially because the targets are all women, which was the aspect which caught me off-guard when I first saw the film back in the day and also could not see the intentional absurdity in its grossness. Details of the film do feel of their time, like this or Gentry getting Nancy drunk continually, but what is also felt is that Lewis is not taking anything serious and being mischievous at the same time. Particularly with the look of the film, shot in Chicago, The Gore-Gore Girls was a shock for me back in the day for feeling rancid let alone looking it, and that I did not appreciate this type of cinema at all, especially when it came to its very twisted sense of humour.

It has a clear witty, very dark humoured tone, which helps the film so much in the modern day, but in hindsight this film should probably be a later work for a newcomer to watch from Lewis, just in case the content leaves a bad taste in the mouth without seeing Lewis' sense of humour in context. Nonetheless I have changed my tune considerably to the film, and if this had been his last film, it would have been a good one to have closed the curtains of his career on, with all his quirks, all his divisive content, and a fitting final image. One breaking the forth wall, the screen being closed by a character as a literal curtain closer, feeling closer to a touch from a forties screwball comedy than a splatter film conclusion. That was not the end, as he would return to cinema in the 2000s after a very successful career in advertising, but for the original era, this was an apt closure.

When it comes into asking why he even decided to end his career at this point as he did, some of it is the fact he was struggling to make these films and felt he could have less stress in his life, especially as his advertising career for decades after made him a very well off man. Interviewed on The Incredibly Strange Film Show, a 1988-9 Channel 4 series by Jonathan Ross where he tackled "psychotronic" or B movie figures, the episode entirely devoted to Lewis had him absolute at bliss, happy to look back on his career with mirth but also, playing tennis and well off, a man who did well as a lucrative writer and speaker on the subject of advertising, his film career a well kept secret. He came back to cinema, which was a happy thing, but there was in itself a happy end there just as well. Lewis, in spite of his notorious gore films, has something sweet to his life in that he managed to have happy conclusions to his life and career in cinema twice. It is an odd thing to consider, as his career was devoted to make the audience throw up and throwing entrails around, but he would have found that hilarious.

Axe (1974)

 

aka. Lisa, Lisa or California Axe Massacre

Director: Frederick R. Friedel

Screenplay: Frederick R. Friedel

Cast: Leslie Lee as Lisa; Jack Canon as Steele; Ray Green as Lomax; Frederick R. Friedel as Billy; Douglas Powers as the Grandfather

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

It is incredibly obvious why, when I first saw Axe, I could not appreciate this film as it was and once viewed it as one of the worst I had seen. As someone who grew up in Britain, naturally the Video Nasties was a concept I had learnt of as a teenager and gained a fascination for early on. Thankfully, this was also in the 2000s and the DVD era, when I was able to start watching these types of films and you could actually see them. One of the official members of the list, and among those which were actually prosecuted, I expected balls to the walls luridness, only to get this slow burn tale about a young woman named Lisa (Leslie Lee), living with her disabled grandfather in the middle of nowhere, terrorised by a gang of three member. It was a film I once found even at 66 minutes slow and dull to a painful extreme. Nowadays, I rightly see many of its virtues, the Video Nasties list a curious and at times motley crew of titles defining a lot of fascinating areas of genre cinema at the time, such as the Golden era of Italian genre cinema to this, among the regional American titles which flourished between the sixties and eighties.

With its more infamous title the one I prefer - it is snappy, yet fits the tone as well as befits the southern Gothic vibes the production has - it is interesting as a film not quite in the horror genre but in many at once. It begins as a crime drama, following a group of criminals - one the ruthless and cold leader, the second the sadist, and the last played by the director-writer himself as the one with morals, becoming more uncomfortable with that his colleagues are capable of. They are the kind of men, the two with a desire to harm, to put a cigar out in a man's mouth and dismiss accidentally killing him in his room whilst he was with his boyfriend. Even on the run, they terrorise a woman working by herself in a small store, tormenting her and even playing William Tell with a gun. Beyond this, due to the length of the film, and its succinct plot, there is not a lot to add to the premise, barring that it becomes obvious Lisa herself has mental health issues, with hallucinations and even contemplating suicide at one point, living by herself on a farm with a paralysed grandfather with only the chickens she tends to (and kill for food) there for her. She also, defying what they expect of her as a merely casual figure they can manipulate, someone more than capable with intelligence to get rid of their threat out of the house.

This is what one would think of a small regional production, made with a low budget, if you wished to have an example of this era of regional genre cinema, and with a premise which you could easily adapt into a short story or a radio drama. That is to its advantage as that does not mean the film has no personality. I could not help but think of a film which tried to recreate this era of seventies genre cinema but felt lacking for me personally. Ti West's X (2022), which attempted to be a seventies throwback by being set in the time period, in which a porn shoot at a farm ends up with the elderly owners finding out and starting to get violent, spring to mind and a lot of the reason why I felt it did not work was that it felt more like a horror film in terms of a series of shocks and gore moments than what Axe is, a drama which just happens to live in the skin of a horror film. A lot of modern horror films feel, for me, more inclined to a well worn series of sudden shocks rather than nestling in its mood, even if the point as with Axe originally, it felt like it dragged significantly with its dialogue scenes and lack of constant pervading threat in scenes until things escalate.

