No Tears for the Damned

So basically, "No Tears for the Damned" is the 1968 horror drama film thought to be lost, but recently was one of the 10 movies found and released via Vinegar Syndrome. Most of the 10 are pretty bad and subpar, but this one was actually a bit entertaining.

The plot is about a man, treated poorly by his mother and others his entire life, finally snapping and going on a killing spree through Las Vegas.

Sure, the film is very low quality but the dramatic events and killing scenes make it entertaining enough. Plus, some surprisingly good cinematography for a film of its grade.

Overall, it is of bad quality, but entertaining enough. 5.5/10.

Enjoy this black and white gem not for its story but as a time capsule.

Watching movies like this from early 1960s to about late 1970s is not so much about quality of story and sometimes filming techique but the style of the cloths... kinds of cars... old paintings in the back ground.... This movie has it all.

This is before good roads and good general landscaping in Vegas.

It seems that the ubiquitous VW big or bus is not present.

The natural women... hubba hubba!

Yes the plot is wonky...acting transparent...dialouge could be snappier...boy 600 words huh...

So all in all enjoy and for cripes sake it was or is free on...

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.

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.

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.