Director – Wolfgang Schmidt [Ray Dennis Steckler], Screenplay – Christopher Edwards, Producer – Carol Flynn, Photography – Sven Christian, Music – Henri Price, Special Music – Alberto Sarno. Production Company – Ciné Paris Films, Ltd..
Cast
Pierre Agostino (Johnathan Click), Carolyn Brandt (The Skid Row Slasher), Lori Morris (Strangler Victim #1), Snowy Sinclair (Strangler Victim #2), Bonnie Smith (Strangler Victim #3), Joanne Hiatt (Strangler Victim #4), Jean Roberts (Strangler Victim #5), Chuck Alford (Slasher Victim #1), Jim Parker (Slasher Victim #2), Forrest Duke (Slasher Victim #3), John Leeman (Slasher Victim #4), Denise Alford (Girl in Orange Shirt)
Plot
Johnathan Click lurks around Hollywood, calling up various girls advertising themselves as nude models. He arranges to take photographs of them but as soon as they undress, he strangles them. He becomes fixated on a woman who works at a second-hand book store and believes she might be the one who can replace his beloved Marsha. However, the woman has a secret – that she likes to hunt down the winos that pester her at the store and kill them with a switchblade.
Filmmaker Ray Dennis Steckler (1938-2009) attained a cult reputation in Psychotronic cinema. Steckler never made it as a mainstream director or had any major success in his lifetime but his films were rediscovered in the 1980s and became fascinating curio items among aficionados of weird and terrible cinema. Almost all of Steckler’s reputation centres around The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964), although he made a number of other works. (See below for Ray Dennis Steckler’s other films).
I had earlier watched Steckler’s The Las Vegas Serial Killer (1986), unaware it was a sequel to The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher. Both films feature Pierre Agostino as a disturbed individual who wanders the streets with a camera hiring women to pose for nude photos and then killing them. Both films largely consist of sequential scenes where various of these scenes occur, accompanied by Agostino’s voiceover describing what he sees. In both, there is also a B plot where other killers also prowl the streets. There is no real plot to this film – just the two killers doing their respective thing and then meeting up at the end.
Pierre Agostino looks disturbingly convincing in the part. He has a leathery face, says nothing throughout, just stares a lot (often with mean intent) and stalks people. He seems so far removed from normal behaviour that it feels as though he really does live the part he is playing. Added to this fact is that there is no recorded dialogue anywhere in the film – all that there is has been dubbed in afterwards. Possibly this is due to some soundtrack issue or simply that Steckler was so cheap that he recorded without a soundman. The upshot is that all you get on the soundtrack is Agostino’s disturbing voiceover, which further intensifies the character’s state of mind.
Pierre Agostino as Johnathan Click, the Hollywood Strangler
The film follows the thesis that began with Psycho (1960) that either the glimpse of the unclothed female body, some expression of sexuality or voyeurism turns the sexually repressed into psychopathic killers. This found its full flowering in works like Halloween (1978), Dressed to Kill (1980) and the Slasher Film. Here Steckler has the interesting subtext, one not dissimilar to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), where the excess sexuality on the streets in the 1970s – the porn theatres, adult stores, peep shows and prostitutes wandering the streets – has turned one man psychopathic, or at least allowed his urges freedom to flourish.
Where The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher is most interesting is in acting as a time capsule of 1970s Los Angeles where Steckler has gone out and shot in the actual Hollywood Boulevard area. One has no idea whether the practice of girls hiring themselves out as nude models for guys with cameras was as prevalent and widespread in the day as it seems to be in the film – maybe someone who was there back then can confirm this? – but it seems a perfectly natural thing in this environment.
The other interesting thing is that The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasherappears to have been shot in 1973 as opposed to closer to 1979 when it was released. This was the year that Ray Dennis Steckler and wife Carolyn Brandt (who plays the Skid Row Slasher) divorced. The titles on the billboards and marquee of the adult theatre are all ones like Deep Throat (1972), The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) and Marilyn Chambers in Behind the Green Door (1972) and Eve/The Resurrection of Eve (1973) that identify the era as being 1973.
Carolyn Brandt as The Skid Row Slasher
The quite reasonable assumption that can be made is that Steckler shot the film in 1973 and then spent the next six years in pre-production and/or trying to find a distributor. This makes the film very much a time capsule of the early 1970s when porn chic was just becoming big, rather than the end of the decade when it was all a bit passé. This also makes Steckler’s underlying thesis about psychos and the excess sexuality of the era even more timely – it is about a character reacting to the new, changing world around him rather than one who lives in such a world where all the excess sexuality is commonplace.
Ray Dennis Steckler’s other films of genre note are:– The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964); The Thrill Killers (1964) about maniacs on the loose; the comedic monster bash The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters (1965); the superhero spoof Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1966); the evil child film Sinthia, the Devil’s Doll (1968); The Chooper/Blood Shack/Curse of the Evil Spirit (1971) about a vengeful American Indian spirit; and the confused horror porno Sexorcist Devil (1974).
