Also known as No Tears for the Damned, Las Vegas Strangler (1968) is an energetic protoslasher full of female nudity and bleak psychological self-hatred.
Some of your universe's critics fail to appreciate such a complex, innovative film. For example, reviewer paul_haakonsen writes that "it is definitely not a movie that will ever grace my screen a second time." Reviewer finercreative writes "Overall, it is of bad quality." And reviewer oldsvovo writes, "Yes the plot is wonky...acting transparent...dialouge [sic] could be snappier."
Read on for a more nuanced appreciation of Las Vegas Strangler...
The film begins, appropriately, in Las Vegas, as we see shots of the city lights in beautiful black and white, along with some previews of murders to come. The film proper begins with a young woman named Lori leaving a motel, accompanied by sexy jazz music. She cuts a deck of cards that she holds in one hand, shrugs, and enters a dive bar. After exchanging pleasantries with the elderly female proprietor (“You look pretty as the queen,” the old woman — revealed to be Lori’s mother — says), Lori puts a coin in a jukebox and begins “dancing” (i.e., shimmying in place) to the instrumental rock song called “Ain’t No Tears for the Damned.”
As Lori dances her shimmying dance, all the men in the dive bar watch her lustfully. In a clever and tragic bit of cinematic business, Lori’s mother silently flashes her five fingers three times to a particularly sleazy barfly, indicating she will sell Lori’s affections for fifteen dollars. When the man shrugs, Lori’s mother flashes her five fingers twice. The man takes a swig from a can of Coors and nods his head.
The man takes Lori to the back of his van and presses against her. She balls her hands into fists while he has his way with her.
Surprisingly, nobody is strangled during this rendezvous. Afterward, when the sleazy man is drunkly asleep, Lori goes through his wallet and returns to the bar.
Minutes later, an ostensibly more respectable man wearing a nice jacket pays his bar tab. “How come you and Lori don’t get better acquainted, Mr. Murray?” Lori’s mother (who appears to be at least fifty years older than Lori) asks entrepreneurially. “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”
“Well, you know I’m just a working man, Hattie. I couldn’t afford that pretty little English stepdaughter of yours.”
(It must be noted that Lori’s accent is so authentically English that it sounds like she is from Brooklyn.)
“Why don’t you find out?”
At that moment, Lori returns to do her full-time job of putting a coin in a jukebox and shimmying. The sleazy van man returns, demanding the twenty dollars Lori stole. He takes the money from Lori, then “straightens her out” by slapping her, earning him a punch from Mr. Murray, the jacketed gentleman.
Mr. Murray (played by TV Western actor and Al Adamson regular Robert Dix, whose appearance and mannerisms here resemble Kyle MacLachlan) takes Lori’s hand and drags her out of the bar. They get into his convertible. He suggests they go out on the town in Vegas. As they drive, Lori turns on the radio, which immediately provides a news update about a singer named Sue Veil who has brutally murdered, and also “some of Miss Veil’s long hard had been cut off.”
When they enter a show lounge at a casino, the audience is treated to a long performance of a song called “Demon of Love” by a female singer and her male backup dancers. Then the couple moves on to another casino, where the audience is treated to a real full-size carousel where topless showgirls ride around and around. This lasts, of course, for approximately ten minutes.
After some more casino adventures, in which Lori admits she thought Mr. Murray was handsome the first time they met a few years ago, the filmmakers dissolve to the next morning as Lori wakes up in a motel room as Mr. Murray gets dressed. “Boy, isn’t this one for the books,” Lori says, her accent drifting dangerously close to Cockney. “I should have my head examined. I wake up in a motel room with someone I’ve been in love with for years. And I can’t remember how it happened.” (Clearly a bizarre situation for someone who makes her living having sex in vans for ten dollars.)
Far more bizarrely, Lori finds a wedding ring on her finger. “Are we married?”
“Four o’clock this morning. Little Church of the West.”
Having little self esteem, she offers to annul the marriage, but he refuses in perhaps the most sexist manner possible: “You’re my wife and I’m going to take you home with me.”
Her self esteem requires her to continue arguing, saying of her stepmother and her “We’re nothing but scum.” She adds, in one of the best written lines of 1960s cinema, “When I was fourteen, they raffled me off for Christmas for a hundred dollars and a turkey.”
