The Greasy Strangler

And Prison Mattresses

There’s a certain poetry to the title “The Greasy Strangler”. I heard about this one and immediately thought, yes, whatever that is, I must see it. If you’re not on a similar wavelength, I’m afraid this movie won’t satisfy you. Because “The Greasy Strangler” as a title is as accurate as it gets.

The narrative centers on an abusive father and son relationship. Brayden is a middle-aged man who dreams of an audience for his daft science fiction narratives. In physicality, vocabulary and wardrobe, he appears unfinished. It’s why he’s stuck at home with his father Ronnie. Brayden is a beaten-down introvert with no social skills and no hopes for the future. It only makes sense that he’s essentially an underling to his father.

The elderly Ronnie, with his withered baseball-mitt face and short shorts, is the picture of confidence. With Brayden, he hosts walking tours in Los Angeles, the two of them spoiling tourists with a wealth of inside-baseball tales of the city’s disco scene, details that are largely made-up. Ronnie, brash and bold, openly flirts with the ladies on tours, which bothers Brayden because his mother, Ronnie’s wife, left them ages ago. Brayden somehow musters the energy to fall for one of the members of his walking tour, the sexually-aggressive Janet, and finally, his life is showing promise. Also, there’s a murderer going around. This lede has been buried.

Ronnie has a deep and abiding love of grease, so every night he covers himself in it and goes hunting. It’s not clear if these people are targeted, though a lot of Ronnie’s disgusting behavior is explained. Killing gives him even more irrational confidence, and he chases after Janet. Despite an initial reluctance, Janet is worn down by Ronnie’s aggression, and takes him to bed as well. So begins a love triangle that, yes, is openly misogynist, but also not guided by rhyme or reason. “The Greasy Strangler” isn’t in a rush to move the plot forward, let alone reveal a deeper meaning. There is a certain point where you have to abandon all sense and embrace the emotions: Ronnie’s sickened solitude, Janet’s insatiable need for male attention, and Brayden’s pathetic juvenile sadness.

This is a vulgar, deranged b-movie. Director Jim Hosking knows all the innovative new ways to sicken the viewer, so we spend an inordinate amount of time with Ronnie’s gray backhairs, or Brayden’s sagging man-breasts (and as Janet, Elizabeth De Razzo is a champ for how she surrendered her body to this role). The accents are aggressively arbitrary, which combines with the disorientation of being in this Los Angeles, an L.A. of dirty back-alleys and car washes that look like they wash nothing. “The Greasy Stranger” is gross. It deserves respect, because this is the type of grossness you’ve never before seen, the kind that would make your average John Waters or Adult Swim fan blanch. If you are not on the film’s wavelength at the start, it may never happen. And if you are onboard at the midway point, you’ll still not be prepared for the most cheerily nonsensical ending one could ever conjure up.

I won’t spoil it, but there is an amazing bit involving a bed in this film. It does give me a chance to discuss how one sleeps in prison. First of all, believe everything you read about sleeping in prison. You will NOT find peace unless you invest in earplugs, because you are surrounded by people all the time, many of whom have no interest in going to bed. Some men, understandably, can’t sleep. Others, likely encouraged by drugs and youth, want to stay up all night and sleep all day.

As I mentioned, in my first spot, I ended up in the mental health ward. There was a metal plank in my cell for a mattress, but I slept on the cold steel as a mattress was not forthcoming for several days. The mattresses are recycled, so sometimes you’ll get a new one. More than likely, it will be a mattress that has been previously cut open, probably to provide material for pillows – pillows are permitted in some prisons but not all, and I cannot tell you how excited I was to leave prison and reunite with pillows. Frequently you’ll have your own bunk. But there were times in the SHU where they’d house three people in a cell for two, the third man on a lumpen mattress on the dirty concrete floor. They often claim there’s no space for that third man. Protip: if there’s not enough space for your prisoners to sleep, maybe your plan to house prisoners just isn’t working. I still have nightmares of an awful mattress that feels like sleeping on a pile of rolled-up socks.