It does become horrifying, whilst in a way which makes the British prosecutors who viewed it as potentially harmful to British society ridiculous. Whilst not seeing many films like this would naturally cause one to feel shock for how intense this eventually gets, the Southern Gothic reference I made befits. Barring some extensive use of fake bright red gore, the gruesomeness is standard in horror films even from the Hammer horror films eventually when they had to catch up with their competition, or it is implied in an appropriately horrifying way. Blood on a pure white kitchen sink, which comes from a decapitated chicken, and the implicit idea of axe dismemberment, than explicitly show a fake mannequin being chopped up as Herschell Gordon Lewis would have in the sixties, is how Frederick R. Friedel depicts the violence. The most gore image onscreen is a simple prosthetic on the back of an actor's neck and a lot of fake gore, so it comes really apparent the notoriety this got on the Video Nasty list is a mass paranoia of what it suggests, evoking images of more gruesome dismemberment onscreen (like a few of the films which did get on the list) when it is merely perceived. There is even an ominous use of Campbell Tomato Soup which, whilst absurd out of context, fits for the scene in its shock.

The use of a tool which can be found in any D.I.Y. store was also clearly an additional fear at the time for being possible to have as a weapon in reality, not able to be separated from said reality. The idea of this being the film which got the name "Axe", like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre franchise getting chainsaws and fellow Video Nasty The Driller Killer (1979) for drills, befits as here, the axe feels like something, in a true crime tale spun out in stories in the modern day, as here someone would end up using if not to murder someone but to at least dispose of the body, the gruesomeness felt with a weapon you have in the shed as a viewer, which could happen with greater ease in real life and not just in a movie. Additionally, the film has an ill-ease provided by its droning electronic score, composed between George Newman Shaw and John Willhelm, which helped emphasised a woozy atmosphere which helped the film immensely. Axe among some notorious films in the Video Nasty collection was one of the quieter members, befittingly like its lead Lisa in that the film seems out of place among the unruly and more controversial of that list like the cannibal films, but it has its own strength which has to be admired, alongside the knowledge this was really a project made by Frederick R. Friedel where he wanted to make a film even if from his own resources.

Grindhouse (2007)

 

Directors: Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror), Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof)

Screenplays: Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror), Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof)

Cast:

Planet Terror: Rose McGowan as Cherry Darling, Freddy Rodriguez as "El Wray", Josh Brolin as Dr. William Block, Marley Shelton as Dr. Dakota Block, Jeff Fahey as J.T. Hague, Michael Biehn as Sheriff Hague, Rebel Rodriguez as Tony Block, Bruce Willis as Lieutenant Muldoon, Naveen Andrews as Dr. John "Abby" Abbington, Julio Oscar Mechoso as Romy, Fergie as Tammy Visan, Nicky Katt as Joe

Death Proof: Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike McKay, Zoë Bell as herself, Rosario Dawson as Abernathy Ross, Vanessa Ferlito as Arlene/Butterfly, Sydney Tamiia Poitier as Jungle Julia Lucai, Tracie Thoms as Kim Mathis, Jordan Ladd as Shanna, Rose McGowan as Pam, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Lee Montgomery

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

About as useless as a pecker on a Pope.

Grindhouse was a fascinating one-off, and as time has passed, it feels for me like a project that was never going to be a big hit and always the cult title. Considering Quentin Tarantino prior to this created the Kill Bill project, which was split into two theatrical releases, and were tributes to genre cinema with even an animated sequence from a Japanese studio, that may seen questionable as a comment, but I see Grindhouse as more of a niche concept in principal. It was a tribute to certain types of cinemas of the past than necessarily the genre films churned in them 24/7 on the notorious 42^nd Street of New York City and other locations, something which is more specific to get the references to in the project itself. Kill Bill had the advantage of being split into two halves, and riding the wave of interest of the likes of martial arts cinema, whilst this was a three hour double bill as a concept rather than the genres chosen by him and Robert Rodriguez. It appeals in principal, but in mind that this was a large budget project too, rather than a fictional double bill made on the lower budget, the project was always going to be in danger if it did not have the right amount of advertising and the right release, which it sadly did not.

The idea of paying tribute to this idea for a large budget projection was a risk, and if anything, when I was just getting into cinema at this time, it did at least catch a wave of interest in old genre and cult films that carried into decades after. It also lead to a wave of "neo-Grindhouse" films not really evoking the old exploitation films but replicating the template Grindhouse itself became, and it neither helped back then, whilst I want to return to them all, I hated most of those films when I watched them. The lack of box office success in the United States also lead to the films being split up into two theatrical features for the British market, including their initial DVD/Blu Ray releases. Contextually, Grindhouse itself came to me in its intended form with me more appreciative of its goal, whilst unfortunately, the lack of box office success when released in the United States lead to the Weinstein Company initally splitting the films up into two theatrical features for the British market. Death Proof, Tarantino's entry, was not a film I received well at all, to the point as a young lad who got into films like Pulp Fiction (1994) I thought he had lost his mojo entirely with this extended theatrical release when I caught up to this on DVD. What it was, remembering how divisive the responses from others at the time was as well, is clearly a transitional stage for his films.