After a quick shopping trip, Mr. Murray drives Lori to his home, a big ranch in the desert. There, a burly manservant named Harmony unloads the packages from the car. Inside, Lori is introduced to Mr. Murray’s mother Madeline. When Mr. Murray is alone with his mother, who is predictably shocked about her son’s marriage, Madeline says, “You’re displaying a very sadistic sense of humor, Jeff.”
“Possibly,” he says sadistically. “Maybe I’m just asserting myself for the first time.”
His mother (who appears to be about five years older than her son) tells him to get rid of her. “I won’t permit that kind of trash to work in my kitchen, let alone visit in my living room.”
“She’s staying, dear mother. To have and to hold.”
They argue a bit further in front of a large portrait of Mr. Murray as a long-haired child and his mother, until he decides to speak with his new wife and his mother smiles inscrutably.
Mr. Murray says he has to go out for work, so he drives to downtown Las Vegas and takes a prostitute into a motel room. She strips naked and they begin to make love, with the woman letting her long hair fall on his chest, but he suddenly flashes on the long hair in the portrait and attacks her with a gigantic pair of scissors.
After the murder, he cuts off some of her long hair with the scissors.
Back at the Murray household, Lori is confused about the sleeping situation, as she has been given the guest room. She enters Mr. Murray’s bedroom and they kiss, but he is uncomfortable. “All my life I’ve had a woman tell me what to do and when to do it.”
After Mr. Murray leaves the house, Lori looks at the portrait with Harmony. “That must have been awfully rough on him,” Lori says, “having to wear long curls and clothes like that till he was big.”
“Sure was,” Harmony explains, “and he fought against it. But you know Mrs. Murray. She wants things done her way.”
“People must have made fun of him.”
“Well, they did when mama’s back was turned, which wasn’t often. She’d fight like a mother bear if anyone dared look at him cross-eyed. Especially girls.”
“That I can believe.”
Harmony explains his name comes from the name of the town of New Harmony, Utah, where he grew up. Lori explains her entire life to Harmony, and he tells her she has a good life to look forward to. “I’m not so sure,” she says. “I’m not so sure…”
The film cuts to the Murray family business, which appears to be growing cotton in the desert. Jeff is in the middle of some business outside in the fields when his mother drives up and tries to take over from him. “You just love to patronize me, don’t you?” Jeff says to her, and then he adds inexplicably, “You’re a real split personality. Man/woman type.”
Jeff drives off angrily.
Later, Jeff goes to a bar, which is packed in the middle of the day. In an exceptionally frank sequence, Jeff stares lustfully at a man playing a piano, and the man stares lustfully back at him. They are interrupted, however, when an attractive woman with long black hair appears. Jeff’s mind returns to the portrait of him as a boy with long black curls, and the filmmakers helpfully dissolve to the portrait so the audience isn’t too confused.
Minutes later, Jeff sits outside the bar in his car. He waits for the woman to get in her car, then he follows her to the Country Club Hotel, where she rudely parks right in front of the door and goes inside. Jeff almost as rudely pulls up next to her car and squeezes his empty hand, indicating to the audience that he wishes he had a knife or pair of scissors. Then he pulls away to find a pay phone, which he uses to call the woman’s room, somehow.
The woman, frustrated by the phone call, slips nudely into the hotel room’s gigantic bathtub. Oddly, she swims around the circular tub several times, perhaps to work out her frustrations.
Jeff gets his scissors and gloves from the glove compartment of his car and enters the hotel. In a fascinating twist, Jeff murders the woman not with the scissors or with his hands, but by dropping a radio into the giant bathtub. The woman is electrified immediately, allowing Jeff to cut off part of her hair with his precious scissors.
Much later, Lori waits up in her bed for Jeff, but when he comes home he goes straight to his separate bedroom. Intriguingly, she hears something that sounds like crunching so she barges in on Jeff as he sits on his bed tearing up cardboard. His mother barges past Lori and puts a blanket over him. “Probably have one of those bad colds coming on again,” says Mrs. Murray, though Jeff appears to be having some kind of psychotic break.
The filmmakers cut to a swinging Las Vegas party in a claustrophobic living room where women wear bikinis and men pull off their shirts while listening to a live rock band. Jeff makes his way through the living room, takes a swig from a bottle of liquor, and ogles a bikini-clad dancing woman. The scene goes on for quite some time, as some of the older guests crawl along the shag carpet as their younger compatriots dance with abandon. Also, people have close-to-explicit sex in a bedroom, which is treated as a joke by one of the crawling older people.
