No Tears for the Damned

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.

Watched movie on a whim on the Tubi app. Loved the old vegas 60s style cinematography and the trend of the culture at the time.

Bit of a mild copy of Psycho without the Norman Bates.....all.the actors played parts pretty well right down to the gay piano player getting a punch .

Plot not too over the top either.

Loved the party scenes with the dancers and the band and the soft porn clips . This movie really captured vegas well.

Movie bit naff but actually found myself enjoying this film...better than half the movies made in this day and age. Kept my interest and will add this movie to my favourite list

A hidden gem.

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.

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?