The Hillside Strangler, directed by Chuck Parello, is an independent film with amateurish acting and cinematography that attempts to recreate events of 1978-1979, when young women were strangled and then dumped in the Glendale hillsides near Los Angeles. (A second film entitled The Hillside Strangler, but directed by Chris Fisher, is ready to be released soon.) Rather than following a Law & Order formula, Parello's version is presented in the manner of a pornographic snuff film that looks into the psychological components of two stranglers, not one. What emerges is a case study of what Hannah Arendt has called "the banality of evil," that is, the story of two unremarkable individuals who commit nearly a dozen murders for no reason other than to have "fun." Twentysomething Kenneth Bianchi (played by C. Thomas Howell) leaves Rochester, New York, after breaking down in tears on his mother's lap because his application to become a member of the city's police department is turned down. When he arrives in Los Angeles, he is met by his cousin Angelo Buono (played by Nicholas Turturro), an auto upholsterer, whose accent suggests that he is from New York City. Buono, who is unmarried and has no girlfriend, is a punk who enjoys picking up prostitutes; when a female cousin later visits him, filmviewers realize that there was a lot of violence in Buono's home life. Then, after a month or so of applying to join local police departments in vain, Bianchi gets a job at a title company, prints up phony graduation certificates from Columbia University, where he claims to have majored in psychology, opens an office as a consulting psychologist, and falls in love with an apartment neighbor, Claire Shelton (played by Allison Lange). One day, Buono designs a scam--a prostitution racket. He asks Bianchi to recruit beautiful women on the pretext that he is a talent scout. Accordingly, Bianchi meets the first victim just before she is to return to Tucson. Bianchi prevails on her to quit her job in Tucson to make a commercial for a granola product, sending her a free one-way airline ticket. When she arrives, presumably to stay temporarily in Buono's house, Bianchi tells her that the deal unfortunately fell through, so she is now stranded. Buono then gets tough with her, and she becomes a white slave who is soon strongarmed into recruiting a friend from Tucson to become their second prostitute. After that, they get a list of johns from a street prostitute to expand their clientele, but a threatening visit from the street prostitute's pimp ends that approach. The murders begin when one day they murder their two Arizona sex slaves and dump them on someone's front lawn. After the pimp visits them, they pick up street prostitutes and follow the same method of operation. (However, the film fails to reveal the fact that most of those murdered were not prostitutes and does not mention that one was twelve, another was fourteen.) In response to murders in the nice part of town, the police form a task force, so the two lie low. Claire, unhappy living with Bianchi, moves back home to Oregon, pregnant with his child. When he goes to live with her, she rejects him, whereupon he strangles two Oregonian women. The police then connect the dots and arrest Bianchi; Claire, when questioned, reveals that his best friend in Los Angeles is Buono, who is then apprehended. Christian Chavez (played by Marisol Padilla Sanchez), a "patient" of Bianchi, tries to commit a copycat killing of two women to throw the police off the track, but she botches the effort. Titles at the end indicate that all three were sentenced to prison. As a quasidocudrama of a gruesome part of the history of Los Angeles, The Hillside Strangler might have been presented more professionally, but alas the film contains an excessive amount of brutality, notably a how-to-do-it course on alternative methods of committing homicide. MH
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