THE ZEBRA KILLER (1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Once more a streaming service has unearthed a specimen of "weird cinema" for all interested parties, one that, from what I've heard, has never received an American VHS or DVD release.

Slightly before he directed the well known "blaxploitation" film ABBY, grindhouse veteran William Girdler (a White guy, incidentally) made this obscure low-budget psycho-thriller, starring Austin (ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13) Stoker. The city of Louisville is plagued by a serial killer, but with a difference. The killer not only executes various victims with no known connection to one another, he uses different murder-methods each time. Stoker's character, Black police detective Frank Savage, is assigned to find the killer, alongside his cheery White partner. Strangely, even though the police captain is constantly raging about the need to end the threat, there's only one mention of the possibility of other cops pursuing the case, and nothing, least of all a task force, comes of it.

As I recall, the big reveal turns out to be the old "killing off the jurors who sentenced his father" trope, though Girdler, who also provided the script, doesn't spend much time on the murderer's motivations. Even less well explained is his peculiar disguise. Though the Zebra Killer (never called that in the film) is a White guy (James Carroll Pickett, who only acted in two other films, both directed by Girdler), during his crimes he dons blackface and a big Afro, and affects a stereotypical Black accent. To complicate things further, Zebra Killer holds a grudge against Savage. Zebra not only calls Savage to berate him with racist insults and to give him clues, he kidnaps the detective's girlfriend and threatens to kill and/or rape her. Zebra has one long scene where he rants at his captive about race relations, but nothing he says possesses any psychological heft, and he doesn't even try to assail her in any way. Did Girdler, without saying so and perhaps losing his grindhouse audience, want to imply Zebra had some negative compensation issues? The world will never know. But Zebra's attire and varied killing methods make him an uncanny psycho, even though none of the methods themselves are uncanny.

In contrast to the majority of American films in this subgenre, the script treats Zebra's racism as an unusual deviance. Savage gets along fine with his White partner, and they toss racial barbs at one another like a low-budget Culp and Cosby. Savage is a cool, laid-back hero even though it takes him a really long time to get anything done. Girdler shows a scene of Savage practicing karate at a dojo to foreground a later battle (though not a climactic one) in which Savage nearly beats the stuffing out of Zebra. Possibly Pickett simply didn't know how to do anything in a staged fight but fall down? This means that Girdler, after giving Savage several chances to overcome his opponent, then has to let Zebra whip out a hidden knife and wound the detective, so that the killer can escape for the final reckoning later.

It's an odd movie, which invokes racial tension verbally but barely shows any incidents. In fact, Savage even shakes down a Black guy purely on suspicion, which most blaxploitation heroes would never do. There's a comic scene in which the two detectives come across a pimp (familiar face D'Urville Martin) who's being beat up by five of his hookers. The cops' solution is to call a paddy wagon, pile the pimp and the hookers into the same van, and let the girls continue beating their victim. Nevertheless, I rate the film's mythicity as "fair" simply because it captures some of the sociological dynamics of the period.