Let us now return to the 1970s and explore the classic protoslasher Massage Parlor Murders! (1973). (As everybody knows, any movie with an exclamation point in its title is an instant classic.)
Some of your universe's critics are, habitually, wrong about this film. For example, reviewer damianphelps writes, "This is a complete time waster." Reviewer capkronos calls the film "one big, colossal bore with an aimless and meandering plot, endless filler, padded scenes, lethargic pacing, a mostly dull cast, a sleep-inducing light jazz score akin to what you'd hear in a waiting room." And reviewer lotekguy-1 writes about the acting, "performances below the bar even for the era and genre."
Read on for a more balanced exploration of Massage Parlor Murders!...
The film begins by getting right to the point: A woman leads a man into a room with a massage table. As jaunty music plays, a brilliantly improvised comedic scene plays out. The woman undresses the nervous man. “I’ve never had a new customer in a long time,” the woman explains, speaking rapidly. “All my customers are usually my favorite customers. I hope you become one of my favorite customers.”
He lies down with his shirt off and she begins massaging him, but he asks immediately, “Is this all you do in here? I mean, really?”
After some negotiation, he pays her twenty dollars to remove her top.
“How about that,” he comments off-handedly.
“Is it worth twenty dollars?” the woman asks.
“Well, let me think about that for a while.”
He pays her another twenty dollars and she removes her shorts, but not her underpants. Eventually, he decides to leave, telling the woman he feels ridiculous.
“No one’s walked out on me before,” she says.
“Don’t get insulted,” he replies. “Don’t feel bad.” He leaves, shutting the door, and the movie’s opening titles begin — they feature still photos of the cast (many with their eyes closed) over a peppy xylophone score. (Oddly, one photo shows two people but lists only one name.)
The titles also feature a credit card for Assistant Director George Dzundza, pictured admiring an out-of-focus woman from behind. Of course, Mr. Dzundza would become a well regarded TV and film actor a decade after this film.
The first scene of the actual film shows Detective Jimmy Rizetti buttoning up his pants after having sex with a masseuse/prostitute. He climbs into his unmarked NEw York City police car and tells his partner O’Mara to call into the precinct that there are no problems at the massage parlor despite a complaint call. The filmmakers then intercut shots of Rizetti driving his car with shots of the massage parlor prostitutes sitting around doing nothing. This lasts about five minutes.
The film then cuts to an unknown person’s POV. The camera enters the massage parlor (Venus Paradise - Fullerton Body Massage) and chooses the same woman with whom Rizetti recently canoodled. She leads the camera to a room, and then, in a startling sequence, the killer uses one gloved hand to smash the woman’s face against a mirror before strangling her!
Rizetti, at home in his basement apartment with his wife, receives an immediate phone call about the homicide. He picks up his partner and they investigate the dead, topless, dead body of Rizetti’s prostitute. Of course, Rizetti is distraught. He sits on the massage table, under which the body stares obliviously.
After roughing up the male proprietor of Venus Paradise, Rizetti sends O’Mara to the prostitute’s apartment, where he meets her roommate Gwen, and he also meets the massive carpet that makes up their apartment wall.
O’Mara makes a drink for the distraught Gwen by digging some ice cubes out of a hotel-style ice bucket, then interrogates her about her roommate’s various clients. Gwen tells him about a man. “She used to go over to his place and come back black and blue. He really must have been making it worth her while.”
“Do you remember his name? Where he lived?”
Gwen thinks for a second, then blurts out, “Mr. Creepy!”
Fortunately for all involved, except Mr. Creepy, Gwen finds her roommate’s address book, so O’Mara and Rizetti are able to track Mr. Creepy, whose real name is Keyanovich (played by Assistant Director George Dzundza). They stake him out and then track him slowly in their car. Mr. Creepy discovers he is being followed, however, and the police officers give chase on foot, tackling him and then punching and kicking him. When he is subdued, like all good police officers, the detectives ask what their suspect did. Unfortunately for them, he does not admit to committing a crime.
