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STUDIO: North American Motion Pictures
MSRP: $ $24.49
RATED: Not rated
RUNNING TIME: 85 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Trailer
The Pitch
Maniac meets enraging boredom.
The Humans
Elissa Dowling, Adolph Cortez, Jeff Dylan Graham
Directors: Ulli Lommel
The Nutshell
Ostensibly the tale of real-life serial killer and Satanist, Richard Ramírez, known as the “Night Stalker,” who killed over a dozen women in Southern California in the 1980’s. Richard (Cortez) goes around shooting chicks… over… and over… and over… and over… zzzz…
The Lowdown
Goddammit. You people owe me! I just sat through this diarrhea nightmare of cinema… for you. So you never have to. You’re welcome.
The latest in director Ulli Lommel’s series of real-life killer films (B.T.K. Killer, Green River Killer, etc), Night Stalker has a certain gritty, grimy vérité aesthetic that could have made it a new Driller Killer, if it just weren’t so unacceptably monotonous and obnoxious and fucking awful. The film doesn’t even attempt to have a story. Richard hates women, we learn from the film’s ever-present, hacky narration. His uncle shot his aunt when Richard was younger, so shooting women seems like a good way for him to deal with his feelings. Then he meets a girl who turns him onto Satanism. Then he kills some different girls. The end. With that redundant violence porno structure Night Stalker was going to be a boring movie no matter what, but it could’ve maybe squeezed by for diehard genre fans if the kills were satisfying. Alas, Richard shoots every victim, and with the film’s no-budget, each murder is staged in the same cop-out fashion.
Blow-pops have forever lost my business.
The only way this movie could’ve actually worked is if Richard had been a captivating character. That is completely necessary for this type of slasher protagonist film. But I wanted to punch Richard in his dumbass face whenever he was on screen. For some reason Lommel decided to have Richard sucking on a lollipop in every single goddamn scene. Watching him suggestively twirl the lollipop around in his mouth, scene after scene, I felt like I was watching some sort of weird gay candy-fetish film. And there is zero conflict here. Normally in a film like this, there are complications getting in our slasher’s way – maybe a nosy detective – but this film’s detective character doesn’t appear until the final 1/3 of the film. The movie is just murder after boring murder.
A title card from the end of The Movie Killer, the true-story about writer-director Ulli Lommel’s gruesome crimes against cinema.
The DVD’s $24.49 sticker price has to be one of the most preposterous things I’ve ever heard. If given the chance, you should pay someone else to not have to sit through this crap sandwich.
The Package
I had a screener with no special features.