| Tony is a peeping tom who lives in a dingy one room hovel somewhere in Queens in the otherwise thriving metropolis of New York City. He looks a lot like Frankie Avalon with just a maniacal dash of Joe Pesci. He spends his days working in a mannequin factory, and being surrounded by all of those artificial female forms isn�t exactly a healthy environment for a sexually perverted loner like Tony. One day on his lunch break, he wanders into one of Times Square�s many gadget stores and buys an expensive pair of binoculars. Every self disrespecting voyeur needs good surveillance equipment. Tony arrives back at the factory a few minutes late, and is taunted by a loud co-worker named Frank. �You�re late back from lunch� what happened?� Franks asks his nervous colleague. �Nothin�� Tony replies. Frank sees the new binoculars, and questions the motivation behind the purchase. �I bet you�re gonna look at girls on the street huh? Girls undressing?� he jokes. Frank�s suspicions are incorrect� but only a little incorrect. After work, Tony clocks off and heads for the rooftop of a nearby skyscraper. As he scans the area, we see the old standard binocular P.O.V shot as he scans the nearby rooftops. The voyeur soon sees several young ladies indulging in some topless sunbathing on top of a nearby building. The next day at work, Tony�s co-workers are talking about their latest hot dates while the troubled loner lovingly strokes a mannequin in the storeroom. He tries to take a mannequin head home, but runs into his supervisor on the way out the door. �Hey Tony� grunts the surly supervisor. �Where are you going with that?�. He insanely asks if he can borrow the broken mannequin head. The manager refuses, and Tony leaves the factory sulking. On his way home, he passes an antique store. And guess what�s in the front window? A beautiful disembodied mannequin head. He takes the head to a bar, and lovingly places it on the table in front of him. He orders a beer, and gazes longingly at the dismembered dummy head while the bartender and other patrons shake their heads in disbelief. Then it�s time to go home, so Tony and the head catch the subway from Times Square to Queens. I wonder if he bought a subway token for the head? And after taking it up to his pad, it�s the last we really see of the head. It�s a little bit disappointing. I was hoping that Tony would have deep and meaningful conversations with it. But the loner has to feed his voyeuristic urges. He ascends the stairs to yet another rooftop, and scans the surrounding area for a free show. Amazingly another sunbather is baking topless on a tar coated roof nearby. I never realised that topless sunbathing was such a popular pastime in Manhattan. No wonder those helicopter joy flights over the city are so popular. We see more of those crazy multi-angle binocular P.O.V. shots. Tony licks his lips like a dog at a barbeque as he surveys the scene. But he wants to be closer to the fairer sex than his long distance voyeurism will allow. And there�s but one option for a socially inept sexually depraved psychotic loner. It�s the good old pre-zero tolerance days, so Times Square is full of sleaze. As he passes the exploitation grind houses and adult theatres, he approaches a tall blonde prostitute. The na�ve Tony invites her back to his apartment. When they arrive, she�s less than impressed. �You call this an apartment?� she asks him with disdain. The hooker explains that her price is twenty dollars, which is probably about the same amount that producer/director Barry Mahon paid her to act and appear nude in this film. Tony is devastated. She�s his first call girl, and he was expecting his first experience with a lady of loose morals to cost half of that. �I�ll give you five dollars just to take off your clothes� he pleads. �Nothing else�. �Are you kidding? You must be some kind of nut!� she exclaims. She�s not the only person in The Sex Killer to accuse him of that. But after thinking it over, she agrees, warning the drooling Tony not to touch her. The striptease lasts about three seconds, and the voyeur feels shortchanged. �You�re not goin� are you?� he pleads. �I�m a busy girl� she replies. �When you have more money, I�ll stay longer. You know where to find me. The next day, he�s up to his old peeping tom antics again. After spying on a scantily clad blonde through her front window, he sneaks into her house via the unlocked front door while she�s sleeping. He strangles her with a stocking, then indulges in some off-screen necrophilia. Then he sneaks out of the building unnoticed, and melts into the busy city streets. His co-workers read about the horrific sex killing in the next day�s newspaper. �He balled her after she was dead� one observes, putting the article�s forensic gibberish in laymen's terms. You�d think that checking the rooftops for nude sunbathers would have become a little passe for the sex fiend by now, but he�s soon back �scanning for babes�. But he�s not finished killing either. As the bodies rack up, the women of the city are in a state of paranoia. Strangely though, they�re still not paranoid enough to actually lock their doors. There�s a sub-plot involving an attractive girl with an English accent that curiously leads nowhere. A lot of time is spent on her with no real purpose whatsoever. The film ends in typical serial killer fashion when Tony becomes sloppy as his killings and necrophiliac leanings become even more bold and outrageous. Like Q the Winged Serpent, New York City is the star of The Sex Killer. Most of the performances are fairly uneven, so it�s the great sleazy locations that really make this film. It�s heavily inspired by the real life case of Albert DeSalvo the Boston Strangler, and at least attempts to study the psyche of a sexual sadist. It was obviously filmed on a very minimal budget (even for an exploitation quickie), and it shows with the amateurish performances from most of the cast. Still, the wooden performances do give it a surreal atmosphere. The Sex Killer is a long lost oddity well worth hunting down. |
| The Sex Killer (1967) |