Crew
Director – Chris Fisher, Screenplay – Chris Fisher & Aaron Pope, Producers – Chris Fisher & Ash R. Shah, Photography – Eliot Rockett, Music – Ryan Beveridge, Production Design – Leslie Keel. Production Company – Silver Nitrate Entertainment.
Cast
Brittany Daniel (Samantha Stone), Clifton Collins, Jr. (Kenneth Bianchi), Lake Bell (Jillian Dunne), Bret Roberts (Jack), Tom Smith (Detective Bryant), Mike Hagerty (Detective Smith), Eddie Jemison (Kantor), Thomas Arana (Angelo Buono), Michelle Borth (Nicole)
Plot
Hollywood, 1978. Psychologist Samantha Stone is called in by the LAPD to consult on arrestee Kenneth Bianchi, who is a possible suspect in the Hillside Strangler murders that have been terrorising the area. Bianchi will not talk to police but Samantha sits down and connects with Kenneth, getting him to open up to her. He denies any responsibility for the killings but says he knows a bad person Steve who may be the killer. Samantha is successful in getting Kenneth released, believing him innocent. Kenneth then turns up at her home. Samantha and her boyfriend Jack enjoy a swinging lifestyle. After a girl they spend the night with is left murdered outside their house, the suspect is Kenneth. Samantha determines to interrogate Kenneth where she believes that Steve may be a split personality in his mind.
The Hillside Strangler was the name given to a series of serial killings that terrorised Los Angeles between 1977 and 1978. The Strangler was in actuality two ‘stranglers’ – cousins Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi. Bianchi had come to Los Angeles in 1975 where he and Buono had tried to set up a pimping operation. The two then started getting their thrills by abusing and then strangling women, leaving their naked, dead bodies out on hillsides around the area. One of the techniques they developed was to cruise neighbourhoods, pull women over by flashing fake badges, pretending to be undercover cops and then abducting them. The two were responsible for the murders of ten women before parting ways in mid-1978. Bianchi was arrested in early 1979 after he killed two girls on his own. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1983; Buono died in prison in 2002 but Bianchi is still alive.
Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders was the second film for director Chris Fisher who had previously made another true-life serial killer films with Nightstalker (2002). Subsequent to this, Fisher went on to direct S. Darko (2009), the much-reviled sequel to Donnie Darko (2001), and Meeting Evil (2012). All of Fisher’s subsequent work has been in tv as a producer and occasional director on shows such as Warehouse 13 (2009-14), Person of Interest (2011-6), The Magicians (2015-20), The Stand (2020-1) and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022- ).
The title Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders is somewhat of a misnomer in that the film is actually not about the Hillside Strangler murders so much as it is about the arrest and interrogation of Kenneth Bianchi, who was only one half of the duo. Angelo Buono rarely gets a look in – he appears briefly in some flashbacks and then during a scene later in the film where he is arrested. Rather than the actual murders, the film focuses on one specific incident in the case – where Bianchi was arrested and made a claim he was affected by split personality, before it was shown that he was faking it.
One major issue I have with Chris Fisher’s ventures into True Crime cinema is that he announces he is going to make a film based on a well-known case and then basically makes stuff up. This was particularly the case with Nightstalker. He adheres more to the facts here but also adds some sections that I have been unable to find any corroborating equivalent in the Hillside Strangler story – namely that Bianchi turned up at the house of the psychologist who treated him and then left the dead body of a woman outside her house. There is a detailed list of Bianchi’s victims by name and details here at Murderpedia and nothing that corresponds to such a murder among them. Fisher also has Bianchi arrested in 1978 in Hollywood near where he had been conducting the murders, whereas his actual arrest occurred in January 1979 in Bellingham, Washington. Moreover, the psychologist who interviewed him during which Bianchi made the split personality claims was a man not a woman.
One thing that is quite striking about Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders is the character of Brittany Daniel’s psychologist. She is introduced as leading an open and swinging lifestyle – this is something that the film just introduces as part of her character and uniquely passes no judgement on it. In almost any other film this would be seen as a sign of mental instability or her flirting with danger – she does break up with boyfriend Bret Roberts later in the show, but that is because he becomes an abusive asshole. All of this is portrayed with some frank casual sexuality that is more upfront than it is in most films.
The backbone of the film’s drama is Brittany Daniel’s interrogation of Bianchi. This more or less follows what happened in real life as far as I can ascertain. Omitted is that Bianchi’s assumption of a Split Personality came out not long after the hit tv mini-series Sybil (1976) popularised the topic. The dramatic thrust of the film is Brittany Daniel’s hypnotising and breaking through Bianchi’s lie to reveal him as a fraud. The major frustration of the film is that Fisher constantly shoots these sequences with his camera circling around the interrogation room or handheld following the participants in conversations, something that actually becomes visually distracting.
Brittany Daniel is okay in the role, however Clifton Collins, Jr., who also produces the film, makes for an average everyday Bianchi. By contrast, the Bianchi who comes through the criminal record was someone who was constantly trying to be someone he wasn’t – affecting the role of a psychologist to pick up women – and was smart enough to even fool some people, even adept enough to try and fake a split personality diagnosis, and yet was sufficiently weak-willed that he was able to be led by Buono. That makes for quite an interestingly complex character, but we see nothing of these shades in Collins’s performance.
Other film versions of the Hillside Strangler case include the tv movie The Case of the Hillside Stranglers (1989) with Billy Zane and Dennis Farina as Bianchi and Buono; the tv movie Supersleuth/The Hillside Stranglers (2001); and the hard-hitting film The Hillside Strangler (2004) with C. Thomas Howell as Bianchi and Nicholas Turturro as Buono.
Trailer here