The Zodiac Killer (1971), by Tom Hanson

Most of us at this point are familiar with the story of the Zodiac Killer. In the late '60s through the early '70s, an as-yet-unidentified murderer killed at least five people in the San Francisco area, leaving behind mysterious ciphers which remain as unsolved as the case they belong to. Many theories have emerged citing a number of suspects, and similarly quite a few films have been made on the subject of the murders. Like the theories, some of these movies are sound, while others are not. The 1971 film The Zodiac Killer, made by Tom Hanson as part of a harebrained, probably-bogus scheme to catch the Killer in the theater it showed at, is decidedly not one of the sound Zodiac case adaptations, being instead a fascinating portrait of ugly people thrown into a classic exploitation backdrop.

The film is a relatively disconnected series of vignettes. We first follow the Zodiac Killer without knowing who he is, and two suspects emerge for us to consider: the meek, rabbit-keeping vegan mailman Jerry, and the violently misogynistic, drug-addicted, alimony-dodging Grover. The police begin to close in on Grover, seeing as he's the more readily obvious suspect, but he's shot down after trying to kidnap his daughter with a Ultimate Weapon, a handsaw. Jerry is the actual Zodiac, believing that his victims will become his slaves in the afterlife (which the Zodiac Killer claimed to believe), after Atlantis rises from the ocean (which is horseshit concocted by the director). He keeps on killing and, as in real life, he is never caught.

Tom Hanson here takes the Ed Wood route of exploitation and tries to make a movie that teaches us something. At first, the movie is rather cynical--it flat-out calls the audience stupid for not being more paranoid about serial killers, for not suspecting the un-suspicious. This is a rather uncomfortable view to take, especially in an age where kids are now being told that their shy classmates are potential school shooters in the making just because they're quiet. Jerry being the killer fits in with this mentality; he is the very "guy next door" that he warns us about at the beginning. Grover's arc exists to demonstrate that sometimes the most vulgar and openly-violent and Trump-esque of us are just bad people, and despite their loudness and brashness they shouldn't be the only ones we look at when it comes to looking for murderers. Of course, that sort of seems to normalize people like Grover, but the subversion, I think, goes deeper than that.

Grover is violently misogynistic, true, but grotesque sexism is a running theme of the whole movie--almost as if Hanson wanted to demonstrate, at least subliminally, that the Zodiac Killer could not exist without a confining culture that encourages men to be violent. Jerry is not as sexist as Grover, but only barely. He shares a conversation with his hideous pimple of a neighbor Doc, who opines that "once women are over 20, they're no good...Chinese have a term for it, it's called the Year of the Dog. [That's...not what that is, but 'kay.] Or as I like to call it, the Birth of the Bitch!" Following this Doc adds, "if you get any leftovers, though, send 'em my way...remember, I like 'em plump 'n' juicy...and DUMB!" Jerry is generally on Doc's side during this, and the rest of the movie will show him throw sexist remarks out of his own volition. Jerry and many other characters also sling around the word f*ggot, and Jerry himself takes deep offense at being called such. This latter incident takes place in a bar scene where we get glimpses of various relationship dynamics, nearly all of them portrayed negatively. Bad sexual dynamics, negative gender roles, and institutionalized homophobia are all major parts of the world that makes the Zodiac Killer who he is.

Actually, this movie in some ways is all about subversions. After Jerry is shown to us as the Killer, we see him first share some hotdogs with some beachgoers, where he doesn't kill them--then he goes to a park full of vulnerable children, where he doesn't kill anyone. But then we get the biggest and most infamous murder scene of the whole movie, where he first claims to be a crook escaping from a prison in Montana, and that he just needs to steal his victims' keys and money to get to Mexico. But after he ties them up, he chuckles casually, "I'm gonna have to stab you people." This sort of sadistic joking-around follows as he plays games with the police. He takes genuine pleasure in shutting down the power of those who can stop him. At the end, this is played with, where it's briefly put forth that maybe if the police didn't need to get so many fuckin' permits and warrants and whatnot they'd just be able to arrest/kill all those dirty crooks all the time like we want. It's uncomfortable (because time shows that cops perform worse and commit more crimes without those regulations), but it's presented alongside the suggestion (put forth, admittedly, by the Zodiac himself) that the Killer may in fact be a sane person, which means there are other reasons for his killings aside from simple "mental illness." While it is the Zodiac Killer himself putting forth this view, it also obviously stands in for the sentiments of the filmmakers, so this is a point they're interested in exploring. It's interesting. It's almost like unscientific views of mental health and biased explanations/solutions for crime are excuses for the violence of the patriarchy or something. 

Of course, this movie is also ridiculous. Grover is absolutely disgusting inside and out, which becomes kind of comedic after a while. ("Suspect proceeded to urinate in customers' drinks, proclaiming...'The Fountain of Youth lives'?") The Zodiac Killer wears a Paul McCartney wig and a beaglepuss. The police consult a psychic, Mr. Koslow, who has some Mysterious Foreigners in his apartment for no reason. It's a weird movie, and I may have understated that, despite the fact that this is a fictionalization of a series of murders that was released while those murders were still happening. To say nothing of the fact that for all the hard facts about the case Hanson gets right, there are plenty he just makes the fuck up.

This is one of my favorite movies of all time. It's not an easy watch, for quite a few reasons, but every time I pop it into I'm completely engrossed in its world for 87 minutes. Like, I will actually forget about outside reality when I throw it on. That's another way it's weird. Watch it.

