Bleeding Skull’s Top 50 (July 7 – 13) The middle-brow champions of low-brow horror, Bleeding Skull has picked out some of their favorites from the SWV catalog. They neglected to put I Drink Your Blood or EEGAH! on the list, but I think I can forgive them since they included Ship of Monsters. 

Zodiac Killer is just as much an attempt to catch the never arrested real-life Zodiac Killer as it was to cash in as an exploitation movie.

On its opening night on April 7, 1971 at the RKO Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, audience members were asked to write their answers to the question “I think the Zodiac kills because …” and drop their entries into a large box. They were told that they could win a Kawasaki motorcycle, but they were also having their handwriting being tested by experts against the actual handwriting of the killer. Members of the cast were waiting to grab and interrogate anyone whose penmanship was suspect.

I don’t see David Fincher doing that.

In the first half of this movie, Grover (Bob Jones) bemoans his life. He’s a drunk and balding tow truck driver who can’t even see his daughter whenever he wants to. He takes her hostage and decides to tell the cops that he’s the Zodiac. She runs away and he gets the due process of being shot a whole bunch of times, his body falling into a swimming pool.

The truth, as shown in the second half, is that the Zodiac is Grover’s friend Jerry (Hal Reed). He’s a Satanist who hates humanity when he isn’t delivering their mail. He blames his crimes on the fact that his father is mentally ill, then his closing voiceover warns the audience that he will never been caught and that there are others just like him.

Along with Another Son of Sam, Zodiac Rapist and even Dirty Harry, the Zodiac was all over 70s cinema. This film’s director Tom Hanson — according to Mental Floss — “had found his niche as the owner of several Pizza Man franchises and a handful of Kentucky Fried Chicken locations.” He spent $13,000 of his money making this movie, which was less about making a good film and more about luring the Zodiac to the theater. He believes that he met the Zodiac at the urinal, when a man next to him said, “You know, real blood doesn’t come out like that.” As for his research, at least Hanson met with reporter Paul Avery, who also gave this quote that started some prints of this movie: “The motion picture you are about to see was conceived in June 1970. Its goal is not to win commercial awards but to create an “awareness of a present danger”, Zodiac is based on known facts. If some of the scenes, dialogue, and letters seem strange and unreal, remember – they happened. My life was threatened on October 28, 1970 by Zodiac. His victims have received no warnings. They were unsuspecting people like you.”

They may have missed the killer despite their plans, as co-writer Ray Cantrell was hiding inside a freezer to watch audience members. He nearly passed out and as he was being rescued, someone left a card that said, “I am the Zodiac, I was here.” No one was able to see who left that message.

There was a documentary called The Zodiac Killer Trap that discussed how Hanson spent years keeping up on the man who he met in the bathroom, who was still alive as of 2019.

As for the movie, it’s as good as $13,000 and amateur filmmaking will allow. It does have Doodles Weaver in an absolute freakout of a performance, ranting and snarling dialogue like “I like ’em plump and juicy and dumb!” A member of Spike Jones’s City Slickers band, a writer for Mad Magazine, the uncle of Sigourney Weaver and a frequent cameo and guest star actor, his full name was Winstead Sheffield Glenndenning Dixon Weaver. You’ll wonder how life led him to be in this movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.