Massage Parlor Murders!

There is a killer stalking the massage parlors of Manhattan, and two New York cops are trying to find him. That’s the plot. It is not a plot that requires elaboration, and the movie doesn’t much bother with any.

It is not a good film, but it is sometimes an interesting one. The movie was shot on location in early-seventies New York, and the camera has a documentary’s hunger for the real thing. We see Times Square when it was dangerous. We see the waterfront. We see the parlors themselves, and the women who work in them, how they pass time between clients, and the way the money changes hands. An early scene follows a nervous customer through the full negotiation. He balks at the prices. He leaves. It is the funniest scene in the film, and I’m not sure anyone involved knew it was funny.

That’s the movie’s strange gift. It keeps stumbling into authenticity. There is a bacchanal “Health Club” that no production designer could have invented. The residential streets look like residential streets. When the film stops trying to be a film and just shows us the city, it becomes something worth watching.

Then it remembers it has a plot, and the trouble starts.

The acting ranges from adequate to unfortunate. The dialogue has no ear for how people actually talk, which would be forgivable if it had an ear for how people talk in movies, but it doesn’t manage that either. There is a car chase that begins with surprising competence and then runs out of footage, recycling the same close-up of a cab’s front tire until you start counting the repetitions.

The tragedy is the script has some good ideas. Two decades later, Se7en would take many of them and put them together in the right order with the right emphasis. By contrast, even at just eighty minutes, this film drags. I have said before that I can forgive bad acting, thin budgets, and flat lighting. I cannot forgive boring. Boring is the one thing a movie set in the massage parlors of 1973 Times Square has no excuse to be.