But Grindhouse itself, when finally released as intended eventually, began with Robert Rodriguez’s than-fake trailer for Machete, imagining character actor Danny Trejo as a Mexican immigrant with governmental combat skills being double crossed, and thus going on a revenge mission. Fake trailers were one of the touches that were part of the Grindhouse project, though this one was kept for Planet Terror’s individual releases as here, the others lost in a project that was meant to recreate the experience of these cinemas, including some real ephemeral material shown at cinemas like the ones about age restrictions. They were touches more for a cult film crowd, but were cool to include, and whilst some of it has not aged well, entirely the stuff nodding to The Weinstein Company and the rightly disgraced Harvey Weinstein, the material is all interesting. Machete’s is interesting as it did become a film in 2010 through Rodriguez himself, with a sequel later that got more ridiculous, turning into an exploitation spin on US immigration politics. It also connects to how Planet Terror itself, as that later film, are both jokey over-the-top pastiches at their heart, full of stunt casting as Machete itself would have Lindsay Lohan as one of the roles in the trailer’s biggest gag, Trejo seducing a US senator’s wife and daughter at the same time, and inexplicably Steven Segal.

Planet Terror itself, which is about a bio chemical weapon causing a zombie outbreak, takes this further as we can have six degrees of separation games the TV series Lost, the Die Hard franchise, The Lawnmower Man (1992), and a member of the Black Eyed Peas. Planet Terror was a safer film of the two parts of this production, a pastiche with a budget to get away with violence which would have given eighties moralists a collective heart attack, with a name cast and a complete lack of seriousness meant for a crowd viewing. Planet Terror, as we set up the outbreak and the key leads, such as the mysterious traveller El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) to ex-go-go dancer Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan), immediately shows the most contentious legacy of the Grindhouse project, that being the artificially created grain and celluloid print damage, more for all the other films which took influence to copy this aesthetic than necessarily being controversial for Grindhouse itself. If you watched any neo-Grindhouse film of the time, and this could even be found in micro-budget productions, between the late 2000s to the early 2010s, you would have seen digitally added film grain and damage, replicated from what Grindhouse did on a considerably larger budget. This is a tribute to how exploitation films in the original cinemas could be old, battered prints and as both halves play, the creators of these new films imagined the worse case scenarios where film reels went missing or salacious moments, as Planet Terror plays with, were cut out by the projectionists for keepsakes. With hindsight, this was preparing us for the tactile nature of any Blu Ray release of a title where the negative was lost and a film was preserved from a screening print, but this also makes one aware Grindhouse was always the imagined version of the thing the creators were paying tribute to. This was an imagined Grindhouse where you could have not really captured the real places, more so as Rodriquez’s is less the ideal of these types of films, from the seventies, but more the eighties films as they were coming to VHS and video rental stores.

Time is convoluted in both films, tributes to the past but made and set at the time they were produced in, and with Planet Terror, as an entire military platoon infected with the bio weapon end up in a deal gone wrong that unleashes the gas onto the local community, the tone also feels closer to a Return of the Living Dead (1985), and that era of cinema. What you get in a post-ironic form is something between the late seventies and a John Carpenter love-in, with the score paying tribute to his music, to the mid-eighties straight to video practical effects driven work. What between the gooey practical effects by Tom Savini, who gets an onscreen role too, and tributes between Lucio Fulci eye trauma, and possibly even Cannibal Apocalypse (1980) by Antonio Margheriti as an action horror film, and this feels slightly different to the goal Tarantino was after with his a seventies throwback. It is amazing to see a large budget tribute to all these, and also managing to get away with a child shooting themselves by accident, as a real taboo, but alongside Rodriguez’s trademark to make his films as independently as possible by his own hands, Planet Terror itself is purposely cool and deliberately absurd in construct.

Even when he has some really nasty gore, and sexual threat at one point, Quentin Tarantino in a cameo having a knack, between this and From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), for playing creepy sexual deviants, Rodriguez plays this with pathos and parody at the same time. You feel real emotional connection to Michael Biehn and Jeff Fahey as brothers in the end, but it surrounds Biehn trying to force Fahey to give up his secret barbecue recipe even in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. Even in mind that Freddy Rodriguez feels one of the weaker figures, because he had to play the mysterious and sombre tough lead, his character finds himself the straight man among everyone else and eventually having to ride a pocket motorbike in a scene deliberately done for humour. There are also the obvious stunt casting moments, like having Bruce Willis as the lead of the military platoon, and the little details of Rodriguez’s own interests, making the kind of film he would want as a viewer in the truest sense. Planet Terror can also claim to have its own obsession with male genital trauma, be it Naveen Andrews, the Lost series alumni as a shady scientist, being obsessed with collecting castrated testicles, to how Tarantino, as long as he gets to name check Ava Gardner and monologue, has his penis melt off before the film ends.

