hunsa-jars · 1 year ago
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Aaaa hi hello howdy everyone! The chaos died down so expect the usual screeching tonight
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mst3kproject · 7 years ago
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514: Teenage Strangler
Oh, boy, I get to talk about serial killers!
That isn't even sarcasm.  Remember I mentioned my addiction to terrible television?  That includes not only MonsterQuest and Ghost Adventures, but also a number of things on ID (investigate!). I'm going to enjoy this very much.
Twenty-something 'teenager' Betty sneaks out of the house to see her boyfriend Jimmy with help from their mutual friend Anne.  On the way home, the two girls get separated and Anne is murdered by a figure in a leather jacket suspiciously like the ones Jimmy and his friends wear!  This isn't the first such murder, and it won't be the last.  Over the next few weeks more and more bodies are discovered... is it one of the kids? No, of course it's not.  It's obvious from the very first scene that it's Mr. Wilson the fucking creepy school janitor, and he has a totally rubbish explanation for why strangling women fills the void where his soul should be.
The movie was made in a small town by a bunch of people who had never made a movie before, and as a result the whole thing has a weird, histrionic vibe to it.  Every performance is either overdone or underdone.  Jo Canterbury as Betty sounds breathless and hysterical even before she witnesses a murder.    Bill Bloom as Jimmy is furious about everything.  Betty's mother is unaccountably delighted by the police in her house.  Jimmy's father intones every line as if he's doing Shakespeare.  The sheriff looks like he's reading his lines with a gun pointed at his head.  And then there's Mikey... I'm not sure English has the vocabulary to describe Mikey.  Imagine a kid so withdrawn and socially dysfunctional that not even Napoleon Dynamite would hang out with him.  Then make him more so.
The movie tries its best to present us with suspects.  Jimmy's anger and supposed criminal past makes him the obvious one, and when it turns out Mikey was the bike theif we're supposed to wonder if he is our pubescent DeSalvo.  When neither of them prove to be the suspect, we're next offered Curly, leader of the Fastbacks drag racing team.  All of these, however, are obvious red herrings.  The janitor is the only adult with a significant role in the story besides the cops – we know it's not any of them, therefore it has to be the janitor.  We would be sure of this even if his first appearance wasn't popping out of the darkness to scare Anne and Betty half to death and then creepily insisting on walking them home.  If you lined up everybody in this movie and asked people to pick which one is a serial killer, nobody would hesitate.  It's the janitor.
Meanwhile, there's very little evidence that the town at large cares about the series of horrific murders going on.  Kids are having a party with live entertainment in the malt shop the day after Anne's death hits the headlines (the malt shop extras probably look back at this movie and feel personally responsible for stereotypes about white people and dancing).  People don't even bother to start locking their doors.  There's no sense of the pervasive 'who will be next?' terror you might expect in a community being stalked by a serial killer.  Betty's parents tell her to stay home, but only because they don't want her hanging out with Jimmy, not because they're afraid the killer will find her.
The girl who gets up to sing Yipes Stripes actually looks a bit like Betty, so if you're not paying attention it's possible to confuse the two.  This may leave the casual viewer wondering why the hell this girl is literally dancing on tables mere hours after watching her friend get brutalized in an alley.  It feels downright surreal and it was a relief to know I'd merely confused the two characters... but then I realized that we were never going to see the singer again and there was no point to the song!  In I Accuse my Parents the songs were part of the story.  In The Giant Gila Monster Chase was a character as well as providing the soundtrack.  Yipes Stripes, much like California Lady, just kind of happens and then it's over.
Sampo on Satellite of Love News noted that Yipes Stripes is a hell of an earworm.  I concur: I was singing it to myself all week after watching the movie for this review (and now you will be too).  I have to say, though, that despite all Tom Servo's complaining I do like how the same tune in a minor key is used as the ominous stalking theme.  It unifies the soundtrack and represents a note of professionalism this movie otherwise would not have.
There's certainly not much professionalism in the sets.  The high school stuff seems to have been filmed mostly in and around a real school, and various people's houses make appearances, but check out the 'holding cell' the gang is kept in, with its cardboard walls painted in a 'brick' pattern.  Or the 'malt shop', which looks like somebody's basement bar – I especially like the sad little pennants pinned to the walls in the effort to distract from the lack of windows.  The Sheriff (played by the town of Huntington's actual sheriff, which is possibly why the guy looks like a deer in the headlights) makes his TV broadcast in front of a set of curtains standing in for a TV studio.
Between the amateurish sets and acting, the flat and uninteresting lighting and the lack of any suspense, the overall effect we get is that we're watching a school play.  It just happens to be a play about a serial killer for some reason.  So with that convenient segue, let's talk about our culprit, Mr. Wilson the janitor, and why his excuse that he kills for revenge against the girl who ruined his life is almost certainly bullshit!
Mr. Wilson is a very good fit to the standard profile of a serial killer: he's a middle-aged white male in a job that he feels is beneath his talents, and he murders vulnerable members of the gender he is attracted to – in this case, women and girls walking alone at night.  He is what the FBI calls an organized killer: his job at the school gives him ample time to observe and stalk the students and female teachers who are his victims, and he puts some thought into how he will avoid capture and see that the blame falls on somebody else, as illustrated by his theft of the Fastback jacket.  And he leaves the bodies in places that ensure swift discovery, so he can enjoy the shock and horror of the community and feel like he has power over all these people.
Also like many real-life serial killers, he has a rationalization for why he does what he does.  Sutcliffe claimed he murdered prostitutes because god had told him to.  Ramirez and Berkowitz blamed Satan. Bundy at least implied that it was revenge on a woman who had spurned him, while Gacy insisted that he killed over thirty teenage boys in self-defense.  In Mr. Wilson's case, it's about the lack of respect the students have for him, and particularly about a girl who ruined his life by accusing him of sexual harrassment.
This rings false, for starters, because the students never seem to be particularly disrespectful of Mr. Wilson.  He is not presented as the butt of jokes or pranks.  In the opening scene, Betty and Anne are startled by his appearance but they are not rude to him.  When he corners Betty at the climax he taunts her for calling him 'Mr. Wilson' as if this is something new, but throughout the movie we have never heard the students address him as anything else!  Mr. Wilson's persecution by the student body seems to exist mostly in his own imagination.
Then there's his claim of the false accusation that cost him his teaching job.  Of course we only hear his side of this, which is probably coloured by his victim complex.  We never meet the girl it happened to, so we can't get her version, but Mr. Wilson's choice of phrase when telling the story is interesting. I wasn't even near her, he says.  There are plenty of ways to sexually harrass somebody without actually touching them, and a teacher would be in an excellent position to take advantage of these.  Perhaps Mr. Wilson made embarrassing remarks to her in front of the class, or wrote inappropriate things on her test papers.  Maybe she accused him of attempted rape because her parents and the principal kept downplaying or ignoring complaints about his actual behaviour.  Whatever happened, I'm willing to bet this mysterious student would tell a very different story than he does!
The movie ends with Mr. Wilson being shot by the police, who had only just arrived and couldn't possibly have any idea what was going on in his office.  It's an ending that fails to be worthy of Colman Francis only because the shooter isn't in an airplane.  You'd think they could throw the audience a bone by having a line about how they'd suspected him all along or something.
I've probably made it sound like I don't like Teenage Strangler, but that's not the case.  The movie is something like Teenagers from Outer Space in that its ambition far outstrips the budget and talent attached to the project, but everybody gave it their best and you can't say their hearts weren't in it.  It sucks, but it sucks with sincerity, and that's my favourite kind of bad movie.
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