Night After Night After Night

A psycho switchblade killer is on the loose in sleazy late 60’s London The corpses of attractive females are stacking up and so a no-nonsense detective (Gilbert Wynne) tries to zero-in on the murderer. Is it a womanizing punk, a court clerk or someone else? “Night, After Night, After Night” (1969) meshes the mental illness elements of “Psycho” with the seedy Big City milieu of “Coogan’s Bluff,” just switched to the locale of London’s seedy underbelly. Like the future “The Confessional,” aka “House of Mortal Sin,” it casts suspicion on those in respectable authority positions. Blurbs about the flick describe the slayer as a “Jack the Ripper-type serial killer,” just in the modern day (the late 1960s, that is) yet, while sinister indeed, the murderer is nowhere close to being as bad as Jack the Ripper in regard to the grisly things he did to his victims’ bodies. The subtext is interesting: Day-to-day exposure to the most degenerate denizens of society may cause someone to break and seek to purge those undesirable elements, sort of like Marvel’s Foolkiller, who debuted 4.5 years later in Man-Thing 3-4. Linda Marlowe plays the detective’s winsome wife and stands out on the feminine front. On the other side of the gender spectrum, Donald Sumpter’s character is like the British precursor to Luther in the “The Warriors” ten years later (David Patrick Kelly) while the determined Wynne come across as England’s version of Leonard Nimoy. Although distasteful in some ways for obvious reasons, including the grungy London setting, this obscure flick has its points of interest, including a respectable place in slasher history, a decade before the genre exploded. It runs 1 hour, 28 minutes, and was shot in London. GRADE: B-

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Wuchak