Later, at another massage parlor called, for some reason, Everybody’s Envy, the killer’s POV enters and selects a young woman to give him a massage. When they are in the massage room, however, it is the woman who gives herself a nude massage, interrupted by another gloved strangulation. After killing her, he drips a bottle of what appears to be candle wax (but is revealed to be acid) all over her body (or perhaps this is before she dies, as she visibly breathes while the wax drips onto her skin).
Rizetti and O’Mara quickly report to Everybody’s Envy to investigate the body. The attendant at the massage parlor identifies what might be the next target as a parlor called Leisure Plus near Times Square. “Gonna do a little personal investigation?” O’Mara jokes to his partner, suggesting that Rizetti needed to find a new masseuse/prostitute.
The film cuts to Rizetti walking through Times Square. He walks past a cinema showing a double feature of the classics Invasion of the Blood Farmers and Blood of Dracula’s Castle as he narrates, “Here I am, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, yeah, just go out and find an average guy who goes out for a little fun. Some goddamned fun. Strangles Rosie and then he puts acid all over the other chicks. What’s he gonna do for an encore? Clues, clues. The bastard leaves a ton of clues, but they’re no goddamn good.” (The film might have been even more fascinating if it shared some of these clues with the audience.)
After several minutes of historically significant footage of Times Square in the early 1970s, Rizetti gives up and goes home. This gives the filmmakers the opportunity to show a nude pool party in an indoor swimming pool. (The nude party footage lasts quite some time; the film’s balance of nude debauchery and driving scenes is roughly equal, always the sign of a well made exploitation film.) Detective O’Mara is at the party when someone screams. O’Mara chases a man out of the pool and onto the streets of New York, where, dressed only in a towel, he forces a taxi to stop so he can commandeer it.
After a thrilling (and surprisingly expensive-looking) car chase, O’Mara gets his man by dragging him off a fence by his boxer shorts.
O’Mara asks the man, “Who the hell are you?”
“She was a nut, man. I didn’t do anything to her,” the man explains.
Inexplicably, O’Mara simply walks away, for some reason convinced the man is not related to the massage parlor murders. As he walks away, the soundtrack plays a sad but jaunty series of notes that resembles the death of Pac-Man.
Rizetti and O’Mara next seek out one of Rizetti’s old contacts; the man, a former drug dealer, demonstrates he is “clean” by showing the detectives his current business: peeping through a small window in a door while a man and woman on the other side enact a “kinky” undressing ritual set to classical music. The ballet-inspired ritual ends comedically when the man falls asleep on the floor.
A phone call informs Rizetti there has been another murder, this time a strangulation by sheet on a massage table. This time, O’Mara puts some clues together: All the murdered prostitutes were wearing sets of dog tags on chains, something nobody ever noticed before!
In their car, Rizetti explains that his favorite prostitute bought the dog tags from an astrologer in the East Village. Fortunately for everyone involved, especially the audience, this astrologer is played by the great Brother Theodore of Devil’s Express (1976) fame. He tells the policemen, “My tongue is not long enough to give you a full account of what’s really going on, gentlemen. Today, you will have to unlearn all and everything you have ever learned before! All of your information is misinformation, and what you call science is really nothing but an organized system of ignorance! I say to you most earnestly it is far more important to go to heaven than it is to go to the moon!”
Asked where he was on the dates of the murders, Brother Theodore responds, quite logically, “Tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. near West 96th Street, I shall plunge into the Hudson and shortly thereafter I shall reappear on the coast of New Jersey as a white swan. It will be a miracle. There will be dancing in the streets.”
Frustrated, Rizetti punches Brother Theodore in the stomach. They decide to leave. The astrologer curses them: “I’ll rip you into a thousand odds and ends, each more repulsive than the other!”
(In any case, the astrologer incident contributes nothing to the murder case and is never mentioned again.)
