Imagine you’re a young woman who recently graduated high school. You plan on moving to Los Angeles looking for your personal version of the American Dream. You hear of an amazing opportunity to model – a small agency willing to fly you to California where they’ll shop you around and find you work. After you get there, everything changes. You meet a man who acts real sweet. Then he takes you back to another man who’s a lot less nice. Suddenly you’re being told the modelling job fell through but you’ve still got to find a way to pay off your plane ticket, your room and board, so on. That’s when the two men who promised you a job offer a new solution: prostitution. Although you don’t realize it, you’re in the clutches of the Hillside Strangler – the media’s name for who was later discovered to be two serial killers, cousins Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi.
For five months between 1977 and 1978, Buono and Bianchi raped, tortured, and killed fifteen young women, dumping most of their bodies in the Hollywood Hills. 2004’s The Hillside Strangler depicts this period of time, from when Bianchi went to live with Buono in Los Angeles to the time of their eventual arrest. The movie isn’t anything to write home about but it excels in how it examines the deteriorating psychology of Buono and, specifically, Bianchi as they descended into a unstoppable cycle of murder and sexual violence against women during the late ‘70s.
The screenplay starts out with Bianchi (C. Thomas Howell) spying on women as a store security guard, one of the earliest incarnations of the multiple characters he played in his day to day life. Also, a precursor to later, more devious and psychotic behaviour involving manipulation, sexual extortion, rape and then, of course, murder. The Hillside Strangler also doesn’t neglect to show how desperate Bianchi was to become law enforcement. He had no power, so this was his hopeful way to gain some power and control in his own life. Over and over, he was rejected by police departments, usually on psychological grounds, but was also once rejected for giving questionable references.
Bianchi experienced a repeated failure to make it both in terms of a social life, as well as economically and professionally. In lieu of all that, Bianchi created an entire persona for himself – the man he wanted to be yet could never manage to become. His mother, Frances, gave an interview in 1994 saying Kenneth was a pathological liar, to the point he was a master, even as a young boy, at gaslighting others. Obviously this youthful tendency developed into a sinister talent later in his adult life.
A significant scene in the movie involves Bianchi bringing his girlfriend to hang out with cousin Angelo (Nicholas Turturro), which backfires after the woman clashes with the bachelor lifestyle of Buono. These uncomfortable moments epitomise the socially inept nature of Bianchi’s personality. He was never comfortable being himself, only playing other parts and identities than his own. This is why posing as a talent agent was just another character for him to play.
Buono and Bianchi took advantage of an ever emerging industry in the fashion world: exploiting the trust of young women looking to build modelling careers. California in particular was awash with girls seeking the American (or, rather, Hollywood) Dream, fantasizing that some photographer or agent might scoop them out of obscurity and deliver them into the limelight. After the two men pimped out the girls, they later encountered trouble because of a list of johns given to them by a sex worker they knew. This incident is generally regarded as what triggered Bianchi and Buono to begin their murder spree, in a twisted form of symbolic revenge against the women who screwed them over. In reality, this was merely a catalyst for the cousins to exert their violent misogyny on the unsuspecting women of L.A.
There’s a powerlessness about Bianchi that comes across in the movie. It’s more than obvious Buono is the dominant partner of the pair. Certain scenes such as when Angelo insists that he “goes first” while committing a rape, all but shoving his cousin out of the room, illustrate the power imbalance even between two serial killers. This is not just a morbidly interesting fact about these two men, it’s a general fact about killers who work in pairs: one is more often than not the alpha, whereas the other mostly acts as a devoted follower rather than a partner in crime. What’s equally as fascinating is seeing the way these serial killers interact with other people outside of the duo dynamic.
Aside from the main portrayals of Bianchi and Buono, the screenplay features a couple characters who aid in building a psychological portrait of both men. Lin Shaye appears briefly as Angelo’s mother, Jenny, and it’s a telling scene. The interaction between Jenny and Angelo all but sums up the problems he has with women. She yells at him about abusing his former stepdaughter. She also starts crying, lamenting her son can’t even wipe his own ass properly. Within the few minutes Jenny is on-screen, she conveys a lot of information. Except it isn’t a dump of exposition, it’s done casually enough that the whole conversation doesn’t feel forced. The scene works as the movie’s clearest window into Buono’s psychological state of mind.
The other interesting inclusion – in terms of Bianchi’s story – is the character of Christina Chavez. She’s based on Veronica Compton, who lured another woman to a hotel room in an attempt to strangle her so that the police would believe the Hillside Strangler was still loose while Bianchi was in custody. The woman is depicted as having been known to Bianchi for a long while before he was arrested. In reality, Veronica met the serial killer only after he was in prison, and then they began a relationship culminating in her attempts at a copycat murder. Even though the events were manipulated and the time was altered to make it a more compelling subplot for the film’s story, the inclusion of Veronica’s character is interesting on its own because it shows Bianchi as unrepentant. Some killers accept what they’ve done and most never try to escape. It’s noteworthy Bianchi actively engaged in a plot with a woman to kill yet another victim, all to enable a legal – and simultaneously highly illegal – escape for himself. Not just that, it also serves as a chilling punctuation to the story’s finale before the credits roll.
Not considering its other numerous faults, the movie’s biggest mistake is its overuse of nudity. Women don’t need to button up to be feminist, and a movie doesn’t have to shy away from nudity, but a movie about serial killers – even if they’re sexual sadists – has the option of whether to include scenes where naked women are being murdered. Here, the decision to faithfully recreate the dumped corpses is an especially ill-fated choice, considering most if not all of Bianchi and Buono’s victims were found in public and nude. Not to mention the numerous scenes depicting the assaults and murders, where the frame is filled with bare breasts and spread legs punctuated by the women’s sobs and tears. There’s a dearth of subtlety throughout, most evident in a scene which cuts from Angelo slicing turkey meat to a shot of him and Kenneth torturing a topless woman. It’s clear the point is to show the dehumanization to which these men subjected their victims; a literal representation of their view of women as meat. That’s the ultimate problem with the movie in general: too on the nose.
None of this is to say The Hillside Strangler is a good movie – it’s not. There’s a strong focus on the misogyny of Bianchi and Buono, which isn’t exactly exploited, neither is it entirely subtle. The movie didn’t really need its nude scenes, either. A serial killer movie is disturbing without explicit moments featuring naked women having their bodies assaulted. A movie such as this can run into trouble if it focuses too much on the wrong things. It still doesn’t reach the same heights of depravity as the real killers themselves; luckily the viewer isn’t subjected to the most hideous of the Hillside Strangler murders involving a fourteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old. All the same, the graphic fixation on dead, naked women is a huge detriment to this movie, crossing over the line into exploitation. The Hillside Strangler manages to take a hard look at the psychology of Bianchi, though not focusing as much on Buono, and ultimately its predilection with too many of the gruesome details throws the whole thing off track. If it weren’t for all the unneeded visceral horror and disturbing sexual content, this movie could’ve been much more effective, as the warped psychologies of the two men dubbed the Hillside Strangler don’t need more bells and whistles to send a shiver up any viewer’s spine.
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