Lori is a hard-luck barroom hooker who dreams of a better life, and her dream seems to come true when Jeff, a dashing and successful bachelor, sweeps her off her barstool and straight to the altar. Jeff, however, is not the man he appears to be...he's still living with his overbearing, manipulative mother, and she's none too pleased by her new daughter-in-law's presence. Worse yet, Jeff's a serial killer who's been blazing a gin-slicked trail of terror through Sin City, hitting all the sleaziest Vegas nightspots and exterminating every slutty, passed-out slag who crosses his path. He kills in a variety of gruesome ways, snipping a swatch of hair from each victim with a pair of giant ceremonial ribbon-cutting scissors. The implied reason for this psychosis is that his mother kept him dressed in a sissified Little Lord Fauntleroy getup with long hair until late in his childhood. Lori is perplexed by her new husband's nightly absence, and the fact that he still hasn't layed a hand on her...much to her mother-in-law's cruel amusement.
NO TEARS FOR THE DAMNED/LAS VEGAS STRANGLER is, centrally, just another tit window from pre-porn times, when more than just a mouse click was needed to get an eyeful of the female mystique. It's a bit more ambitious than the quotidian example of this extinct realm of cinema, putting forward a fairly coherent story with developed and passably limned characters. There's even a sliver of a sub-story involving an amorous gay piano player...it doesn't amount to anything, but it helps pad the film to feature length. Shorn of its naughty bits, it could pass as a sub-B mainstream thriller(in noting the choppy placement of mature content, it would seem that may, indeed, have been the intention). It's sort of a masculine counterpart to the grimy post-noir shocker ANGEL'S FLIGHT(1965), another sexed-up poverty-row forerunner to the modern "slasher" subgenre, but centered on a female serial killer. Additionally, it's a real treasure for anyone with a taste for kitsch midcentury interior furnishings...there's no fewer than three mini-bars in this flick!
I can't see anyone praising NO TEARS FOR THE DAMNED as a legitimately GOOD movie, but all things considered, it's a welcome addition to the recent windfall of rediscovered regional schlock which had long been feared lost, and it's got some great footage of iconic Vegas hotels which are no longer standing.
5/10.
