That last title makes some sense, since an African-American priest named Father Jessie plays a key role in the story, getting entangled in the escalating conflicts of a white family in his parish. It all begins when a member of that family, Denise, returns from college to her home in New Orleans, where she's welcomed by her brother Vance, a sympathetic Vietnam veteran who runs a flower shop.
Their older brother Dan is a bigot with a hard shell, and he explodes with rage when Denise reveals that she's pregnant and plans to marry the baby's African-American father. Shortly thereafter, Denise and her boyfriend are having a quiet outdoor chat when a bearded stranger picks off the boyfriend with a high-powered rifle. Another killer - apparently not the bearded assassin, since this one's appearance is obscured by cagey camerawork - later breaks into Denise's room, drowns her in her bathtub, and cuts her wrists to make it look like suicide. (No halfway competent medical examiner would be fooled by that for a second, but logic is not the movie's strong point.)
Father Jessie recently returned to his old parish, and he's saddened to hear of Denise's apparent suicide. He's looking forward to officiating at Dan's impending wedding, but the brothers get into a fight before the wedding - turns out Dan's fiancée is a woman he stole from Vance while Vance was serving in Vietnam - and when Father Jesse intervenes, Dan's vicious racism resurfaces in another blast of wildly offensive language. And so it goes, in a story that never brightens. Murder victims pile up, including Dan's new wife, Vance's new girlfriend, and an African-American worker named Willie who meets his doom while trying to murder Dan after Dan fires him. Attempting to sort through the confusion are a white cop named Lieutenant De Vivo and a black cop named Jim Bunch, both bewildered by the growing mayhem and wondering what on earth is going on with this family, anyway?!
The plot is ultimately resolved via one of the oldest and creakiest storytelling clichés around. Yet two things make The Night of the Strangler worth viewing despite its shortcomings of narrative and technique: one is its implicit critique of the low-end "family values" that undermine the morality of some communities, and the other is its explicit exposure of the bigotry and racism that continue to bedevil modern America.
Houck Jr. was the son of Joy N. Houck, who produced almost a dozen westerns starring Lash LaRue as a hero of that name in the 1940s and 1950s. Following in his father's cinematic footsteps, Houck Jr. was an owner of movie theaters located across the Deep South and a founder of Howco International, a South Carolina company that produced and distributed B programmers (including this one) until it closed its doors in the early 1970s. He was also an actor, with Louisiana-based movies like Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law and Jim McBride's The Big Easy (both 1986) among his credits. This ties in with the New Orleans atmosphere of The Night of the Strangler.
The biggest name in The Night of the Strangler is Micky Dolenz, the drummer of the Monkees, the manufactured rock group that ended its brief career a couple of years earlier. Dolenz was a star of the band's eponymous television show as well as its sole feature-film vehicle, Bob Rafelson's Head, which came and went with little fanfare in 1968. He plays Vance with a reasonable amount of energy, if little charm. The same goes for James Ralston as Dan, while Chuck Patterson is more interesting as Father Jessie and Michael Anthony and Harold Sylvester, Jr. are effective as the two cops.
The most striking aspect of the remaining cast is how many of its members have no other screen credits before or since, even though some of them - Adrian C. Benjamin, Jr. as a pathologist, Ann Barrett as Dan's wife, Katie Tilley as Vance's girlfriend, Susan McCullough as Denise - turn in capable performances. The more experienced Patrick Wright, billed here as Michael Wright, is also noteworthy in the silent and thankless role of the rifle-toting assassin, whose long hair and casual duds appear to be a shot at the hippie community still scattered across the American landscape in 1972.
The sound department's boom microphone should qualify as a member of the supporting cast, since it makes several surprise appearances in the upper portion of the frame. The other technical values range from adequate to barely adequate, and Dennis J. Cipnik's cinematography falls into both categories, varying wildly from one scene to another. A nod also goes to the designer of the film's original poster, which features - you guessed it - the hand of the strangler and the neck of the strangling victim who never show up in the movie. Go figure!
Director: Joy N. Houck, Jr.
Producer: Albert J. Salzer
Screenplay: J.J. Milane, Robert A. Weaver, Jeffrey Newton
Cinematographer: Dennis J. Cipnic
Film Editing: Rex Lipton
Music: Jim Helms
With: Micky Dolenz (Vance), Michael Anthony (Lt. De Vivo), James Ralston (Dan), Chuck Patterson (Father Jesse/Jake), Susan McCullough (Denise), Katie Tilley (Ann), Ann Barrett (Carol), Warren J. Kenner (Willie), Ed Brown (Jack Markam), Harold Sylvester, Jr. (Jim Bunch), Stocker Fontelieu (Father Babbin), Wilbur Swartz (Monsignor Greyson), Adrian C. Benjamin, Jr. (Dr. Labewitz), George Wood (Guard), Anthony Buonagura (Mike), Brick Tilley (Sailor), Norbert Davidson (Flower Man), Mark Bennett (Hebert), Michael Wright (Assassin), Joseph Liuzza, Wayne Rau, Bert Roberts (Groomsmen)
Color-89m.
by David Sterritt
