The Hillside Strangler

Kenneth Bianchi would very much like to join the police. He's also a psychopath. After being rejected again his mother – or, as we later learn in passing, his adoptive mother – suggests Ken might benefit from a change of scenery and arranges for him to go west and visit his cousin Angelo in LA. It's a bad combination, the older, more experienced but equally psychopathic Angelo exerting a negative image on his younger, impressionable cousin.

The two men decide to set themselves up as pimps, using Ken's charm – by this time he's also found a steady girlfriend in Allison and set himself up in a phony counselling business – to lure the naive Amber into their clutches and Angelo's capacity for brutal violence to control her. But, after recruiting another victim and buying a list of clients of another hooker, Gabrielle, they are visited by a rival pimp and his thugs, who take their money and guns and send the girls packing.

Seeking vegeance, Angelo and Ken pick up Gabrielle and Ken strangles her to death. They dump the body, but it doesn't even rate a mention in the papers. Turned on, the pair quickly develop their modus operandi. Posing as plain clothes policemen they find it easy to arrest hookers – and then, just any woman who has the misfortune to cross their paths – and then take them in for questioning to rape, torture and murder, before then dumping the bodies…

John McNaughton and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer have a lot to answer for. Without them we'd never have a piece of dreck like Hillside Strangler. The film's director, Chuck Parello, debuted with an in-name only sequel to McNaughton's film, the unwieldy-titled Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer 2: Mask of Sanity. He followed that with Ed Gein. Ed was scripted by his co-writer here, Stephen Johnston, who handled similar duties on Matthew Bright's Bundy.

So, what Parello and Johnston do ain't nice. But, unlike Wolverine, we can't even say that they're the best at what they do, which is in any case very different from McNaughton: Though certainly drawing considerable inspiration from Henry Lee Lucas, McNaughton never presented his film as an actual biopic of any real-life serial killer. Yet, ironically, the low-key way in which Henry delivers the 'facts' is ultimately far more effective and true to the documentary tradition than the faux case-study approach of Parello and Johnston's biopic, given the way in which they distort their material – no mention, for instance, is made of the three murders probably perpetrated by Bianchi in Rochester before he and Angelo crossed paths – and the manner in which it is presented.

The big problem is that the film-makers seem to actually want us to identify with Bianchi and – admittedly to a lesser extent – Buono. It's almost hagiographic at times, with insufficient distance or authorial comment present to establish a distinction between the distorted, hateful, misogynistic views of the two men and those of the film and its creators, as a succession of women line up to act dumb and get killed in the best slasher movie tradition. Suffice to say that the film which immediately comes to mind as a point of comparison here is Fantom Kiler, a pseudonymously produced quasi-underground sex-horror hybrid that most definitely isn't going to be showing up in the cinema, on TV or at your local Blockbuster anytime soon.

Hillside Strangler's saving grace – or, alternatively, a major part of the problem – is the quality of the performances from C Thomas Howell and Nicholas Turturro. Both are utterly, scarily convincing, the former equipped with a glib charm and tendency to fall apart when faced with a reverse, the latter more overtly sadistic and controlling. Here, at least, comparisons with Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer's Michael Rooker are appropriate.

If nothing else, then, Parello can direct actors well, remembering that Steve Railsback was equally impressive in Ed Gein.

All told, however, one has to question the film-makers motives and, indeed, those of whoever programmed this at the EIFF. As with the equally flawed Trauma being the product of the Festival's ex-artistic director's new company, one suspects that if this had been produced by some entity other that Tartan, it wouldn't have got a look in.