Planet Terror in context made sense to begin Grindhouse, the party starter even if, with hindsight, Death Proof as the film which got the most negative reactions initially became the more interesting to unpack. Planet Terror itself is fun and ridiculous, even if now with a melancholia of how, really, this is Rose McGowan’s film. This is the moment where we sadly do have to talk about Harvey Weinstein, as alongside the fact she drifted away from films very prominently advertised in the 2010s, she is one of the women named as one of his victims, accusing him for horrible crimes, when the MeToo movement came to exist in the 2010s, that finally led to him ending in jail. Rodriguez, who dated McGowan, has talked that he learnt of the trauma she went through, and deliberately cast her in Planet Terror as a rebuttal to her being effectively blacklisted by Weinstein for crimes he committed to her. Rodriquez argued the box office failure of Grindhouse was Harvey Weinstein burying the project for this by under promoting the film¹. Whatever the circumstances for why the film was not a box office success, she is also the best thing in Planet Terror too, given Cherry Darling a playful spark between wanting to be a comedian and talking of all her useless little talents through the film. This is even before we get to her character spending most of the film without a leg, the special effects still great to this day, and leading to the image that sold this film even if it only happens near the end of Planet Terror, attaching a rifle with a rocket launcher attachment as an improvised false leg. It is the kind of role, one of two through both films, which should have been a platform for even bigger films but sadly was not to be.

The original way to see the two films that make up Grinndhouse meant we never got the trailers originally meant to split them up. Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS, feeling like a pitch reel to an actual project, does encapsulate how exploitation films are historically contextualised and more complicated than Grindhouse itself, in this case the moral quandary that led to the Naziploitation genre. Most of those films got on the Video Nasties list in the United Kingdom and most are still not allowed to be released due to their perceived mix of sex, violence and Nazis by the British Board of Film Classification, the one exception being the one with the really infamous VHS cover, SS Experiment Love Camp (1976), which is just bad taste and inexplicably links to the theme of genital trauma as a male character has his surgically removed, to be given to a high ranking Nazi officer, and is naturally not pleased. How they came to be is not something I can adequately write, in mind they come twenty to thirty years after the fallout of World War II and were as much for illicit sexploitation scenarios as part of the lasting effect of that war, but Zombie’s take is broad and over-the-top. It is not portraying the completely exploitative aspect to an Italian film like SS Experiment Love Camp nor the serious takes on the subject, like The Night Porter (1974), also coming out at the time. Some may know this trailer for Nicolas Cage as the Fiendish Doctor Fu Manchu, another contentious exploitation concept we English, and Sax Rohmer, have to be blamed for, but alongside the fact they do not have him in yellow face as Christopher Lee did playing the character a few times in the sixties, the absurdity is there in the premise of Nazis having a secret werewolf woman project and yet also bringing in this character as a possible sub-contractor to the project. Could it have worked? It would have been highly stylised and divisive as Rob Zombie’s other work, especially as this was the time he helmed two Halloween reboots, though the trailer promised if they were able to make a film with Udo Kier, Sybil Danning and Bill Moseley as a mad Germanic doctor, let alone Nicolas Cage, I would have been interested.

Don’t by Edgar Wright was a really good parody of seventies horror. A tribute to the nastier side of British horror, the world of directors like Pete Walker, the nod to Video Nasties was appropriate in the last paragraph as, at one time, having “Don’t” in the title was seen as a good marketing tool at one point and lead to a lot of films on that Video Nasties list which fit this, such as Don’t Go Into the Woods (1981) to Don’t Go in the House (1979). Wright’s feels like it was meant to be a trailer and nothing else, perfect as it is as a cavalcade of seedy British horror from the seventies distilled into a short work, including the fact they had recognisable faces from our TV to films, making cameos from Nick Frost as a man baby in a diaper in a grungy basement appropriate as a stunt cameo on two levels. Thanksgiving from Eli Roth also pulled out a memorable trailer, though his in 2023 finally became a full feature by himself. How a thanksgiving slasher film never already existed is strange, but he clearly saw Don’t in the editing stages and felt he had to top it, having images as a tribute to murky independent slashers that will scar a few viewers. He gets the aesthetic of slashers, and for a director I do vary on, certainly, for the man who never held back for Hostel (2005) to The Green Inferno (2013), he made sure to make a work that was memorable. He took the type of film that came in the wake of Friday the 13^th being successful, and lead to independent producers all jumping on the band wagon, and made the trailer to the imaginary one Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel warned viewers about. The ill advised decision of one girl to do strip trampolining to the human turkey is enough to claw into the human memory against a viewer’s will, but I can now thank Roth, with a human head on chicken for added grossness, for the snapshot of inappropriate use of poultry that will last.

These three trailers are a prelude, and honestly a palette cleaner, for Death Proof as whilst it is set around Quentin Tarantino wanting to stage a car chase in the tradition of classic seventies car chase films like Vanishing Point (1971), to which he and those involved pulled it off completely, his film is a literal gear change on purpose throughout itself. Death Proof for all its potential flaws, subjective to the viewer, is the far more complex film to dissect as the set-up, a tribute to car films without using CGI, however led to a deliberate shift onwards in how his films would be structured. It is close to a slasher premise too in how it follows a homicidal stunt driver named Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) who targets women with a “death proof” car, one reinforced as old car stunt vehicles were to allow him to survive horrible crashes, barring some injuries, but still drive head first into victims’ cars and kill them. Where this film did not originally work for me, and I found it a disappointment, is that this is a dialogue heavy work with a simple two act structure, very simple, but lets the dialogue linger far longer than it originally did in older films of his before.

