Hillside Strangler Movie Review:


In the late Seventies, a series of savage murders swept Los Angeles, committed by two cousins, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Bueno. They would prowl the streets looking for women to abduct; rape, torture and murder, then dump the bodies in the hills around Hollywood. The longer the pair remained at large (not helped much by the fact there was originally thought to be only one killer), the more brazen their crimes became, until one Thanksgiving week, when five bodies were discovered within days of each other.

It is hard to know where to start with “Hillside Strangler”, so let’s get the pleasantries out of the way first of all.
It doesn’t look cheap, and has attracted C.Thomas Howell, a well - regarded actor who has had a consistently prolific career.

However…

The dialogue is absolutely abysmal, delivered for the most part in a stilted, wooden fashion. Lines such as “You’ve grown up so much since I last saw you” (twenty years ago, duh!), “You think they’re gonna make a movie about you?” (Oh, the incredible irony!) Ha! Ha!
Their chat-up lines are even better.
“You have the most beautiful…hair I have ever seen” (swoon!), “This is our night, Claire” (Lucky Claire!), and “You smell like cheese” (eh?) are absolutely laughable in their context and delivered with the emotional impact of a wet slap. The interactions between the two killers begin badly and get gradually more and more laughable until you could be mistaken for thinking this is supposed to be a comedy, (Until it gets grim).

It’s not entirely the cast’s fault, having as they do a script that with an aversion to words with more than two syllables, but terrible acting does blight this film, some characters over-egging it completely, some looking genuinely embarrassed to be there.

The facts about the crimes these people actually committed are not really made clear.
They slaughtered at least fourteen females, but the movie conveniently skirts around the fact that two of the victims were only twelve and fourteen when they were murdered.
Important and interesting aspects to the case are altered to suit the makers’ vision, so it isn’t even as though it’s a decent source of information, choosing instead to concentrate on a few abductions, torture and murder scenes in very lurid detail.
It is expected in this genre of flick to see victims pleading for their lives, trying to escape and meeting a nasty end, but there is something particularly unpleasant about the way this is handled. Seedy and creepy where it should be scary, there are a large number of focus shots of naked, bound girl’s bodies jiggling about as they are being strangled, suffocated or gassed, which linger for far too long.

The effect is just sleazy and grotty, the tone shifting from crappy porno (maybe that explains the awful dialogue and cheapo music!), to nasty death scenes a little too quickly. The two don’t sit well together at all, and sometimes it’s as though they merge into one another.

The title would suggest at least some time spent looking into the psychology of why they ended up committing these awful crimes, the dynamics, how they were caught, and how many victims they claimed - but these things seem to be quite unimportant in this version.
Any possibility of effectively conveying facts here is lost in a haze of lousy acting, clumsy timing and ill-conceived scenes.
Don’t be fooled into thinking this could be, “so bad it’s good” – it really is just plain excrecable.

You are urged not to waste your money on this utter, utter garbage.

Terresa Gaffney

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