Hollywood 90028 (1973)

By day, loner cameraman Mark (Christopher Augustine) shoots porn reels – not even proper porn movies – for the low-rent outfit of one Jobal (the impressively named Dick Glass). He’s clearly not happy with this state of affairs and dreams of less morally dubious work. When he’s not dreaming of his traumatic childhood, that is, which has caused some pretty major issues with women.

So by night, mark picks up women in bars, lets them take him home, and strangles them to death. Which doesn’t even seem to make him any happier, adding sad-sack-ism to his deadly misogyny.

Things change when he meets accidental porn actress Michele (Jeanette Dilger). They start on a courtship made less than ideal by the fact the audience knows about Mark’s more typical nightly endeavours, and Michele clearly sometimes catches a vibe from him that suggests more to her than “somewhat difficult guy”. Mark is curiously seriously about their relationship, though. Why, he even stops murdering women, in a somewhat ironic twist on monogamy. Of course, these things can’t last.

Christina Hornisher’s Hollywood 90028, unfortunately her only feature film, has long been underseen and undervalued but thanks to some champions in the film world it is now available in a restoration that look better than it will ever have looked when it hit the grindhouse circuit, and is now presented in environments sympathetic to a film that treats pretty typical early 70s grindhouse-style exploitation material with a low budget arthouse style and rather a lot of feminist subtext.

If you’re of the film school interpretative shape of mind, you’ll find much to think about here concerning the male gaze, the camera as a method of male domination, the problems with the porn industry; if you’re somewhat more bread and butter you might be astonished by Hornisher’s willingness to still treat her male serial killer as a complex human being without ever forgetting/or letting us forget, that he’s also a horrible one.

Obviously, this never tries to be a straightforward serial killer thriller, but there’s a heft and believable violence to the murders that keeps this a horror movie; just one where the violence is equalled by an ability to portray softness as well as paint a picture of a very specific part of Hollywood at a very specific point in time.

Visually, Hornisher often shows her background in experimental film, breaking up moments that feel verité through edits and dissolves that are anything but, very consciously tunnelling under the reality she has at first established so well. There is a slightly disorienting quality to this approach, as if time and place were slightly out of joint, or as if we were subtly pushed into sharing some of the wrongness that lurks in Mark.

Then, there’s that incredible final shot that belongs high up in the pantheon of final shots in (sort of) horror cinema finishing up a film that has been quite a revelation to me in an area of film history I thought I’d pretty thoroughly exhausted by now.