When Charlie Chaplin made his great black comedy of murders, "Monsieur Verdoux" he planned a sequence where Henri Verdoux contacts a woman through the matrimonial ads of a newspaper, only to discover she is a female serial killer for profit. When they find out each other's true vocation it becomes a race to kill the other, that Verdoux barely wins. However, this sequence was never in the finished film. One wonders how it would have been handled by Chaplin. I suspect it might have been good.<br /><br />Ray Steckler was nowhere near the Chaplin class of director and film creator. He is nearer Ed Wood, but Wood had that saving grace of having some concept or idea that was original but that he could not bring to the screen due to poor talent. Steckler was basically an opportunist who shot films that were violent and full of quasi-pornography. He never could do a nude sequence of interest. He just could show sleazy situations. It was enough to attract an audience, but its not cinematic art at it's best (Chaplin) or it's worst (Wood).<br /><br />The plot of this film is fairly simple: Johnny Click (that is his name) is a photographer played by Peter Agostino. He has been married but the marriage is now over, and he is a bitter man due to that. He looks at most of the women he meets as tramps and prostitutes, and since he is in Hollywood he does see many of them on the street corners. With a better script and direction it could be the negative version of Julia Roberts-Richard Gere's "Pretty Women", the street nightmare of the whores that Roberts wants to get away from. But this is Stekler, and he concentrates on the sensational that will make the film a ticket seller to a certain audience that just likes sensation. I will give him one credit though - his shots of the streets of Hollywood are done well, and the more to his credit is the cheapness of his film equipment: Steckler made this film as a silent film with a shoulder held camera. Later (at prodding of distributors) Agostino does do some narrative.<br /><br />Agostino contacts whores and offers to do photos with them as models, showing their "skills" for his camera. And we see him do in all these poor girls by strangling them. We never see any police investigation (it would have meant a more involved script with more acting). Agostino sees every victim as a "cock tease" and he feels he is doing the race of men a favor by killing them. Actually we do sense he is really going off the deep end - at one point he follows a woman to her car and strangles her in the car.<br /><br />While his murders do make headlines he is sharing them with a second serial killer known as the Skidrow Slasher.* These are male derelicts who are found cut up and mutilated in the back rows of the streets at night. Again no police investigation is shown. But we are invited to see the party responsible. It is a pornography book store owner played by Steckler's real life wife Caroline Brandt. Apparently (we are never allowed into her mental state to see what her problem is) she sees the derelicts as the parasitic men threatening the race of women, and sees it her duty to destroy them.<br /><br />(*I hate to give a schlockmeister like Steckler any real credit for creative force, but I keep wondering if he first got the idea of the two killers from the notorious Zodiac murderer who operated in California in the 1970s, and was never caught, as well as the "Hillside Strangler", who was caught eventually.)<br /><br />You can see what is inevitable in this crappy film.<br /><br />Agostino goes into the book store one day, and his eyes and Brandt's meet. Now neither is really pleasant looking, but both are "presentable" and neat. Both have some "good points" that could overcome their negatives (Agostino never smiles, Brandt has a perennial stare in her eyes). Slowly they get to know each other and start judging each other as a classier type than they have known than others of each other's sex. They decide to go full scale into a deep relationship. And just as it is coming to fruition they realize just who each other is, and what each other does.<br /><br />SPOILER:<br /><br />Briefly their growing fondness (I really can't consider it love) turns into mutual contempt and hatred, ending with Agostino strangling Brandt to death while Brandt plunges her knife repeatedly into Agostino's belly stabbing him to death. She dies first, and he dies shortly after.<br /><br />Aside from the shock value of the murders (which frankly gets monotonous) and the film of the streets, it is a wretched film. I take it that it found it's audience, as Steckler would later do a second film with Agostino (playing the same role - hey didn't he die in this first picture - only playing it in Las Vegas). One can't pass this story by without also noting that it could have been improved in many ways. For instance, Brandt's knife could have been used by Agostino on her while she strangled him in a curious, if fitting reversal, of murder methods. But even with that it would have been a worthless bit of change for such a film. Really the best thing to say about such a film is one need never have to see it. I recommend to the readers they avoid it like the plague.