The Hillside Strangler (2004)

Pathetic attempt at serial-killer realism. I mean, seriously, for the entire first half of the movie there's no strangling. Instead, we get to watch these two fuckups as they screw chicks and try to start an escort service and generally show themselves to be obnoxious prats. (Nicholas Turturro tries way, way, way too hard to get this last point across. I get the feeling most of his pointlessly 'ugly' dialogue was improvised.) It's a '70s hit parade of bad clothes, bad dialogue and bad sleaze, and it's riotous. I openly guffawed on several occasions at this film's early ineptitude. Then, for some reason the film doesn't quite make clear, the two guys decide hey, as long as we're tooling around L.A. and treating women like shit anyway, why not just start killing them? So we get the stranglings, and they're put together like the filmmakers wanted them to be disturbing. However, they don't have the talent for that, so the remainder of the film ends up coming off as merely unpleasant. But hey, at least it stopped being unintentionally funny. C. Thomas Howell acquits himself rather well as Kenneth Bianchi, all things considered. But that's no reason to suffer through this wart on the balls of cinema.

Grade: D-