The budget is way down in Herschell Gordon Lewis/Barry Mahon/used Volkswagen territory. The writing and directing are similarly rough and the acting performances are full of howlers. Still, this is one of the strangest true crime films of its time because it takes a contemporary, still-at-large serial killer as its explicit subject. They don’t hide it. The killings are straight from the original reports. We also get a taste of the Zodiac’s real-life letters to the San Francisco Chronicle. Films back then didn’t tend to do things like that with a subject like this, unless a few decades were long passed. Psycho came from Ed Gein, Targets tackled the Charles Whitman shootings and Badlands dealt with the Starkweather-Fugate killing spree, but all in disguise, however thin. Anything less would have been considered tasteless.
However, for The Zodiac Killer in 1971, a year when the Zodiac was still mailing out letters, first-time director Tom Hanson and a cast and crew all at the same bottom rung of the film biz ladder didn’t care about any of that. Did this movie play in San Francisco? Did it do well in San Francisco? Did the Zodiac Killer, whose identity is still unknown to this day, himself see it? Was he annoyed?
You see, the really weird twist here is that this film gives the Zodiac Killer a face, a name, a job, a back story and a pagan altar at which he gets deep with his mystical motivation (the real-life Zodiac said in his letters that his victims would all be his slaves later in the afterlife). Director Hanson drops the police procedural midway into the film to put the killer under his cheap microscope. And it’s pretty sad. The Zodiac Killer is kind of a dweeb. He loves rabbits, but is bad with people. His only friend is a sad sack divorced truck driver tortured by child support payments, an abrasive ex-wife and terminal loneliness. He ain’t invited to my President’s Day party.
This isn’t a good movie (David Fincher likely did not consider this to be competition when he made his Zodiac twenty-five years later), but if the idea of it intrigues you at all, it’s worth seeing. This is a place to get low. Keep your expectations there while you’re at it.