I hated the extended cut, as many, because I came to Tarantino through work which was crime pastiches with sassy dialogue on a surface level, still found here in a different genre but with a clear change in tone. A spoiler has to be nodded to for two films at once, but this is the structure of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) entirely, following one group of women before the second act introduces another set. Tarantino focuses on characters, in a slasher template, you would only linger on for ten minutes for an entitled longer length, forcing one to live with them far longer than other films. It is not perfect: some of the dialogue caused me to cringe and think of how pissed off Spike Lee was with him for certain choices of words for black characters, though the debate about whether Tarantino can write female leads is subjective, as I am not going to dismiss the idea of women who are gear heads and watch Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974) as they exist. I do also have an uncomfortable question of whether sexism ever came into the issue about this film getting a negative reaction from what I perceived of it having back in the day. Even from a male director-writer, it is almost entirely about women talking in the downtime between spectacle scenes, and yet was one of his most divisive films. Certainly there is a sense here we were moving away from monologues about what Big Macs were named in France, ebbing away in favour for the dialogue fully taking over as the prime mover of his stories. Tarantino was already reaching this with Jackie Brown (1997), entering more complex emotions, and I vividly remember Kill Bill Part 2 (2004) already being divisive, as it went against the high octane shock that was the first part, with its memorable sword battle finale, with far more tonal shifts, and even went out of its way to undercut the final revenge against “Bill” himself by having it being a languid character drama for the final act. What is changing from this point and Death Proof feels like the final gasp of the earlier part of his career, the moment he was no longer the “cool” cult director who was mainstream, but the esoteric director-writer who still spoke in cult films, and had the budgets to allow him to make the films he did on after Grindhouse, who instead wanted to play with structure and pace in dialogue driven movies onwards.

The importance of the women in the cast cannot be understated - Vanessa Ferlito, Rose McGowan again in another role, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Tracie Thoms, Rosario Dawson, Mary Elizabeth Winstead – all giving great performances with dialogue which, whether you think of it, is a lot more dynamic than sadly could still be passed to actresses into films made after this, and by the second half, we switch to Stuntman Mike having the tables turned and the emphasis on a strong female cast in its centre integral to the production. From the cool character that showed Kurt Russell was always good, to being out of his depth and showing he is still good playing a snivelling weasel, he encounters a group including stunt women for that final act, such as New Zealand stunt actress Zoe Bell playing Zoe Bell, Tarantino in probably the sweetest moment of his entire career paying tribute to someone who worked on the Kill Bill project, and would continue to work with him throughout the others film onscreen as an actress. He lets her play herself whilst also getting to pull off an insane stunt involving playing "ship's mass", hanging off a car at fast speed for real on camera, and no less on the same car from one of the films ritualised lavished upon in the dialogue. The second half legitimately emphases this was always a film about strong women and symbolically castrating male ego, making that disconcerting thought sexism played into the reaction to the film’s lengthy dialogue more concerning if purely speculative. It is telling how even a seemingly pointless cameo by Eli Roth actually makes sense, as he makes a good sleaze ball in a more conventional sort, in a dialogue scene in the Grindhouse version where he plans with a friend to get women drunk enough they allow men to join them at a beach house for the weekend, still a scummy toxic male attitude. More examples of this are found in the extended cut, with one extended scene involving an "Italian Vogue" magazine being offered at a gas station, and it is contrasted by a legitimate psychopath in Stuntman Mike, whose modus operandi briefly evokes J.D. Ballad’s controversial novel Crash (1973), and David Cronenberg’s controversial 1996 adaptation, when someone suggests mowing women down in his car, an item symbolically connected to masculinity in a variety of pop culture, as a sexual thrill. The ending even plays to a symbolic act of pegging but with a female driver ramming the male driver's car from behind over and over.

The extended cut complicated this as it alters the pace. It has new scenes, and removes the "Missing Footage" section, tricking the viewer into not being able to see the clothed lap dance set up with Vanessa Ferlito in the first act. It also allows one to appreciate the music as, even when I hated the film, I still got hold of the soundtrack album as, between T. Rex's Jeepster to April March's interpretation of Chick Habit, a Serge Gainsbourg number she added new English lyrics to, Quentin Tarantino always was always good at choosing existing songs for his films. Though the extended cut itself adds scenes that now feel good and of worth in having, in Grindhouse, the pacing works entirely, and it feels as if, after Kill Bill and the car chase that succeeds triumphantly here, Tarantino was waving goodbye to his older films entirely. Action still transpires in films like Django Unchained (2012), but when The Hateful Eight (2015) was set up as a misanthropic chamber piece I saw at the cinema, set in the confines of a western and set in a cabin, I see something changed when we got to Inglourious Basterds (2009) with his attitude to his stories.

