Friday, May 9, 2014

The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher (1979)

How bad is it? It's a 5 minute film stretched to feature length.
Should you see it? No.

That poster is for a better movie than this one.
Ray Dennis Steckler's last film, this reportedly took years to film, bits being done whenever he had the funding. Given that it looks like a $50 film, I can't imagine how this wasn't filmed in a day.

I hate this movie. Composed almost entirely of tracking shots of the outside of buildings with an incoherent voice-over narration, Steckler himself plays the Strangler and his wife the Slasher and I'm guessing the biggest challenge was to find someone to film the "climactic" scene where they meet, since this looks like a two person film. The most interesting thing to me was to see how Steckler aged; his hairline looked to be receding 15 years earlier, so I kept checking to see if he was wearing a rug. The film is actually that boring.

1 comment:

  1. The "strangler" is Pierre Agostini, not Ray Dennis Steckler who was quite bald on top by this point in his life. From commentary tracks on the new RDS box set, I learn that Pierre was a contractor in Las Vegas and got the part because he knew someone who knew someone and Ray didn't like to hire actors when he knew people who would work for almost nothing.

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