#Hooptober9

💀 NUMBER SIXTEEN 💀
💀 ONE FILM BY JOY N. HOUCK JR. 💀

"Night Of The Strangler" (1972)
* dir: Joy N. Houck Jr.
* Crime / Mystery / There's Very Little Night Or Strangling In This Night Of The Strangler
[ ★★★ / ★★★★★ ]

Man, what a weird little movie.

A racially charged, refreshingly blunt, fervently anti-hippie genre flick that plays more like a bizarre domestic melodrama with the occasional visceral attack scene thrown in. It comes from that fascinating pre-slasher era of early-to-mid 1970s exploitation cinema, where everything feels JUST a bit more scuzzy than it usually would and each performance is overcranked to a delightfully pulpy degree.

"Night Of The Strangler" just happens to land as a modest cut above the rest in a heavily crowded field due to a well-paced script (that builds to an appropriately absurd finale), a steady directorial hand, and a committed cast of pricks, oddballs and sentient mustaches who chew so much scenery that they must have shat stucco for a week. Not to mention one absolute all-timer of a sequence in which the titular maniac methodically stages a post-murder crime scene in a single eerily still, totally unbroken shot filmed in complete silence. For that decision alone am I curious to explore more from Joy N. Houck's brief-but-interesting filmography.

Also: this is likely your only opportunity to watch the second best Monkee give a pretty decent performance while also getting the absolute shit slapped out of him by the most detestable human being in cinema history.

Ya know. If you're into that sort of thing.