Grindhouse altogether is a compelling work, one which was a mad project to get off the ground at all, as unless they stayed with lower budgets, Tarantino and Rodriguez’s dream ballooned out into what it became always placed a harder target for it to reach due to a niche concept. That niche, the re-admiration of cult and genre cinema, did thankfully pay off as, whilst not a success and with half of it divisive originally, it followed a wave of things that happened for the better. The likes of “Ozploitation” became a concept for example, as one documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! a year later helped Australian heritage to be celebrated, with this film in Tarantino's end credits thanking a big name in that documentary, filmmaker Brian Trenchard-Smith, in a detail predating this example. Eventually you will get Blu Ray (and 4K) restorations of even maligned filmmakers like Al Adamson in big special edition, and that is ultimately the real success of the Grindhouse project, which was a big and intriguing tribute to these projects which got fans even if the box office was not a success. That did become an industry, and grew into something great, making this a film I would still salute for helping with this trajectory. Also undeniably, in terms of my fascination especially with films which break the three hour plus lengths, as they can be very unconventional films in their own right even as stereotypical "serious dramas", there is something about a three plus hour tribute to an actual genre film double bill that is compelling, especially as so much is to be talked about and appreciated in all its moving parts. In turn, it makes one wish I had greater access to the modern day double bill retrospectives in cinemas which do not have the potential urine smell in the theatre.

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1) Robert Rodriguez Says Casting Rose McGowan in ‘Grindhouse’ Was an F-U to Harvey Weinstein, written by Brent Lang and published by Variety on October 27th 2017.

Night of the Demon (1980)

 

Director: James C. Wasson

Screenplay: Mike Williams and Jim L. Ball

Cast: Michael Cutt as Professor Bill Nugent; Melanie Graham as Wanda McGinty; Shannon Cooper as Carla Thomas; Bob Collings as Roy; Jodi Lazarus as Linda; Michael Lang as Pete; Ray Jarris as Gary; William F. Nugent as Lou Carlson; Barrett Cooper as Reverend Emmet McGinty

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Let your seeds of evil grow within her!

Among the Video Nasties of the 1984 Video Recordings Act, all of them present their own fascinating history and with Night of the Demon, we find ourselves following the trends of "cryptid" culture, including the legendary 1967 Patterson–Gimlin film footage which was said to capture onscreen images of an ape-like humanoid and feed interest in this legendary figure in cinema. With Night of the Demon, there is obviously the dichotomy that this is also a splatter film in tone, where films which helped pave an interest in making them were more family friendly; films like The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), a huge independent success, and when Monsters! Mysteries or Myths? (1974), a TV documentary with Rod Serling as the narrator, was expanded into a feature film with new footage (and actor Peter Graves taking over narration) for The Mysterious Monsters (1975) for another hit. This is not even the first gorier Bigfoot film as, whilst its plot involves a fake one, Shriek of the Mutilated (1974) exists, but Night of the Demon among some pretty strong competition in the Video Nasties list still stands toe-to-toe with a level of extremity.

With Night of the Demon, the explanation for how it came to be explains everything about the tone and content - originally this was a suspense film, in which Professor Nugent (Michael Cutt), in a bookend disfigured and recovering in a hospital bed, recounts to doctors and the police about his trip with students to a forest region which is said to be terrorised by a bigfoot creature, only for the production to struggle to be sold and producer Jim L. Ball to film additional gore footage which gained its infamy. This is immediately established when a man has his arm ripped off, both the gore intercut to and showing this is not a friendly Bigfoot. Even without this initial context, where after a first version played off mood and tension from director James C. Wasson, you had the gore added which gained a lot of notoriety for those who had seen the film, Night of the Demon from the first time I saw it, and did not appreciate it, to a growing one for it now, is curious in its pacing and tone. Immediately after that arm is pulled off a man like a doll's, it cuts to seventies flute music over an ordinary school, a reminder the early eighties in horror reflects the previous decade in style until the hairspray came in during the mid-eighties. With the daughter of one of the male victims of this creature in tow, what this becomes is a mystery as the team of Bigfoot finders go to the woods in Northern California, where the sightings are, and first ask around before going further into the woodlands.

The gore scenes are mostly linked to flashbacks from tales recounted by Nugent, filtered throughout, be it a man swung in a sleeping bag by Bigfoot and impaled, to the infamous scene of a motor biker having his penis ripped off, which is more for the sake of spectacle splatter than cohesive in their presentation, more a series of scenes to get reaction from than a cohesive series of attacks by a cryptid. It becomes more of a series of exposition scenes, getting to the culprit, until the later half where "Crazy" Wanda (Melanie Graham), a woman living in the deepest woods, is introduced, someone traumatised by a religious zealot father and a significant encounter with Bigfoot. Alongside its tangents, like the moment involving the Bigfoot cult in the woods, there is material with Night of the Demon with hindsight which is out-there even among the Nasties, particularly as this has as a key plot point a child conceived between cryptid and human being. It is a transgressive and uncomfortable scene in presentation, and meant to be to its credit, and it is another story if one of a few of a cryptid creature in a scenario like this, if one here which attempts to be much more serious and a disturbing take on the matter than, say, The Geek (1971), a porn film which exists and was released by Something Weird Video. It is strange how many films, even as far back as Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) with the Gill Man obsessed with Julie Adams, fixate on the monstrous having desires with human women, and in mind that there is a world of cryptid erotic novels, many actually written by women¹, this is a concept for an entirely different piece but is important to keep in mind with human beings fascinated by the monstrous as something to fear but also having a physicality to them that can even be sexual. In some cases it is erotic, but as Wanda's story becomes central to this film, whilst it can be viewed as tasteless in this context, one of the stronger (credibly) aspects to the production as a drama is that it is meant to be a horrifying story. Of religious zealotry distorting and hurting a young girl, and especially with what happened to the conceived child, which can be lost in the film's tone and included splatter scenes, but should be pointed to as the real attempt at a narrative within this.

