The Hooker Cult Murders 2004 Horror Movie Review

Why does this exist?

I’ll tell you.

It exists as a Canadian take on the huge hit, “Klute”, which starred Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda.

That flick was bad enough. This one tells you where it’s headed right off the bat with a screechy, decades out-of-fashion, theme song sung by the star, Karen Black against someone providing acoustic guitar.

She does 3 different soundtrack numbers in this film, one worse than the next.

Christopher Plummer, supposedly a world-weary, jaded police detective (we know this because the villain tells us so at the end of the movie. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had a clue), sleepwalks throughout.

He has very little actual dialogue. Very few of the actors have anything meaningful to say and yet, the film feels talky.

It drags and drags and drags.

Director Harvey Hart switches the timeline back and forth with abandon. No devices are used to let you know you’re either in the past or in the future. One second someone is dead, the next, they’re in a bar having a drink. This was, I suppose, made like that to be suspenseful, but the pacing just wore me out.

And I must say, the “Carefully Re-Mastered For Best Possible Picture Quality” claim on the back of the case, is a bunch of crap, too.

I have no idea what this looked like in the theater on opening day, but the dark, grainy, choppily edited, murky mess St. Clair Vision has produced here, has not been touched by a living soul.

It is quite obviously a sloppy dub from an old public domain VHS tape. Shame on them, even at the cheap price they’re charging.

It’s possible that this would have been a completely different experience if I’d actually seen a watchable print. Nothing can help the sluggish, silly script, dull acting and anti-climactic ending, though.

Junk is junk.

Watch it only if you’re interested in movies from the 70’s on an anthropological level, because as entertainment, this clearly misses the mark.