Crew
Director/Producer – Tom Hanson, Screenplay – Ray Cantrell & Manny Cardoza, Photography – Robert Birchall & Wilson Hong. Production Company – Adventure Productions, Inc..
Cast
Hal Reed (Jerry Quigley), Bob Jones (Grover McDurry), Ray Lynch (Sergeant Pittman), Tom Pittman (Officer Heller), Bertha Dahl (Mrs Crocker), Aaron Koslow (Arnold Koslo), Doodles Weaver (Doc), Norma Michaels (Gloria), Art Porrine (Paul), Jo Porrine (Sandy), George Fryette (Mr Quigley)
Plot
San Francisco is in the grip of a spate of killings. In a series of letters to newspaper written in a cryptic code, the killer gives details and nicknames themselves The Zodiac. As the killings continue, the police scour everywhere, dragging in possible suspects in their search for the identity of The Zodiac.
The Zodiac Killer is one of the most notorious serial killers in US history. The canonical Zodiac murders consist of five attacks between 1968 and 1969 in which five people were killed and two survived. There are other killings that may or may not be part of the case. The case is also marked by a series of cryptograms sent to the various newspapers where The Zodiac tells what he did and taunts the police. The Zodiac was never caught and speculation as to their identity has been of great fascination to the modern True Crime industry.
The story behind the making of The Zodiac Killer is often more fascinating than the film itself is. Director Tom Hanson had the idea of making the film with the intention of luring the real Zodiac. The film premiered at a theatre in San Francisco where the audiences were invited to fill out a form speculating about The Zodiac’s motivations in order to win a motorcycle. A person was hidden inside the ballot box to compare the writing on each submission form with samples of The Zodiac’s handwriting. The ruse however ended up being unsuccessful. There is a documentary The Zodiac Killer Trap (2020) about what happened.
For all that it is a document of the time made during the period when the Zodiac killings were active, The Zodiac Killer is rather dull. It has a very flat and dreary visual style, while director Tom Hanson never engages in terms of suspense. The soundtrack is bland pipe music. There is not really much to the police investigation as the film is locked in by the fact that the police themselves had no strong leads on any suspects at the time. At the point the film was made, all the canonical murders were over and done – although this is not something the filmmakers would not have known – but the Zodiac’s letters were still ongoing until 1974.
The film creates two fictional suspects – Bob Jones as a truck driver who likes to play at being a businessman and ladies’ man, and the withdrawn postman Hal Reed, who proves to be the killer according to the film. Both seem to have women issues – Jones has to deal with a nagging ex-wife and punches out a woman in a bar who pulls off his wig. We have a scene where Reed is taunted by an angry tenant at one apartment where he delivers mail, while at the end he pushes his father’s wheelchair down an incline outside the hospital.
The film makes occasional effort to replicate details of the Zodiac Killer case. There are roughly approximate replications of scenes like the shooting of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen in a car, and the shooting of taxi driver Paul Stine. There is a scene where the killer attacks a couple in a park by a river, which is supposed to approximate the Cecilia Ann Sheprd/Bryan Hartnell stabbing . There is a scene where the killer helps a woman with a car breakdown, which approximates the non-canonical incident with Kathleen Johns, although the film has her killed while in reality the Zodiac drove her around in his car before she found him creepy and fled. There are some scenes at the San Francisco Chronicle as the Zodiac’s cryptograms are received with the demand that they be printed, while the film is prefaced by an introduction from journalist Paul Avery who spent much time writing about the Zodiac investigation and received letters from the Zodiac.
Other Zodiac Killer films include: The Zebra Killer (1974) loosely based on the Zodiac case; the tv movie The Limbic Region (1996); The Zodiac (2005), an independent film that closely follows the facts of the case; and David Fincher’s high-profile Zodiac (2007). There was also Awakening the Zodiac (2017) showed The Zodiac still alive in the present, while the ghost of The Zodiac turned up in the Devil’s Night episode of American Horror Story: Hotel (2015). There was also Dirty Harry (1971), which had a Zodiac-modelled killer Scorpio, even a pornographic film exploiting the hysteria with Zodiac Killer/Zodiac Rapist (1972).
Trailer here
Full film available here