There is an absurdity that cannot be denied due to how the film was put together, where you are watching in one scene Bigfoot literally forcing two Girl Scouts to stab each other, which is as ridiculous as that sounds, and the languid tone of what was supposed to be a suspense picture from director James C. Wasson is felt and does make it a slower paced experience. It is to be admired nonetheless for a regional production, knowing how hard film production is, and the figures behind this are fascinating, making this an even weirder and rewarding Video Nasty in its context. Producer Jim L. Ball, coming to this business from an obsession with Maria Montez and films she starred in like Cobra Woman (1944) as a kid², even working at American International Pictures alongside Roger Corman in the sound department. He would end up creating a trilogy of these horror films with Night of the Demon sandwiched between Fraternity of Horror (1964), a 16mm production never released until the 2022 Severin Films/88 Films Blu Ray release, and Prophecy of Blood, a video shoot mummy film that is insanely obscure. Director James C. Wasson's career is even more idiosyncratic as he was a singer before this production, a writer of songs and a musical manager, even writing the musical composition for a song written by one of the men behind the legendary Patterson–Gimlin film, which was an influence on him taking this film as a director³. Night of the Demon on screen and off-screen does gain a lot from this. As much as the production onscreen is a lurid and bizarre bigfoot film which is idiosyncratic to witness, this background context adds to the cherry on the cake for appreciating the work behind it, and its infamy as a Video Nasty has more meaning knowing the first proper release this had in distribution was in the British VHS market², and we know how that went.

Only the knowledge of Tab Hunter being offered a role, and declining, suggests an alternative version of the film I admit I wish I could have seen².

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1) Figures like author Virginia Wade, who even became controversial that Amazon was clamping down on their ebook "cryptid erotica", are a fascinating reminder that unconventional (and eyebrow raising) depictions of sexuality have no gender bias, as is documented in MONSTER PORN: Amazon Cracks Down On America’s Latest Sex Fantasy, written by Eric Spitznagel for Business Insider.

2) Just a Little Green Kid Outta Waco, Texas, a Blu Ray interview short with Ball included for the 2022 USA Severin Films Blu-Ray release, and transferred over to the 88 Films 2022 release in the United Kingdom.

3) The Demon Made Me Do It, the Blu Ray interview short with Wasson included for the 2022 USA Severin Films Blu-Ray release, and transferred over to the 88 Films 2022 release in the United Kingdom.

The Last House on Dead End Street (1973)

 

Director: Roger Watkins

Screenplay: Roger Watkins

Cast: Roger Watkins as Terrence "Terry" Hawkins, Ken Fisher as Ken Hardy, Bill Schlageter as Bill Drexel, Kathy Curtin as Kathy Hughes, Pat Canestro as Patricia Kuhn, Steve Sweet as Steve Randall, Edward E. Pixley as Jim Palmer, Nancy Vrooman as Nancy Palmer, Suzie Neumeyer as Suzie Knowles, Paul M. Jensen as the Blind Man and Ken Rouse as The Whipper

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)/An Abstract Film Candidate

 

This makes you look just like a vampire... that's what we are...

One year in prison for drug possession, and Terry (played by the director Roger Watkins) is sick of it all, deciding a course to making ritualistic snuff movies as a response, this beginning one of those true one-offs in that Roger Watkins' film came, seemingly vanished, and returned in its battered form as a strange piece of cinema history heard of in speculation and infamy for years. The story of Last House on Dead End Street began for me with an actual official release, not a bootleg, with the 2006 Tartan Film DVD release in the United Kingdom, part of their failed "Grindhouse" label series. Barring some Jess Franco double bills and obscurities like Bloody Malory (2002), it was not a success and was near the end of their existence when they closed their doors in 2008. Considering they, since the VHS era, were important in cult and art cinema, including their sub label "Tartan Asian Extreme" being a huge part of the push for the likes of South Korean cinema in the 2000s, the Grindhouse label was a fascinating idea, but LHoDES was an idiosyncratic choice even back then. Not helping was its messy preservation as a film heard of and not seen despite the whispers about it, even having to use video footage to include the entirety of one of its goriest scenes, at a time before cult physical media releases emphasised preservation even of films which just survived being lost. Even in terms the decades after, Vinegar Syndrome included it as an extra to one of Watkins' adult erotic films Corruption (1983) as an extra on the Blu Ray, requiring one to search for it as an Easter egg, but they merely had plans for a proper restoration for its own release.

The irony is how, under eighty minutes, not a lot actually transpires in terms of elaborate plot but so much is clear in the little character interactions, with what is witnessed being incredibly striking. It has to be factored in that, in the lore of its production, Roger Watkins with this his first film made a much longer production, called The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell, originally from 1973 and based loosely on the Charles Manson cult¹. A maelstrom of issues came as time passed - including a lawsuit from one of the film's actresses, battles with producers and distributors, and the film being out its creator-writer-lead-editor's hands² - and as the film I know it as, as for everyone else, was released officially in a truncated form in 1977 with a title clearly sold on the back of The Last House on the Left (1972) and its notoriety.

