I WAS A TEENAGE STRANGLER

Rough, shaky video footage of a masked marauder holding his hands out in strangling motion towards a topless woman while she plucks a hair from her nipple.

It's a brief pre-credits scene that pretty much sums up the cheap and sleazy nature of this curious offering from William Hellfire (DUCK! THE COLOMBINE HIGH MASSACRE; ORGASM TORTURE IN SATAN'S RAPE CLINIC).

Following cartoonish opening titles set to agreeable psychedelic music, I WAS A TEENAGE STRANGLER starts proper by introducing the deranged Winston (Josh Miller, CARESS OF THE VAMPIRE 2). Winston rings around people - in particular we see him ring a virtual stranger who gave Winston his telephone number while drunk in a supermarket once - and invites them to the "party of the decade".

Meanwhile, Winston goes round his brother Miles' house, who's just been released from a mental asylum. Winston encourages his drunken female friend to make out with the heavily bandaged Miles on the settee, But Miles freaks out, breaking the girl's nose and strangling her to death. As this occurs, Winston calmly rings Miles' doctor and informs him that his brother is having another episode, but that he'll sort it out himself.

Next we cut to Daisy (Chelsea Mundae, BITE ME!), who is busy getting ready for Winston's party with her friend Miss Applecore. The two argue over how they know Winston and what his surname is (neither seems to know him particularly), then throw themselves into a full-on catfight (in their underwear! Set to 60's-style garage punk!) when the friend claims Daisy's daughter Sandra has been raped.

Miss Applecore leaves, leaving Daisy seething. Her boyfriend appears and asks how he can help. Daisy hypnotises him then bends over and demands that he eat the excrement caked around her thong area. He obliges, then lies with his back on the floor so she can squat over him and shit on his face (I'm not making this up).

Then Daisy looks deep into her boyfriend's eyes to catch a flashback of what's really happened to her daughter. We see the flashback, in which Sandra is enticed into a scuzzbucket's home while selling cookies door-to-door.

The lowlife plies Sandra with drink, and then drags her by the hair to his bed. There, he batters her, strips her, gets her to play explicitly with herself, rapes her, punches her repeatedly in the mouth then forces her to graphically perform fellatio on him, blood from her mouth spewing over his penis (still not making this up).

Daisy is distraught at what she's seen in her boyfriend's eyes, and decides she must take immediate action. She finds Sandra sobbing on her bed and masturbates her to moisten her vagina, before ramming a coat hanger inside it and performing a bloody DIY abortion (honestly, it's all true).

Sandra retires to the bathroom shortly afterwards to vomit - for real. While spewing, she's attacked and strangled from behind. We assume the killer's Miles, right? But the following two murders are performed by a masked strangler … could there be a reason for the anonymity? Will Hellfire add a twist to proceedings?

I couldn't possibly divulge that information, but I will say that from this point on the plot hones back in on Winston's party. Which means we get a lot of music, sex, drugs, booze, bad fashion, a bit of lesbianism and an early performance from the ever-appealing Misty Mundae (AN EROTIC WEREWOLF IN LONDON; SPLATTER BEACH).

And, of course, more strangling!

STRANGLER is a confused mess of a film, made by people on drugs and virtually incomprehensible as a result. It's plot is almost non-existent, it's script feels ad-libbed and goes off oddly on tangents at times where it seems like Hellfire has lost his thread completely.

Performances are so bad I couldn't tell whether they were deliberate or not. Everything is over-the-top, seemingly fuelled by cocaine; such is the hyper-enthusiasm of this ugly young mob.

Still, there's no denying that the overall grubbiness of this film, its sleazy atmosphere and filthy feel, does have an effect. At times, it reminded me of early John Waters (PINK FLAMINGOS; FEMALE TROUBLE) with it's eagerness to shock through bad taste, and the short films of Richard Kern (FINGERED; YOU KILLED ME FIRST) with it's almost docu-soap no-budget feel and genuinely bizarre characters.

The content is pretty graphic (the blow job is real and explicit, as are the female masturbation scenes) and the strangling scenes do tend to go on for an uncomfortable length of time. Hellfire's intention was apparently to shock the fetishist audience into doubting why they like this kind of stuff. I suspect he achieved his goal.

The disc from Alternative Cinema's Factory 2000 wing is a fairly basic one. I assume the lack of extras is due to the fact that this film was originally made 11 years ago and the likes of Mundae etc won't exactly be keen to discuss it these days (not least of all because her boyfriend of the time was Miller, who died shortly after the film was completed).

What we do get is the film uncut and fully restored, in it's original full-frame aspect ratio. It looks really washed out with weak colours and some grain. Artefacting isn't a problem and visuals are always decipherable, but HD fanatics would have a cardiac if they saw this. The poor picture quality is a fault of the source material and not the DVD transfer, and is oddly in tune with the squalid nature of the film.

The English mono audio is generally loud and clear, but dips out occasionally. It's not a major issue but definitely needs pointing out.

Static menus do not include a scene-selection menu, but the film can be remote-accessed via 15 chapters.

The only extras are an 8-page booklet with enlightening liner notes from film historian Ed Grant (these include interview snippets with Hellfire, and go into some depth regarding the shooting of the more infamous scenes, the drugs being taken, etc), and trailers for (deep breath) NUDE STRANGLER, INFAMOUS BONDAGE MURDERS, INFAMOUS BONDAGE MURDERS 2, I WAS A TEENAGE STRANGLER, SNUFF PERVERSIONS, MASKED STRANGLER, SHOCK 2000, DUCK! THE COLOMBINE HIGH MASSACRE, SIN SISTERS, VAMPIRE SEDUCTION and BIKINI GIRLS ON DINOSAUR PLANET.

The packaging is quite nice too - a card slipcase offering the artwork shown above, plus an alternate, groovier cover on the keepcase inside.

Not for everyone.

Review by Stuart Willis