At night, O’Mara and Gwen, who is now his girlfriend, walk through the streets of the city, kissing in front of a revolving door before going back to her carpet-bedecked apartment. They talk about the case and how lucky the killer must be. “Ah, screw it,” says O’Mara.
“Not it,” replies Gwen suggestively. “Me.”
The couple makes love for about ten minutes.
The next day, the prostitutes are sitting in the lobby of the massage parlor discussing the peccadilloes of their regular clients (one of the prostitutes is played by the late, great Beverly Bonner, a Frank Henenlotter regular) when a new client comes in. One woman takes him into her room and begins mixing up a solution of massage oil, but the man punches her. Gruesomely, he breaks a glass carafe and stabs her, leaving her nude body a bloody, Herschell Gordon Lewis-like mess.
Meanwhile, Rizetti and O’Mara eat lunch when one of their colleagues enters the restaurant. “How you doing with those killings?” he asks, perhaps insensitively.
“Yeah, well, that’s a zero so far,” O’Mara replies. “I don’t know. Pieces just don’t seem to fit.” Then, leaning back and smiling, he says, also insensitively, “Me, this weekend, I’m gonna forget all my troubles.” (He has arranged to spend the weekend with Gwen.)
After cutting inexplicably to Rizetti and his wife attending a church service, we watch O’Mara and Gwen spread out a picnic blanket in the park. The church and the picnic are intercut skillfully, communicating the message that Rizetti’s life is dull and unhappy while O’Mara’s is fun and exciting.
As the priest intones about the seven deadly sins, Rizetti suddenly realizes the killer’s motivation. He stands up in his pew and yells, “That’s it! The guy’s a religious nut!”
Rizetti runs out to his car and speeds to O’Mara’s apartment. He collects O’Mara and the two race to a bookstore to find a book about the seven deadly sins. “I don’t know what the hell half these sins are, but our boy does,” Rizetti says. He links each of the sins (well, two of them) to the massage parlors: Everybody’s Envy involves envy and The Mad Hatter involves anger. Suddenly, it is O’Mara’s turn to have an epiphany. He yells “Gwen!” and runs out of the bookstore.
Gwen works as a masseuse at a parlor called Lust Lounge. Unfortunately, O’Mara is too late. Gwen has been murdered.
In the final murder scene, the filmmakers show the killer, a well-dressed middle-aged man. He offers a topless masseuse hundreds of dollars. “I’ve never seen so much money,” she says.
“I want you to want the money,” the man says, referencing greed, one of the seven deadly sins.
“I do want the money,” she says, sealing her fate. The killer slaps her with a latex-gloved hand. Thinking quickly, she throws a bowl of massage oil onto his face. Then, for unknown reasons, he stumbles into the door, which is on fire, and becomes engulfed by flames.
The film’s most artful shot comes at the end, as the killer flashes back to his various murders and juts his flaming hand into the air when Rizetti and O’Mara break into the room.
The killer dies and greedy masseuse/prostitute survives. She crosses her arms over her chest as she watches him burn to death.
The End
In addition to being a riveting protoslasher, Massage Parlor Murders! is also a time capsule of New York City in the 1970s. While the opening comedy sequence, set entirely in one room, might give an audience member the impression that the film will be a zero-budget affair restricted to small sets, it actually opens up in a fascinating way, alternating small sets with several set pieces on the sleazy streets of New York, New York. Then it returns to a claustrophobic massage parlor for its fiery climax. Along the way, the film delivers comedy, action, students, gore, and a killer reveal worthy of the finest giallo, not to mention a tour of Manhattan's expansive sex industry of massage parlors and public baths. It is hard to imagine anything Massage Parlor Murders! does not include. It even includes a kitchen sink in Detective Rizetti's apartment. (Perhaps this is what is meant by kitchen sink drama, a phrase I have never truly understood until viewing this film.) In any case, Massage Parlor Murders! is a cinematic classic that never fails to satisfy.