What plot is still here can be summed up as thus: Terry's work crosses paths with Mr and Mrs. Palmer, Mr. Palmer a struggling pornographer who cannot get his work sold, as his distributor does not what sensual "art" but something more extreme. Thinking Terry's work is faked despite the truth, they cross paths in selling the latter's work and becoming the next stars when Terry feels he has been ripped off.  Shot in a verité form, it also evokes the adult films which Roger Watkins reacts in film, in mind as well that the plot of this develops meaning knowing his career would enter adult cinema too.  Before his career went to making films in the format of adult cinema, something feels pertinent to how, in the context of this world onscreen, there are conversations about stag sex films not selling anymore and everyone becoming desensitised to extreme content, loaded in meaning here. There is the tone of the films talked of and seen film with film, including a sex scene which feels like porn without any explicit shots and barely any nudity baring the prominent close up shots of buttocks, but this subject matter emphasises the sense of ennui on the material, where shot after the end of the sixties and when the wave crashed miserably, this feels like the ideals of love have horrifyingly died and decayed. One scene, one of the most notorious we will get to, involving Mrs. Palmer participating in an extreme ritual for her sexual gratification is contrasted against her husband, at complete ill ease, alone in a room grimacing as he hears her at the party in the next room. It turns out to be one of the moments, surviving in this truncated form, that manages to hold power as a quiet moment, the sense of a man struggling in a career which is devolving in more and more immortal sleaze against his will as the films are no longer selling.

This is a rare moment in what becomes a discomforting production in content and tone, where its battered existing versions add to its disconcerting mood. Large portions of the production are the actors voicing over the footage, LHoDES nihilistic and weird whilst contrasting its series of ritualistic murders to the sense of alienation felt by the cast, from Terry falling into his most violent fantasies to one of his female followers coming from a dull, unhappy marriage with a man that will lead her to willingly join this cult in senseless murder. The cameraman is initially angry Terry has returned into his life and, after the horror he is shown having recording a blind man being strangled, he will eventually become a willing participant to the atrocities. Within the ritual recordings themselves, Terry has his crew and he wear masks, from transparent ones for the women which distort the face to one Terry and others share which is a full plaster piece from ancient Greek theatre. There is also emphasised repeated dialogue especially in the murder sequences that, post-dubbed, add more to inherently disturbing moments. Already the film is unsettling before it gets to the finale, an entire prolonged string of murders involving mock surgery and deer hooves which made the film's legacy.

Where this gets more strange and infamous are the scenes which are bizarre even next to other horror films. One is a scene you would never be able to get away with now, that aforementioned ritual at their party where Mrs. Palmer "performs" for the guests and for her kinks, involves putting on black face makeup and being whipped in front of her guests, a scene where there is no way around this and it cannot be comprehended. It exists now as a scene which you cannot defend but is so weird that, after rightly criticising it, it feels bizarre even next to the rest of the film, as if it just appeared in the film reels without warning, and inexplicable once the discomfort is experienced. The other involves deer hooves, a sexual subversion scene where a man is forced to go down on a woman with a severed deer hoof in place of anatomy in her jeans, which is not problematic but is so out there, with loaded sexual debasement and scumminess, it will not take the power away from the scene even talking of it. This is not even factoring in that, without these scenes, this is still a discomforting film to witness. The scene which involved a VHS copy to preserve its full gore in the UK DVD, a surgery without anaesthesia, is what you expect in terms of post-Herschell Gordon Lewis in terms of gore and real animal organs being used, but alongside even a scene of a blind man being strangled off-screen, the entire tone to LHoDES is disconcerting from the use of voice over for dialogue to the lo-fi production shot in New York among rundown buildings and improvised props. It feels legitimately grimy and evil in tone though I know this is fake.

The question remains whether this is actually a good film or not. It feels truncated, barely any characters and barely a plot barring the themes talked of earlier, suggesting how this was clearly a longer film cut to shreds. A piece at the end tidies the plot up, [Spoilers] a voice over explaining everyone was arrested [Spoilers End], felt in this misanthropic work almost like a contrived Hail Mary to not relish the nihilism, or at least pretend to not. Even the title, whilst evocative, does hide in the shadow of another notorious work, and it leaves one with a film in The Last House on Dead Street which lingers in the mind but with its own form scarred and likely compromised by the power it may have possessed. It is a compelling piece which retains power, but you could, if not able to appreciate its virtue, easily dismiss it as a terrible film, something poignant in my first knowledge of the film, and that Tartan Film DVD, came from a British DVD review magazine which trashed this as a one star review including in its presentation for the surviving form. The legend, and what actually is onscreen, is truly unique, so it deserves its place in the history of cult film, but alongside the moments you can accuse as tasteless, it is nasty experience even if that was Roger Watkins' intentions and to be considered to view requires caution.

Abstract Spectrum: Disturbing/Eerie

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) He knows audiences want violence, written by John Dalmas for The Journal News and published on April 18th 1973, page 10.  Retrieved 7th October 2019.

2) This Is Where It All Ends: Roger Watkins’ ‘The Last House On Dead End Street’ (1977), written by Brett Wright for Split Tooth Media and published on October 29th 2020.

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.

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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.