• Directed by John Florea
• Written by Arthur C. Pierce
• Starring
  • Robert Foxworth
  • Stefanie Powers
  • Elke Sommers
  • Frank Ashmore

According to the sources I’ve rounded up, this little film was completed in 1976, then languished on the shelf before finally being released in 1981 to well-deserved apathy. Its main value now is simply as a demonstration of the thesis that, eventually, every damned movie ever made will be re-released on DVD, even one like this which no one in their right mind would want to watch.

This is the Invisible Strangler. Say hi to him now, ‘cuz you’re not gonna see him much from here on out.

We first meet the title character, Roger Sands, in his cell in the California State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Apparently the building is mislabeled, since such mental hospitals usually look more like, you know, hospitals: clean and antiseptic and such. This just looks like a cut-rate jail set. Roger, by the way, is played by Frank Ashmore; if you have the geek gene, you recognize him mainly from his role as Martin the good Visitor in the V miniseries (and if that gene is dominant, you don’t even mind admitting it). Across the hall, the other inmate (excuse me, “patient”) is displaying what may be the fastest appearance of a product placement logo of all time, the huge Marlboro ad on the back of the magazine he’s reading. The article in question is on Roger’s mother, who had been a major Hollywood star, and who died at Roger’s hands six years before. Roger is kind enough to provide us with flashbacks: Embarrassed by her unwed pregnancy, Mom had had the baby but kept him pretty much out of sight, in boarding schools and such, for his entire life, and unintentionally belittling him until, well…

But Roger has been spending his time in prison (whoops, mental hospital) well; he’s got a collection of books with titles like Yoga and You, The Hidden World Within, and How to Turn Yourself Invisible to Escape From Incarceration. Which is what he does: He concentrates and concentrates, and his hand disappears. He strips down and waits until the guard notices that he’s apparently not in his cell, then gives him a kick in the groin and high-tails it.

Costume party? Hazing incident? I dunno.

Immediately, he goes to the apartment of a young blonde fashion victim (Sue Lyon), follows her inside, waits until she undressed and gets in the bubble bath, and then, um, strangles her. At least, that’s what we’re supposed to believe. The fact that the girl clutches her throat with bubbly hands, thereby showing that there’s no way the murderer’s invisible hand are touching her, really destroys whatever suspension of disbelief I was bringing to the party.

Anyway. Lt. Barrett (Robert Foxworth) is called on the case, and it’s pretty easy to identify the killer — he left his fingerprints all over the place. It seems that this victim is one of five women whose testimony was crucial at his trial, so he’s going to be going after them, and –

Uh huh. She’s being “strangled” by an “invisible man.” Riiiiight.

Hold on just a second there, Clyde. In what way could their testimony have been of any damning nature, since not a one of them was an actual witness to the murder? At best, they were Roger’s mother’s friends, and so could have testified that Roger was a few bricks short, but come on. Roger’s own worst witness was himself; as amply demonstrated in this later murder, he has a tendency to leave his own fingerprints around the victims’ necks. He might as well go after the forensics examiner who lifted the prints from his mother’s corpse. (I can almost hear the writer and director furiously backpedal: “Yeah, but he’s crazy! Who knows why crazy people do what they do?”)

Maybe if we’d had some sort of case for alienation of affection — that Roger believes his mother’s friends had turned her against him, and he wants revenge — that might conceivably work. But it’s really hard to set up a motivation like that when Roger has no dialog. He hasn’t spoken up to this point, even in the flashbacks with his mother; he’ll end up having exactly one line, right at the end. Which explains why even Barrett’s wife shows up higher in the credits than Frank Ashmore.

“So — who chose the color scheme in here, anyway?”

Oh yes, Barrett’s wife Candy (Stefanie Powers). We’re going to focus on Barrett’s life for no apparent reason than for filler, which means we get to spend time with him and Candy. The problem here being that, well, she’s an airhead. And not even in a bubbly-blonde amusing way (she’s a brunette). No, she’s just kind of clueless and unintelligent and boring. All of Barrett’s interactions with her show him to be completely uninterested in her as a person; she must be really good in bed, is all I can say. Is there a point to this, maybe a subplot about the objectification of women that contrasts Roger and Barrett? Hell, no. Candy disappears finally a little after halfway through, once she’s filled enough footage to pad the flick out to feature length.

In the meantime, Barrett tries to locate and protect the other four women before Roger can get to them. Naturally, he doesn’t quite make it, so we get a few more murders in just as lackluster a style as the first one. (The only one with any creativity is that of a dancer, whom Roger kills on-stage during a dress rehearsal — everyone thinks it’s just part of the dance until her tongue starts hanging out.) The only one that Barrett beats the killer on is Chris Hartman (Elke Sommers), a lonely trophy wife in a huge house who doesn’t want to do what the police tell her just cuz, and who makes some extremely weak passes at Barrett. (So weak, in fact, that maybe they weren’t actually passes; they were just filler dialog and I, desperately seeking something — anything — interesting in this movie, filled in a nonexistant subtext.) Elke was once an über-babe, but she’s a little past her prime to be wearing such revealing outfits, and the fact that her haircut looks just like Rowdy Roddy Piper’s in Hell Comes to Frogtown doesn’t help any.

Aggh! My eyes! My EYES!!!

Along the way, Barrett visits Roger’s old house, where Roger is holed up in his old room. Barrett and his partner get vases thrown at them, find evidence that Roger’s been there — and then just kinda leave. No surveillance, no evidence-gathering, nothing. Barrett also pays a visit to the ESP Research Institute, where he gets to see an unrelated demonstration of psychokinesis, an off-handed show of apple levitation that a real-world researcher would crap himself to see. And then the Institute guy talks to Barrett all about astral projection, which has absolutely no bearing on the movie we’re actually watching, unless the unspoken assumption is that astral projection somehow turns your physical body invisible but leaves it substantial. My head hurts.

The special effects are distinctly not special; we get Roger’s initial fade-away, and a couple of doors closing and the like. Any time that the filmmakers would have had to hook a piano wire up to do an effect (like for taking a phone off the hook), they instead cut away to something else, then come back to the phone, mysteriously taken off the hook. Jeez, how can you make an invisible man movie if you’re too cheap to buy the damned piano wire?!

What’s the best I can say about this movie? Well… it ends. And so does this review.

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Some Notable Totables: