Night After Night After Night

"Night after Night after Night" is a sleazy and gritty British thriller from the 70's that shamelessly covers all the until then known taboos. In fact, the movie exclusively deals with perverted and sleazy topics. There's nudity aplenty, as well as misogynist violence and more perverted sicko-characters than you can wave a stick at. There's a sadist killer at large in London, targeting attractive blond women between the ages 20 and 30. When Jenny, the wife of detective in charge Bill Rowan, becomes one of the victims, the grieving husband becomes obsessed with finding the culprit. He has a suspect but no evidence, and the more murders are being committed, the more it seems like Detective Rowan has a personal grudge against his suspect. Then there's also the even more fascinating sub plot of an extremely puritan judge – sort of like a modern day version of Witchfinder General, as described by one of the characters – who condemns every prostitute to a maximum penalty and considers himself to be on a one-man crusade to rid society of the cancer called sex. Ironically enough, he has an assistant who's a sex- addict and reads pornographic magazines in court. "Night after Night after Night" is a very sober and downbeat film. It's sometimes even harshly unpleasant to look at, but it remains fascinating and creepy throughout. The film relies on great performances from a largely unfamiliar cast and a very courageous script that is quite ahead of its time.

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 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.

A rash of brutal slayings leads Scotland Yard investigators to a pompous mod hipster, but the true culprit may be a lot closer to home than anyone realizes.

This glowering little slasher genre prototype is a leering and perverse cocktail of sexual depravity, and may be of more than just passing interest to fans of both gialli and lurid trash cinema. Briskly paced compared to many contemporaneous British thrillers, this one surprises with steady direction, credible performances, and occasional off-kilter camera-work which enhances the delirium of the grisly goings-on. One standout flaw is the film's weak conclusion...though not unsatisfactory, it's a tad anti-climatic and hurried.

Pardonable inconsistencies aside, a very worthwhile watch. 6.5/10

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-