Synopsis
When a psychotic killer escapes from an insane asylum and goes on a killing spree, the SWAT team is sent out to track him down.
Another Son of Sam
1977 Directed by Dave A. Adams
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Theatrical
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USA
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USA
01 Jan 1977
- Theatrical
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everytime i put on one of these 61 min exploitation/proto-slashers i think "ok this is only an hour long, i bet they'll get right to it" like a dumbass
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Like Frederick Friedel or Charles B. Pierce directing Halloween, everything about this southern-fried North Carolina proto-slasher is completely inexplicable, as the opening ten minutes of the sub-70 minute film are completely devoted to serial killer factoids, water-skiing, and a ballad by Johnny Charro. The seeds for at least half-a-dozen zonked out SOV slashers are all here, as shots constantly freeze mid-sentence, characters wander aimlessly through hallways in slo-mo, and we're left to wonder what the hell any of this has to do with either the Son of Sam or another Son of Sam. Like a Science Crazed or The Last Slumber Party, this lulls you into a narced out trance, the slowly circling camera making your eyes feel heavy as you hear the same Johnny Charro song play for the third time in an hour. Naturally, I loved it.
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"Another Son of Sam" is a 1977 low budget effort directed by Dave A. Adams. Completing the AGFA release of "The Zodiac Killer" (1971), this film is featured as the secondary title on the set, focusing on another prevalent killer or killings in US history, the Son of Sam killer. In similarity to the Zodiac killer, the Son of Sam Killer also communicated to the open public as a part of the theatrics of it all. In the review of similarity between this direct film and the film "The Zodiac Killer" and not the killers, there is a unique shared energy of the films being released before the finality of the crime spree itself. Different than the Zodiac Killer who…
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David Berkowitz actually communicating with dogs would make more sense than this movie.
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Incomprehensible exploitation cheapie that’s also an earnest attempt to cross over into the arthouse world - it feels like there’s a meaningless freeze frame every few minutes. One of those movies that unintentionally has a narcotic effect on the viewer by being both bland and sleazy at the same time. So yes... it’s cool.
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When I was younger, my friend was in College for Film. It was a two year course and at the end he had to film a short movie. He got me and another friend to be actors for it and we spent a couple of weeks (on and off) working on it. He spent a lot of time setting up shots and making sure the lighting was just right. He put thought into his movie.
The guy who made this movie didn't. Except where to put the next freeze frame. Then they lost their freeze frame notebook and decided to place them haphazardly throughout the movie. Middle of scene, end of scene, start of scene, it didn't really matter. It…
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In what could charitably be called an experimental crime film, Another Son of Sam follows the murderous exploits of "Harvey", an escaped mental patient who stalks a small North Carolina town almost entirely in first person, occasionally grabbing people and leaving small red stains on them before moving on. The local police, exemplified by Claude (Ross Dubuc), struggle to deal with the slow-moving threat...and actually barely seem capable of resolving a petty theft at the local college.
So, yeah, it's exactly like Son of Sam, except he almost never uses a gun, is receiving no canine encouragement and it's over in, like, a couple of hours.
One of the surest signs that you're dealing with a tightly plotted film is…
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I want to live in a city where every radio only ever plays “I Never Said Goodbye” by Johnny Charro and every pub hires Johnny Charro to lip-sync to the same and only song.
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Despite being the B-movie on AGFA's The Zodiac Killer, Another Son of Sam is arguably the better made movie... if you ignore the helter-skelter way the narrative randomly jumps around, not to mix metaphors with a different infamous killer. Impressively, it manages to be genuinely tense, primarily because you have no idea where or when it'll suddenly cut to something else.
This is definitely the opposite of "copaganda", because the local police force (and SWAT) could not be made out to look more incompetent. Same with the doctors, who hang up signs advising nurses to flush old medications down the toilet... because that's not getting into our water supply!
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I won't lie. I knew I would like this movie the second I saw the poster art, no, earlier than that - the second I saw the title. The heart wants what it wants... anyway, Another Son of Sam is a surprisingly visually pleasing, regional nonsense slasher about a guy who kills women obviously. There are a lot of mumbly awkward detectives and coeds hanging about their dorm rooms, waiting to get slashed.
It's kind of chill, just doing its thing, nothing too surprising happens. I was feeling the vibes. The ending was pretty cool too!
Praise be to TUBI for having so much cool shit to stream for free right now, makes getting thru each day so much nicer. -
100%, grade A grindhouse cheese. An escaped mental patient goes to a rural southern college and kills a bunch of people in a dorm. David Berkowitz Jr. this ain't.
It's predictably amateurish, with some odd touches: there's a Neil Diamond-like singer belting out an entire song in the first 10 minutes (a financial backer?), and scenes end in freeze frames before the dialog ends (saving money on film?). Also featuring the most incompetent SWAT team in history.
Bonus points for being a full-on slasher movie, beating the slasher craze by two or three years. It's awful, but since there's clearly no budget, and no one in front or behind the camera had any experience, it could have been much, much worse than awful. I kinda liked it.
Great to see movies from the American Genre Film Archives turn up on Turner Classic Movies!
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One of those films I cannot give a high rating but for the love of my live can't snub either. Unexpectedly distressing camera work (think John McNaughton's Henry) with a foreboding 80s slasher vibe. Too bad stuntman Dave Adams didn't direct anything else after this; he could've brought poliziotteschi or even giallo into the 80s.