Night After Night After Night

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-

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.

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.

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

"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.