Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

9th Kill

There's only one thing more terrifying than a serial killer on the loose in your town. And that's a serial killer who is actually an ALIEN and who can therefore fire explosive laser beams out of his eyes. I think we can all agree on that much.

It's interesting to me that the whole idea of a horror film as something aimed at and mainly consumed by a teenage or early-20's audience seemed to get sidelined in the 70's, and I'm wondering if the same thing isn't happening now. So many 1970's horror films, including rather mindless, derivative ones like The Dark, seemed to think of themselves as serious adult dramas of some sort. Feel familiar? I think the most recent spate of high-minded, desperately allegorical horror films are similarly aiming to differentiate themselves from the less self-conscious horror films of prior decades.

So, here we get a plot set up first by establishing our hero, played by William Devane, whose daughter actually gets murdered by this being who stalks the nighttime streets of LA. Our secondary protagonists are the LAPD detectives investigating the crimes. Richard Jaeckel is an actor who usually has a lot of fun in his roles, but in this, he plays one of the biggest asshole cops in history. His pugnacious callousness in dealing with Devane (who he had previously sent to jail on a manslaughter charge) is matched only by Devane's apparent ease in shrugging off the emotional impact of his daughter being killed. After using it to establish Devane's motivation in pursuing this killer at all, that all seems to be largely forgotten, and Devane even gets in a bit of horndogging with the lovely Cathy Lee Crosby.

Devane dresses like a hippy and sports voluminous hair. At one point, someone refers to him as "young man", but even in this get-up, Devane looks middle-aged. Did he ever look young? I have my doubts. The hair in this film is genuinely distracting. As Devane and Crosby indulge in some very retro ravenous snogging, I half expected them to collapse under the weight of their collective hairstyles - there is definitely more hair than head.

I caught a couple of minutes of the interview with John "Bud" Cardos, whose general enthusiasm is rather disarming. He points out, in the original script, the killer is not an alien at all, and nothing could have been less surprising to me. Because despite this plot point meaning the killer can look greenish, sport troll-like hands and arms with which to reach out from behind fences and grab people, and allow some tawdry laser special effects to be utilised, there's absolutely no reason why this storyline requires him to be anything other than a normal, garden-variety serial killer, and we are never given any context or explanation as to where this alien came from or how or why. We're just supposed to assume that wandering dark streets and murdering random people is what an interplanetary visitor would be bound to spend his time doing.

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

Many of the kills involve a close up of the alien's face (he looks a little bit like the Hulk from the old TV show) and laser beams coming out of his eyes, after which a fake-looking explosion is superimposed over the victims. So, not all that inspiring, but there is one scene where he runs at camera from down a dark alley, gets a passer-by in a headlock and almost casually rips his head off. The victim then takes a couple more steps before throwing his arms up and falling over, which I particularly enjoyed.