Turdsday Movie Review: Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders (2006)

I wasn't very impressed with the unscary, unfunny horror/comedy Club Dread. But shinning like a diamond in that pile of poo was the stunning Brittany Daniel. Naturally, after seeing Club Dread, I was keen to see more of Ms Daniel, so when I read that she had the lead role and appeared naked in the direct-to-video release Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders… well, let’s just say I rented this movie for all the wrong reasons.

Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders starts rather ominously: with an opening credit sequence that has no opening credits. The camera swirls around capturing glimpses of red light district neons before fading to black. The screen remains black for a while, before we get more swirling neons, and another fade to black, more swirling neons, more black, and so it goes on, like we’re supposed to be watching the opening credits… but there are none. Apparently Chris Fisher, the director of this train wreck, decided to move the credits to the end of the film, but it never occurred to him to get rid of the opening sequence designed to house them. Good grief.

From this bewildering opening onwards, the camera never stops moving in Rampage. It constantly, incessantly, swirls around and around and around and around the subjects it's filming. Watching this wretched film is like riding the Gravitron for an hour and a half. It took quite a great deal of self control for me to hold down my dinner while watching this spectacularly ill-conceived film.

For those interested in a plot synopsis, I think it was basically some derivative nonsense about a shrink (Brittany Daniel) and a serial killer (Clifton Collins Jr.), but I was just too distracted by my motion sickness to really take any of it in. According to people who know more about the real hillside strangler murder cases than I do, this film is wildly inaccurate.

Not even a naked Brittany Daniel could save this truly dreadful film.

Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders is exclusively available on DVD, but you could experience pretty much the same thing for less money if you simply held a picture of Brittany Daniel at arm’s length and gave yourself a wizzy dizz.