If you want to help make reviews like this happen, you can support the site on Patreon! Plus, you can like the A-List on Facebook to get updates.

The Raiders of Atlantis (1983), by Ruggero Deodato

Huh. I never thought I'd actually grow to love a Ruggero Deodato film. My experience with Deodato has primarily been the second-hand experience of knowing people who have actually sat themselves down and watched Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust. To be honest, I'm sure I myself will find the strength to watch Cannibal Holocaust at some point, since I made it through Cannibal Ferox and all--I'm not overly concerned with the human violence in Cannibal Holocaust, even if I know I have my limits. What worries me more about Holocaust and Deodato in general is the animal cruelty that would become a hallmark of the Amazon Cannibal subgenre...I keep my movies in the realm of fiction. If you start breaking out into reality with some of your stunts, then eyebrows are going to be raised. I made the mistake of following the trails of breadcrumbs that fanned out from the animal slaughter depicted in Cannibal Holocaust and found that Deodato was actually still one of the lighter of the Italian exploitation filmmakers--at least he didn't actually participate in human trafficking, or show real executions, like his comrade Franco Prosperi. Even so I wasn't prepared to forgive Deodato anytime soon. Today's movie, The Raiders of Atlantis, presents to me a paradox I've also run into with Prosperi, which is that I have actually found one of his movies that I like. (In Prosperi's case, I was a fan of his weird killer creatures movie Wild Beasts before I found out about some of his doings.) The Raiders of Atlantis is an unexpectedly entertaining action film, wildly disconnected and yet bizarrely sober all at once. Kinda makes you forget that the guy who made it was a colossal A-hole.

The year is 1994, in Miami Florida a bunch of mercenaries are killing dudes. They include Mike Ross and a man whose name is Mohamed but whom everyone insists on calling Washington. After they are done killing dudes and getting paid for it, we cut to a scientist, Kathy, who has been called from her Central American archaeological work to examine a 12,000 year old tablet of unknown origin. Suddenly, in the wake of the crash of a Russian nuclear submarine, Atlantis rises from the ocean, and as it does so, a group of biker punks, led by a guy in a really cool semi-transparent skull mask, begin killing people. They shoot a housewife in the neck with an arrow and dispose of her husband shortly thereafter. You may not believe it (I sure didn't), but this all comes together and leads to the bulk of the film's content, wherein the mercenaries and scientists battle the punks with a seemingly-endless supply of Molotov cocktails, which they keep kissing before throwing. In the end, however, none of it makes sense, least of all the bullshit explanation that a radiation leak on the Russian sub somehow caused Atlantis to rise from the ocean.

Where do I start? Maybe at the beginning...these opening credits really caught me off-guard. The theme that plays over these credits was jarringly similar to the theme from Yor, Hunter from the Future. It turns out this is due to the simple fact that both songs are done by the Oliver Onions, a band which along with Goblin ended up scoring a lot of European exploitation through the '70s and '80s. It doesn't help that the theme the Spoony One plays on his old Rebuary videos is the theme from The Raiders of Atlantis, even as he's showing footage from Yor, which is probably where I got confused. In any case, I allowed myself to believe for the first ten minutes of this film that Deodato had just stolen the theme from Yor and cut out all the parts that talk about the titular Yor. That would have been the funniest thing since Bruno Mattei stole the Dawn of the Dead theme for Hell of the Living Dead.

Actually, this movie's dialogue feels like Mattei's...it has that Claudio Fragasso fragrance to it. And I may in fact be selling Raiders of Atlantis a little short, as the dialogue occasionally exceeds the lunacy of the Mattei/Fragasso combo. Take for example this exchange between Mike and Kathy:

Mike: "You gotta be like Popeye. Eat your spinach."

Kathy: "I like spinach too!"

Mike: "Well, tell you what. When we're back ashore, and this is all over...I'll take you out to a spinach dinner."

...I'm sorry, what?

That's some Carlos Tobalina shit right there. A spinach dinner? Is spinach by itself really a meal? Is there a restaurant that would comply with a request for just spinach? Is that already an option on their menu? Are they going to be eaten their spinach raw or cooked? If the former, are they at least going to put dressing and croutons on their spinach, or does their love of spinach eclipse any culinary value they could derive from such? As remarkable as this exchange is...it comes back at the ending. This was considered by the screenwriter to be a big moment in the relationship of these characters.

This isn't even disjointed; this is all the joints taken out of the bones, and reassembled into something weird and spider-y. Individual moments, save for the ludicrous dialogue, work by themselves, but this film in no way becomes a gestalt. There is no unification between the punk plot, the Atlantis plot, and the mercenary plot, save for the fact that they are all in this movie. And Deodato definitively succeeds at distracting us from how these plots in no way overlap by smothering us with endless awesome action sequences, ablaze with tripwire decapitations and napalm.

Finally...returning somewhat to the character of Mohamed. It's true that only Italian exploitation directors could make a movie this illogical, but it also took an Italian studio to make an action movie where the hero, or one of the big heroes, is a black Muslim who lives all the way to the end. Seriously, I've yet to see such a thing outside out of, well, the film markets of the Islamic world, and so for this and for everything else he does in the movie, Mohamed is now one of my favorite action movie heroes ever. Let him be one of yours, too!

If you enjoyed this review, please consider sponsoring the site by becoming my Patron on Patreon!