Written and Directed by James Landis
Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond
Starring
Arch Hall, Jr. as Charlie Tibbs (sadist)
Marilyn Manning as Judy (accomplice)
Richard Alden as Ed (teacher)
Helen Hovey as Doris (teacher)
Don Russell as Carl (teacher)
. . .
"School's out, teacher."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Three high school teachers are on their way to a baseball game in Los Angeles when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, they've crapped out right by a gas station/junkyard/mechanic's garage. But the mechanics are not around. You know who is around? A meaty faced maniac with a .45 automatic in his fist, a knife in his pocket, and an underaged girlfriend/accomplice in tow. The maniac, at first, seems to be an armed bandit type looking to hijack a ride out of the sticks, but it's actually the terror he inflicts on people that winds his clock. The maniac takes the three teachers hostage, venting his bile towards smarty-pants types that he perceives as looking down on him, playing mind games to rub it all in, and all the while his girlfriend acts as a grotesque mascot to cheer on the torture.
The Sadist is a horror movie whipped up from real life ingredients. It's inspired by the real world Starkweather-Fugate killing spree. The characters are all human beings-not Avengers, Jedi, or kaiju. The evil within this story emanates from a pair of human brains and not from the machinations of non-existent entities such as God, Satan, Pazuzu, the Dark Side of the Force, vengeful ghosts, or extraterrestrial body snatchers. The sadistic pair who drive the action are dangerous, even formidable, but they are neither immortal nor particularly brilliant. We are not dealing here with lumbering slasher villains who are seemingly able to teleport to the perfect spot to kill people when the moment just feels right. The killers and the victims in The Sadist are all bound to the earth, caged within space-time just like the rest of us, no exceptions, no substitutions, everybody has to eat from the same menu.
The location of The Sadist is as important as the characters. When the three teachers first arrive at the gas station, no one seems to be around, and so they investigate. They enter a house on the property to find an abandoned table set for breakfast but with the food barely touched. Something's wrong. The place seems to have been abandoned in a hurry. It's eerie. The teachers decide to scavenge parts from the lot of junkers. As the movie goes on it almost feels like a post-apocalyptic world, or maybe a prophecy of the decline of the American automotive industry. I found myself perceiving the teachers as well-intentioned yet delusional sleepwalkers through an inescapable wasteland of moral and industrial decay.
The Sadist has three distinct phases to it. Most of the dialogue happens in the first phase, whereas the second two are mostly action. I had no idea where it was going from moment to moment. The ending is over the top yet convincing. I would ultimately describe The Sadist as "naturalistic horror," since the cruelties it depicts clearly emanate from a world of physical cause and effect, no devils or angels or vengeful spirits required. Cars break down because parts inevitably wear out. Psychopathic behavior may very well be the output of a misfiring brain. Civilization is just a mirage conjured up by politics and marketing. Education is no protection against terror. Kings and emperors fall to assassination plots. A psychopathic maniac's reign of terror can't last forever. Everyone fucks up or wears out at some point. Even the Zodiac Killer most likely succumbed to old age. Call it "contingency horror" if you want to be cute about it.
I would say The Sadist makes for a good triple feature with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes-which are two other horror films that dispense with supernatural gimmicks. The Sadist is a black and white movie from the early 1960s, and therefore it is not as grisly as the 1970s style of horror, but it is no less hard-hearted.
The Sadist . . . the story of a maniac who measured out his victims' lifespans one Coke bottle at a time . . .