Eventually, Jeff sees another woman with long dark hair. She goes out to the swimming pool, which is inexplicably unpopulated, strips off her clothes, and goes for a swim (the pool is only slightly larger than the previous victim’s bathtub).
Jeff strangles the young woman, a process that takes about three seconds, and the filmmakers cut back to the shenanigans at the party.
The filmmakers cut to Jeff’s next victim almost immediately as she showers nudely and then sees Jeff break into her house. She reaches for a rifle mounted to the wall but Jeff is too fast for her. In the film’s most creative and explicit murder, he slams her against the wall, impaling her on a hunting trophy.
The next day, Lori’s stepmother Hattie visits to explain the plot to her clueless stepdaughter. “I’ve been hearing some mighty funny things about your husband and I figured it’s only right you should know about it.” She adds, “I hear that he’s been seen around Vegas with a real queer one. You know what I mean?”
“You’re lying,” says a shocked Lori. “You just want to hurt me!”
“Of course, if he’s home every night like a new husband should be, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
After this shocking development, Hattie leaves, but not before telling Lori that the “weirdo” works in town at a place called Robin’s Club.
The filmmakers cut to Robin’s Club (adorned with a sign that says Sherwood Lounge, clearly playing up a Robin Hood theme), where Jeff is making eyes at the piano player. Lori enters and sees immediately what is going on (the director moves the camera straight into Lori’s face to register her shock). Lori runs out and drives away.
Jeff, having not seen Lori, makes time with the piano player, who invites him to a party. When the man touches Jeff, however, the confused Jeff punches him.
Lori rushes back to the Murray household and implores Harmony to give her drink. “You know where that so-called husband of mine’s been spending all his time? In a bar, with a gay piano player! Now I know why he’s been keeping away from me. Guess I’ve been reading the wrong kind of fairy tales.”
She throws herself at Harmony. “You can make me feel like a woman again.”
Harmony, clear-eyed, brushes her off too. “You don’t want me, Lori. You’re only trying to use me to get back at Jeff. Same way he used you to get back at his mother.”
Lori slaps him, then runs to the main house and begins knocking small photographs off the wall. Mrs. Murray interrupts her. Lori tells her, “You should be proud of your son. He’s as queer as a three-dollar bill!”
As Lori knocks things over with a pillow, the pillow breaks open and various newspaper articles and locks of black hair fall to the carpet.
Suddenly, Jeff appears. “You wouldn’t listen to me, would you mother? I tried to tell you what was happening.”
“Why?” his mother asks. “My God, why?”
“I didn’t kill those girls. You did. You built my life for me and twisted me into something that couldn’t live like a normal human being.”
“You’re sick. You’re not responsible.”
“You are.”
As Lori watches, Jeff pulls out a stocking and strangles his mother.
However, Harmony interrupts, punching Jeff, and everybody survives (except of course the showgirls who have already been murdered).
Las Vegas Strangler serves as a time capsule of Las Vegas in the late 1960s as well as a sun-drenched modern Gothic thriller with an innocent prostitute trapped in a ranch house in the desert while her uncaring husband murders showgirls. What more could one want?
A literal-minded person might want a more thorough explanation of Jeff's murderous behavior, beyond the cinematic trope that his overbearing mother's overbearingness drove him to murder. Analyzing Las Vegas Strangler using Psycho as a model, however, highlights some interesting differences. For example, in Psycho and similar protoslashers, the killer is often motivated to kill women to whom he is sexually attracted. In Las Vegas Strangler, Jeff appears to be more sexually attracted to male piano players. Or is he hiding a deeper secret -- is he killing showgirls with long black hair because they resemble himself as a boy, and he is secretly sexually attracted to himself? What exactly was Jeff doing collecting locks of hair and stuffing them in to a pillow? One might not want to know the answer to that question.
Besides the convoluted psychosexual aspects of the film, there is much to recommend Las Vegas Strangler. The desert locations are an unusual venue for a Gothic thriller, even if much of the drama is confined to living rooms, bedrooms, and cocktail lounges. Robert Dix is suitably believable as a man who cares for little outside of staring into the eyes of piano players. (Intriguingly, Mr. Dix came out of retirement before his death to play Roger Frankenstein in a film called The Last Frankenstein, released in 2021.) His supporting players are also convincing, though I am not sure if Lori's English accent is accurate or, as some might say, bizarre. The film's sex and nudity, while fleeting, are innovative, and the murders, while bloodless, are quick and surprising. All in all, Las Vegas Strangler satisfies as a protoslasher, as a Gothic, and as an exploitation film.