No Tears for the Damned

Rather one of the earliest proto-slasher although the killing doesn't really look so bloody at all although there are some sudden moments. But maybe it is cutting of the hair that seems to be what it is really about. Early on we see the mother and the massive picture of her and her little boy although he wears girls clothes and certainly his hair is rather big and odd. At the very beginning there is a bar and a jukebox and a girl dancing and a man leering so we know that something is going on. Unfortunately it seems a bit slow but it certainly gets going and I really like it. The kills are different but it is the mother and her domineering manner that seems to lead him on, although at first we will have a ride through Vegas, oh and then onto a rather amazing sex orgy. It is here that we really see just how well shot it is and maybe it is not the director that is in charge. I notice that this was shot in 1964 which makes a difference in the 60s with like the clothes and that hair. Oliver Drake did the writing and his wife who was known professionally as Liz Marshall - she had danced in the 40s and here she was 48 and is acting the killer's mother and also wrote it as well. But Drake had an amazing career, with a ranch near Pearblossom, California used for location shooting mostly for westerns. He was born in 1903 and did silents, TV and films later mostly through the 40s and 50s he became a prolific writer and occasional director and producer, working with Gene Autry, Tex Ritter and others. In this film although we know that it was low budget and marketed for the drive-in and 'grindhouse' and presumed lost until recently discovered a splendid one by Vinegar Syndrome. The very good cinematographer here was William G Troiano born in 1914 and made several such as, She Freak (1967), After They Ran for Their Lives (1968) and later with A Whale of a Tale (1976) starring William Shatner. The main 'star' here was Robert Dix (1936-2018) worked through the 50s and 60s often with the Drakes and was also with Satan's Sadists (1969). I consider that this really is a great 'lost picture'.

This is a film that does a lot to build on atmosphere creating a gritty look at the sleazy underbelly of a city where the alcohol and sex are cheap and human life is even cheaper. We get this not only through some scenes that would fit right in with many proto-mondos movies that feature long lost 1960s nightclubs but also through the general grime as our protagonists travel around. The movie does switches gears from nasty Vegas travelogue to something more of a proto-slasher as the titular strangler does his thing with the women who are unfortunate enough to cross paths with him. The kills are actually kinda fun for the era but the film also gets fairly repetitive as it settles into the grove of showcasing a series of sex murders and we get less of the down and dirty tour of Vegas that the first act gave us. Still a decent time though and potentially even a good entry to roughies as this is a fairly tame one.

Sure Jeff's mother dressed him up like the Blue Boy painting as a child and bossed his sorry ass around but does that warrant marrying a hooker with a bad accent and go on a killing spree? You bet it does! The early Las Vegas scenes were enough for me to give this a 7- star rating. And how about that swinging party? Oh, and the ending, what ending?

Lori is a hard-luck barroom hooker in Las Vegas who dreams of a better life, and her dream seems to come true when Jeff, a dashing and successful bachelor, sweeps her off her barstool and straight to the altar. Jeff, however, is not the man he appears to be...he's still living with his overbearing, manipulative mother, and she's none too pleased by her new daughter-in-law's presence. Worse yet, Jeff's a serial killer who's been blazing a gin-slicked trail of terror through Sin City, hitting the dingiest Vegas nightspots and exterminating every slutty, passed-out slag who crosses his path. He kills in a variety of gruesome ways, snipping a souvenir swatch of hair from each victim with a pair of giant ceremonial ribbon-cutting scissors. The implied reason for Jeff's psychosis is that his mother kept him dressed in a sissified Little Lord Fauntleroy getup with long hair until late in his childhood. Lori is perplexed by her new husband's nightly absence, and the fact that he still hasn't laid a hand on her...much to her mother-in-law's cruel amusement.

NO TEARS FOR THE DAMNED/LAS VEGAS STRANGLER is, centrally, just another tit window from pre-porn times, when more than just a mouse click was needed to get an eyeful of the female mystique. It's a bit more ambitious than the quotidian example of this extinct realm of cinema, putting forward a fairly cohesive story with developed and passably limned characters. There's even a sliver of a sub-story involving an amorous gay piano player...it doesn't amount to anything, but it helps pad the film to feature length. Shorn of its naughty bits, it could nominally pass as a sub-B mainstream thriller(in noting the choppy placement of mature content, it would seem that may, indeed, have been the intention). It's sort of a masculine counterpart to the grimy post-noir shocker ANGEL'S FLIGHT(1965), another sexed-up poverty-row forerunner to the modern "slasher" subgenre, but centered on a female serial killer. Additionally, it's a real treasure for anyone with a taste for kitsch midcentury interior furnishings...there's no fewer than three mini-bars in this flick!

I can't see anyone praising NO TEARS FOR THE DAMNED as a legitimately GOOD movie, but all things considered, it's a welcome addition to the recent windfall of rediscovered regional schlock which had long been feared lost, and it's got some great footage of iconic Vegas hotels which are no longer standing.

5/10.

Never having heard about this 1968 thriller titled "No Tears for the Damned", when I happened to come across it by random luck here in 2024, I still opted to sit down and watch it. Maybe I had been missing out on an old cinematic gem from director William Collins.

The storyline in the movie, as written by June Drake and Oliver Drake, was pretty straight forward. It was almost an adequate enough storyline, if you can find it between the song and dance routines. Director William Collins spent a bit too much time on showing singing and dancing throughout the course of the movie, which was odd, because it served no purpose for the narrative, and it was essentially just time wasting and filling.

Needless to say that I wasn't familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list in the movie. But the acting performances were actually fair enough. Nothing outstanding or overly impressive, but fair enough for what it was. But the actors and actresses were definitely struggling with an inadequate script.

"No Tears for the Damned" was not an outstanding viewing experience, and it is definitely not a movie that will ever grace my screen a second time.

My rating of "No Tears for the Damned" lands on a three out of ten stars.