It
was sort of like the play within Hamlet
devised to make the king betray himself. In 1971, the
Bay Area was like Whitechapel circa 1888. Fear of a serial killer stalking the
streets had good people hiding in their homes. Restauranteur Tom Hanson had the
novel idea of using a quickie exploitation film to trick the Zodiac into
revealing himself. It sounds crazy, because it was, but the killer’s preoccupation
with his media coverage was well-established by that point. Hanson is certain
he met the Zodiac face-to-face during the film’s initial one-week run in San Francisco,
but he could never prove it (at least not yet). The behind-the-scenes story is
truly stranger than fiction, but the film itself is mostly a weird artifact of
exploitation cinema. Freshly restored by the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA),
Hanson’s The Zodiac Killer (trailer here) releases today on
BluRay.
Perversely,
the first half-hour of Zodiac 1971 seems
intentionally designed to foster sympathy for the Zodiac, by making the
residents of San Francisco appear so repugnant, we wouldn’t mind watching them
get bumped off. However, around about the second act, we learn Jerry, the
vegetarian, rabbit-keeping postal carrier is in fact the Zodiac, who kills for
both satanic and Freudian reasons. He is a little upset when Grover, the misogynistic,
dope-addicted deadbeat dad with an appallingly bad toupee takes credit for the
Zodiac murders. This rather pushes him even further off the edge.
By
any rational aesthetic standard, Hanson’s Zodiac
is a rough go. It is sort of like watching America’s Most Wanted re-enactments directed by Harold P. Warren,
of Manos: The Hands of Fate fame.
Yet, it terms of historical significance, it deserves to be preserved on the
Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. Frankly, it is hard to separate
the film from its origins and context. Indeed, it is impossible to watch each
head-shakingly awkward scene and not wonder what the Zodiac thought of it.
Considering
the severity of Hanson’s budget constraints and the on-the-fly nature of the production,
Hal Reed (probably best known for The
Doberman Gang) and Bob Jones are better than you might expect, as Jerry the
Zodiac and Grover the creep, respectively. This is definitely on the low end of
the exploitation scale, yet it has a sinister energy you can’t quantify, but
viewers will immediately pick up on. In terms of tone, it is sort of like three-parts
Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (mostly sans the gore) and
one-part Charles Pierce’s original The
Town that Dreaded Sundown.
