MASSAGE PARLOR MURDERS (1973)

 "HOW DANGEROUS CAN IT BE WHEN YOU GOT YOUR PANTS DOWN, RIGHT?" 

Some creep is going around to New York City massage parlors and killing the women who work there. OK, that's the plot out of the way, now let's get to the important stuff.  MASSAGE PARLOR MURDERS aka MASSAGE PARLOR HOOKERS is the one and only directorial effort by Alex Stevens and Chester Fox and we all owe them a debt of gratitude. 

Sleazy, incompetently-made and seemingly ad-libbed by all the actors, this film is one of the reasons we all love these kind of films!  Priceless alone for it's many, many shots of NYC in the early 1970's when the city was bankrupt and at it's most lowdown.  Gorgeous shots of what I assume are movie theater marquees along Times Square showing films like SERPICO and BLOOD OF DRACULA'S CASTLE, this is the kind of stuff 42nd Street Pete celebrated in his late, lamented magazine "Grindhouse Purgatory".  Much like BASKET CASE (which similarly provides us with those precious sites of a grimy, gritty and now gone forever NYC, MASSAGE PARLOR MURDERS really steeps you in it!  We're on Broadway now.  Oh look, there's actually Horn & Hardart's.  Oh look, the camera spots and old lady with a cane waddling away down the sidewalk - - and the camera lingers for a good long while on her.  Man, there's a glorious box of Ronzoni spaghetti on the counter in Rizotti's kitchen!  And this is a fantastic thing for genre fans like you and me.  The movie starts out sleazy and really good with a nebbish named Irving visiting a massage parlor for the very first time and awkwardly ponying up $20 to get the massage parlor girl to take her top off -- then nervously taking it on the lam when she offers to make him "feel a lot better". 

Irving is hilarious and sets the movie off how it means to continue:  silly, amateurish and wacky.  Next scene, a cop named Rizotti (George Spencer) is seen just having had his weekly sexy-time visit with "massage parlor hooker" Rosie (Kathy Everett aka Chris Jordan).  Both these actors have also appeared in soft-core/hard-core porn flicks so I guess they knoweth of what they act.  Soon another customer (not seen by the viewer) bashes Rosie's face into a mirror and kills her. 

Officer Rizotti and his partner Detective O'Mara (John Moser) are now on the case as one by one, massage parlor workers are offed.  Besides the scummy streets of New York circa 1973, we also are treated to the best in 1970's fashions, decor and wallpaper!  God, I love this stuff.  I'm not really sure if there was an actual script or not but the cast seems to have been given a vague outline of each scene and it sounds like they're ad-libbing their dialogue.  Far from a minus, this actually works wonders for the movie and leads the actors to be more free and loose on camera; this also lends a feeling of unpredictability to the scenes as we're never sure what anyone's going to say (which wouldn't be the case if they were following a typical script).  I dunno, this is just a guess but it seems like this is so.  And it also seems like there was never a take two! 

Again, all these things (for this movie, at least) are a big plus!  O'Mara goes to question Rosie's roommate Gwen (Sandra Peabody who was in LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT) and quickly falls in love with her.  Of course he does!  Love it!  Love it!  Seemingly random scenes keep happening such as the skinny-dipping pool party with about 50 sky-clad swingers and 1000 toy balloons floating in the indoor swimming pool.  Our detective O'Mara shows up and takes his clothes off (why I'm not sure and who cares, after all) and suddenly a woman in a back room starts screaming for help.  A (fully dressed) guy takes off running and O'Mara chases him into the street wearing only a small towel!  As the perp jumps in his (splendidly dented and rundown) car and takes off, O'Mara flags down a cab, tells the driver he's a police officer, knock the cab driver down in the street and takes his taxi.  What follows is a great 70's car chase that eventually takes place underneath the El (gee, where have I seen THAT in a movie before???). 

Another scene has Rizotti and O'Mara going to see a suspect (I forget why he's a suspect) played by horror host Brother Theodore.  This cameo is absolutely fried gold!  Theodore gets to spout some of his dialogue from his vinyl LP which he used as an introduction to telling the story of Edgar Allan Poe's Berenice (!) and my God is this a treasure as well.  After a little police brutality, Theodore threatens the cops by telling them to just come back another time and he'll tear them into 'odds and ends'.  I mean, just when you think this movie can't get any better, IT DOES!!!  There's a brief scene in a church where the priest sounds just like Prof. Julius Sumner Miller.  I mean, come on, I'm in heaven right now!  Of course, this movie also has the Tait-O-Meter going off at about 3 minutes in and there is also an abundance of 1970's topiary on display.  The moiders are very basically done but effective in a HGL-sorta way.  And as already raved about, there is more priceless dialogue than you can possibly memorize -- but you sure will want to memorize it all.  And then, after all this fried gold, the best ending of any movie ever made.  MASSAGE PARLOR MURDERS has no business being as magnificently entertaining as it is.  But, by gum, it IS!