The Night of the Strangler

I was always kind of curious to see this 70s horror thriller with Micky Dolenz from The Monkees top-billed. Well, it's more bad thriller than horror, and Dolenz is the worst actor in the cast-which is saying something. "Strangler" has plenty of other problems, too, perhaps the least among them being that nobody gets strangled. It's a murder mystery set in the South, yet none of the characters who are supposed natives has a regional accent-not even the bad guy who talks about Black people and those damn "Yankees" like he's in "Mandingo."

That guy is Dan (James Ralston), the supercilious terror of a wealthy family who's stolen his fiance from his brother (Dolenz), and unleashes both the racist invective and the slapping machine when he finds out their sister (Susan McCulloch) is pregnant by an African-American boyfriend she plans to marry. Soon those last two people have been murdered, and the trail of corpses keeps extending because rageaholic Dan, who ordered at least one of them killed, neglects to pay his hired-assassin bill. So eventually various people are killing various other people.

In mood and (lack of) style more like a bad low-budget 70s cop thriller than a horror movie, "Strangler" (which had a lot of other titles before they settled on this utterly irrelevant one) lacks atmosphere, tension, and even the zest to make much of its fairly lurid plotline. Indeed, the bad-movie fun we should be having is further dampened by the film's linguistically dated anti-racism message, which feels pasted-on for a long time, then turns out to be the labored whole point here.

To put it kindly, this isn't a good or serious enough movie to pull off that kind of moral lecturing. In the end, "Night of the Strangler" doesn't prove anything more than that earnest but misplaced good intentions can kill whatever enjoyment is to be had from a cheesy movie. Well, and also that the over-the-top mugging that made Micky Dolenz a good Monkee makes him a very bad dramatic actor.

The biggest reason I had for wanting to see this film is the fact that it stars Micky Dolenz of the Monkees. As anyone could tell by watching it, Night of the Strangler is pretty low-budget but has a good (and, for 1972, very controversial) plot. It centers around a white girl who falls in love with and gets pregnant by a black man. When the two are mysteriously killed, the investigation focuses on the girl's two brothers, Vance, who is kind and was supportive of his sister, and Dan, an arrogant racist who would rather have seen his sister have an abortion than have a black man's baby. A black priest who tries to console the two brothers throughout the film also adds to the increasingly obvious tension. Sort of a "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" meets "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane." A really good film if you're lucky enough to find at your local video store.

Micky Dolenz, late of "The Monkees", stars in this tepid thriller involving an assassin who targets a prominent white New Orleans family after the daughter of the household reveals she's pregnant by a black man. Amateur-night filmmaking from executive producer and director Joy N. Houck Jr. Tastelessly exploits the brewing racial tensions of the day. The three credited screenwriters--J. J. Milane, Robert A. Weaver and Jeffrey Newton--haven't got one good line of dialogue between them, and the third-act twist is laughable. NO STARS from ****

Probably the most well-rounded film I've seen from thriftbudget auteur Joy N. Houk, NIGHT OF THE STRANGLER touches on Southern U.S. racial tensions in an otherwise boilerplate whodunit which some may regard as a slasher genre prototype(take note that the "strangler" of the title kills in a variety of ways...none of which are by strangling!). The story in play recounts two at-odds brothers imputing one another in the suspicious deaths of their interracially intimate(and pregnant) sister and her lover. Roused suspicions result in more killings and a muster of potential offenders as the mystery snowballs to a sufficing, though slightly deflating, "surprise" denouement.

While the film never really manages to camouflage its third-string foundations, it works well enough as basal entertainment despite a few flat stretches and uneven scripting(and it features a fun go-go groovy psychedelic opening theme played on some old Farfisa-type organ). MONKEES bandmember Micky Dolenz provides a satisfactory performance, and the rest of the cast follows suit(although, to no derogation of the performers, their roles aren't exactly what one might call "demanding").

A tenantable B film for the general votary of secondary 70s cinema, though far from a crucial one. 5/10

Watch out!...this early 1970s anti-racist mystery has more murders than the mafia. I mean I watch giallos on a level that most people wouldn't consider sane and I haven't seen a body count like this outside of a slasher flick from at least ten years later. That's not a good thing, I'm not a gore hound, and the sheer level of murder that people get away with in this cheesy flick in order to make the end "work" is laughably absurd.

People are just dropping like flies from beginning to end despite the victims being regular average folks on college campuses in broad freaking daylight and in the upper middle class white suburbs of New Orleans.

To top it all off, one of the Monkees - Mickey Dolenz, looking just as much like a Monchhichi doll as ever - is a main character yet never once breaks into song. AND...the "night of the strangler" never actually happens, unless you count a drowning. There are however an abnormal number of Asian snakes and poison darts.