Night After Night After Night

The First time my friends and In watched He Kills Night After Night we had no idea what was going on. There is a bit of a mystery involved as to the true identity he who kills night after night. Every time we watched it after we knew exactly what was going on, and the movie just got better and better.

I have to admit that i love this movie. It has some of the best dialog, and one liners. When we watch it now, we just giggle at it. The best part about the whole thing is when the plot elements finally come together it goes so far over the top that your jaw just drops.

It tries to be a morality tale against the loose sexual climate of swinging seventies London. So give it credit for at least trying to have an ultimate point. That might just be an excuse to have a slasher movie, like any reaction will do to justify a good horror/mystery movie. The bad guys always feels justified in his motives, no matter how far out they may be.

So that being said, I would recommend this movie to anyone. not everyone might understand it at first, but if you watch it a few times, it gets better and better.

This movie had some interesting ideas and twists. I thought everyone in the film was messed up and I wouldn't have minded if any of the suspects were "the one." Each suspect had his own perverted/sexist ideas about women so I honestly didn't know which creep did the murders.

A sidenote: There is a striptease scene in the movie that I have seen in another horror movie. This exact striptease footage is from another movie, but I don't remember which one.

All in all, it is an interesting film and I think it pushes some boundaries moreso than most other sex-maniac focused horror movies. There are parts of this movie (basically all the parts that took place in that little room with all the pictures) that were actually disturbing to me as a woman. Nearly all other sex maniac horror movies do not step over this line of discomfort.

I say a movie that can cause discomfort like this is a successful movie in some ways. I give it a 5/10.

It's quite a bit of fun to see the several suspects each give into their urges. Sure there are plenty of sex scenes, but the real good moments involve a lot of forbidden red light district type stuff. Characters get off on leather pants, porno magazines, and underwear. There is some adventurous camera work that aids the creepy scenes. Not as artsy as Italian crime/horror, but fans of that genre will dig this movie.

This movie is not nearly as good as Jorge Grau's very similar "Pena del Muerte", but it is in English (or in British anyway). It is surprisingly sleazy for a British film of that time period with a generous amount of depravity on display. A modern-day Jack the Ripper is stalking the mini-skirted young lasses of Swinging London. A hedonistic youth who is (quite unaccountably) a metaphoric ladykiller is suspected of being the real one by the lead detective on the case. Not surprisingly though, the real killer is someone much more entrenched in the establishment, which the detective hero only discovers after his pretty young wife has become a potential victim.

This movie is similar to the seemingly reactionary but actually very subversive and anti-authoritarian movies Pete Walker would be making five years later ("House of the Whipcord", "The Confessional"). But unfortunately it is pretty ham-handedly executed and just not very good. It does offer a view of Swinging London at the time that it was all actually happening, but it is a rather myopic view and is seen more from the perspective of the moralistic detective and dirty old rotter magistrate than from the hip youth of the the era (the only real nude scene for instance is a skanky stripper doffing it all for some gaping oldsters in a seedy nightclub). It is very sleazy, if you consider that a plus. And even though the identity of the killer is pretty apparent, the ending is memorable. It's not as hypocritical at least as many British films of the era that railed against jaded youth while missing no opportunity to look up their mini-skirts or inside their blouses. Worth a look anyway.

The corpses of attractive females are stacking up and so a no-nonsense detective (Gilbert Wynne) tries to zero-in on the murderer. Is it a womanizing punk, a court clerk or someone else?

"Night, After Night, After Night" (1969) meshes the mental illness elements of "Psycho" with the seedy Big City milieu of "Coogan's Bluff," just switched to the locale of London's seedy underbelly. Like the future "The Confessional," aka "House of Mortal Sin," it casts suspicion on those in respectable authority positions.

Blurbs about the flick describe the slayer as a "Jack the Ripper-type serial killer," just in the modern day (the late 1960s, that is) yet, while sinister indeed, the murderer is nowhere close to being as bad as Jack the Ripper in regard to the grisly things he did to his victims' bodies.

The subtext is interesting: Day-to-day exposure to the most degenerate denizens of society may cause someone to break and seek to purge those undesirable elements, sort of like Marvel's Foolkiller, who debuted 4.5 years later in Man-Thing 3-4.

Linda Marlowe plays the detective's winsome wife and stands out on the feminine front. On the other side of the gender spectrum, Donald Sumpter's character is like the British precursor to Luther in the "The Warriors" ten years later (David Patrick Kelly) while the determined Wynne comes across as England's version of Leonard Nimoy.

Although distasteful in some ways for obvious reasons, including the grungy London setting, this obscure flick has its points of interest, including a respectable place in slasher history, a decade before the genre exploded.

It runs 1 hour, 28 minutes, and was shot in London.

GRADE: B-