Zipperface

Creepy facemasks and slasher movies have gone together like cheese and chives throughout the lengthy lifespan of the cycle. People often assume that it was John Carpenter that started the trend, but as is the case with many of the genre's clichés - the Italians did it first. Movies like Eyeball, Torso and Blood and Black Lace were the originators of a hooded maniac in a murder mystery. There were also a couple of American pre-Halloween slashers that warrant a mention. Classroom Massacre, Keep my Grave Open and Savage Weekend clearly pre-date 1978, whilst The Town that Dreaded Sundown is widely regarded as one of the first teen-kill movies.

Carpenter's seminal flick may not have been the maiden masked nightmare, but it certainly started the competitive race between directors to unveil the spookiest disguise for their bogeymen. Over the years we've seen some memorable contenders, but my favourites would have to be: My Bloody Valentine's maniacal miner, The Prowler's sadistic soldier and Wicked Games' copper-faced assassin. I'm also keen on many of the killer clowns that have made an appearance throughout the category. The final scene in The House on Sorority Row has to be listed as one of the best and The Clown of Midnight also ranks highly amongst the greatest madmen's costumes.

A leather mask was probably the last type to be used in a slasher movie, probably because they are widely linked with sexual perversion, which of course doesn't exactly make for a scary disguise. But in later years both Blackout and this obscurity decided that fear could certainly be incorporated with a gimp suit. Here's how the later of the two fared…

The screen lights up with the rush of blue sirens, as cops race to the scene of a hostage situation. It seems that a stressed-out gentleman has possibly had enough of being cast as an extra in cruddy low-brow turkeys, so he's decided to hold his wife and kid at gunpoint. Detective Shine (David Clover) manages to wrestle with the gunman, but unluckily for him he looses the fight to grab a loose pistol and it looks like it's the end of the road for the grey haired officer. Fortunately he is saved in the nick of time by some precision marksmanship from Lisa Ryder (Donna Adams), the California Police Department's hottest female law-enforcer.

Her heroic encounter earns the brunette a promotion to Detective first class, and its a feat that is heavily envied by her male counterparts. Meanwhile a leather-clad maniac is jollying around town slaughtering hookers and dumping their bloody corpses on street corners. Ryder and Shine are put on the case of the murderous gimp and their first call of questioning is a sleazy back street photographer called Michael Walker (John Mandell). Lisa is such a top notch inspector that normal Police regulation doesn't seem to apply to her, so before long she's dating the cameraman even though he's suspect numero uno. When the bodies continue to pile up around the city, she decides to go undercover in an attempt to flush out the S & M madman…

If anything, Zipperface effortlessly sums up all that went wrong with the slasher genre towards the end of its rein. What started as a great stepping-stone for up and coming filmmakers and thespians had been reduced to a sewer of cinema faeces by movies with flat direction, zero suspense or shocks and talentless mediocre actors. The boom years of early eighties splatter flicks managed to conceal their lack of strong dramatic line-ups with gooey special effects and exciting directorial flourishes. Unfortunately, by this point in the cycle titles like Rush Week, Deadly Dreams and The Majorettes had seemed to be produced in a conspiracy to put the category where many of the aforementioned feature's characters ended up. In an early grave.

Donna Adams doesn't even vaguely convince as an officer of the law and her inexplicably idiotic behaviour - which includes doing a striptease for a top suspect in a nationwide murder investigation - is more mind numbingly pathetic than you might ever expect it to be. Mansour Pourmand couldn't direct traffic and the wide majority of the cast members would struggle to get a second reading for a radio commercial. I searched and searched, but found nothing here of merit or note.

On the plus side, if you manage to keep the TV turned on until the end then you may be fairly surprised by the killer's identity. To be honest though, I doubt that by that time you'll even care. And another plus point? Well, erm.... the disc is perfectly symmetrical, which means that you could use it as a matt to place your cup of tea upon?? Aside from that there's really no other reason to go out and buy Zipperface. Bad bad bad and not in a good way, this is 90 minutes of my life that I could have spent more constructively by plucking my chest-hair. Abysmal.

Seems your Phaithful Phrog is the only one who saw this rarity. Well, there's no use to lose sleep over it : this is an average thriller (Tv movie ?) with an S&M overdose - but why does S&M between consenting adults always have to lead to murder and mayhem ? As a "killer-stalks-witness" story, this one is classical but brisky, but I especally liked the leather-clad killer which seems straight out of an Italian giallo. But don't expect another "Profondo Rosso"

The first thing you should know about "Zipperface" is that it was shot on video, so it has that peculiar "home-video-ish" look that is terribly distracting and makes it hard to take this seriously as a "real" film. And "Zipperface" indeed looks as if a bunch of amateurs got together for an attempt at a "real" serial-killer thriller. It's not quite that, but it's not as bad as it looks, either. Having a woman as one of the two detectives on the case puts a spin on the exploitation genre. Dona Adams gives an appealingly amateurish performance in the role - her obvious inexperience in front of the camera somehow works for her. Plus, she puts up a GREAT fight against the killer at the end. The red herrings appear ludicrous at first, but ultimately they work - I guessed the killer INcorrectly. And you have to wonder if perhaps Tarantino had seen the Zipperface guy when he came up with the idea of "The Gimp" for "Pulp Fiction". (*1/2)

Oh, my God, why was this movie ever made? That is a second graded TV-movie with pathetic acting, awful directing, flat plot... In this movie the characters seem to be electroshocked almost every minute. In "Zipperface" no one behaves like a real person would. That way, in one scene, a prostitute, after hearing some words like "Ask me to punish you..." from behind a door, comes in and says to her colleages: "I can't do that, I'll go home"... And so on. All the sets look so cheap, as if they would made of paper, all the scenes are shot on a soap operas stidio. Among these scenes are a ridiculous scene "hit-by-the-car", "thrown-out-of-a-balcony", "had-her-head-cut-off". But if you really want to enjoy this kind of a made-for-TV low-budget hilarity, buy or rent this one.

Well, I had some fun while watching Zipperface... That´s a kind of movie you don´t watch seriously, unlike The Silence of the Lambs or Copycat. I laughed a bit while watching it. That´s seems to be a second graded TV movie (it seems to be shot on videotape). Everything is very weak - plot, directing, acting (completely horrible), cinematography (I would rather say videography), music and other stuff, which makes movie a good or a bad one. Nobody of the major cast of Zipperface have done more than one movie - Zipperface! For example, have you heard anything about actors Donna Adams, Jonathan Mandell, Trisha Melinkov? Or a director - Mansour Pourmand?

some scenes of the movie are really funny. For example, in one episode a maniac in leather suit cuts off a head of a whore. (All the victims of this movie are the whores - why - I don´t understand!) and he does it as easily as if he would cut a watermelon or something... And in another scene he throws the slut out of the balcony and if you watch carefully (that´s really difficult) you will see a tent which was carefully put there, so the slut just plumps on the tent! Buy or rent this movie and you´ll have a lot of fun!