VICTOR NOTORIOUS........A PRO-BUONO DEFENSE OF "THE STRANGLER"

The Strangler (1964)    First, a bit of fond remembrance for Victor Buono......

               Big, tall and heavy, he fully arrived in the 60's as a sort of modern update of Sydney Greenstreet and Laird Cregar.......but unlike them, he carved out his own unique role - as pouting man-babies tormented by their mothers......

                And unlike the portly, corpulent actors who came before him, he embraced the role Hollywood's Official Ham with unbridled joy.....like a 60's version of one of those puffed up 'thespians' who toured the Wild West, he happily popped up on talk shows in his persona as a bubbly gourmet raconteur......spouting poetry and jokes like an overly cultured Bacchus....

                  So his film and TV roles, befitting his public capering, gravitated toward tongue-in-cheek spoofs.....no one could hardly take him seriously as a villain......

                But early in his career, he could remind you what a truly gifted actor hid behind all the exaggerated posing.......

                  Leo Kroll, the titular "Strangler" is one of Buono's prize Man-Babies.......both sly and infantile, he's tyrannized by his hospitalized harpy mother (the wonderful Ellen Corby)......at home, Leo keeps a picture of his mother forever frozen in her unforgiving scowl......

                 And so he goes about his business of wringing girls' necks, but only after they've stripped down to their underwear.........(you get the feeling the whole underwear thing is more a fetish of director Burt Topper than it is of Leo......)

                Buono's work here is near perfect........subtle, creepy and craftily underplayed.....(the film favors him with huge close-ups and he knows precisely how to calibrate his performance in each of those shots....)

                 But the film.......not nearly anywhere up to his level. Director Topper kicks things off with a great eyeball-view of a murder victim.....blatantly copied from "The Spiral Staircase".  But that's the extent of his inspiration. ....

                The rest of the film settles down into B-movie torpor........it's like watching an episode of "Law And Order SVU"  filmed underwater.....in extreme slow motion.

                 Later on, the movie takes an early stab at serial killer profiling, although it has its clueless psychologist wrongly diagnose Leo as schizo, even though what the doc's describing is a textbook sociopath,,,,,,

                 You can check your texts and e-mails any time the film's dominated by its non-entity supporting cast...….but perk up whenever Victor Buono takes center stage. His quiet, controlled (and sometimes darkly humorous) strangler will chill even more than when score dabbles in some woo-woo Theramin electronics.....

                   3 stars (***) but that's solely for the one-of-a-kind Buono……..a larger than life actor who turns playing a literal pain-in-the-neck into his own art form...…..