Invisible Strangler (1984) -**½

     In 1976, producer Earle Lyon, writer Arthur C. Pierce, and a team of uncredited directors including longtime television jobber John Florea made a horror-police procedural hybrid called The Astral Factor. It languished unreleased for two years before Seymour Borde & Associates agreed to take a chance on it as part of their push to expand beyond their established role as distributors of softcore pornography, then lasted one ignominious week in theaters before being resold into TV syndication. It deserved no better. But six years later, the product-hungry home video market gave the film a chance at redemption of a sort, and its creators did far more with the opportunity than anyone could have expected. Along with giving The Astral Factor a new and altogether more accurate title— Invisible Strangler— they reshot certain key scenes, deleted others, and restructured what remained so thoroughly that it played almost like a whole new picture. Invisible Strangler still isn’t good, but it’s markedly more coherent, more comprehensible, and more all-around watchable than The Astral Factor, with a snappier pace and a blessed reduction in odious comic relief into the bargain.

     The first eleven minutes of Invisible Strangler function as something like a statement of intent for the entire film, for although they comprise by far the longest unbroken stretch of newly-shot footage, the scenes serve exactly the same narrative purpose as their counterparts in The Astral Factor, and indeed hit most of the same story beats. Serial killer Roger Sands (Frank Ashmore, from Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes and Black Eye), having taught himself to become invisible via some mystical mind-over-matter technique, gets the drop on his cell block guard at the California State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and sashays out of the asylum totally unseen. This version even has its own take on the altercation between Sands and Miller, the inmate in the cell opposite his. (Note that although Al Tipay, who played Miller in The Astral Factor, is listed in Invisible Strangler’s credits, the role was actually recast for the reshoots. I have no idea who the new Miller might be, though, because no source that I’ve consulted so much as acknowledges the change. Can it be that I’m the first person on the entire internet who ever bothered to watch both cuts?!)

     You might justly ask, then, what was the point of replacing the original opening, but the new one is in fact much better thought-out than the old. This version introduces a considerable amount of vital back-story and premise information which The Astral Factor had counterproductively held in reserve until later in the film. It starts with the guard tossing Sands’s cell just to be a dick, and in doing so calls attention to the prisoner’s shelf of books on mysticism, spiritualism, and psychic phenomena. The spat between Sands and Miller is now provoked by the latter taunting the former by reading aloud a tabloid retrospective on his celebrity mother, Carlotta. (With Roger’s mom, we have the opposite problem from Miller. Her part, too, was recast, but since the new Carlotta is a performer of at least some consequence— Jo Anne Meredith, of The Psycho Lover and J.D.’s Revenge— she’s the one whom the online sources remember, and it’s the original actress whom I’m unable to identify.) Most importantly of all, Miller’s monologue inspires in Sands a succession of flashbacks establishing not only his mother’s cruel and neglectful treatment of him and her consequent death at his hands, but also the web of friendships linking Carlotta to the five other women whom Roger will spend the rest of the movie stalking and slaying.

     The broad contours of that campaign of murder are again the same in Invisible Strangler as they were in The Astral FactorA. Fashion model Darlene De Long (Sue Lyon, from the other Autopsy and the other other Crash) is the first victim, and her home-invasion killing draws official attention in the form of Detective Lieutenant Charles Barrett (Robert Foxworth, of The Questor Tapes and Transformers) and his partner, Holt (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’s Mark Slade). Their captain (Percy Rodrigues, from The Legend of Hillbilly John and Deadly Blessing) assigns them to protect professional dancer Roxanne Raymond (Renata Vaselle) and former Miss Galaxy Chris Hartmann (Elke Sommer, of Daniella by Night and The House of Exorcism) on the grounds that they, like Darlene De Long, testified against Sands, whose fingerprints were found in the dead woman’s apartment. And a close encounter with the killer at his mother’s old house leads the detectives to discover Roger’s enemies list, which includes the names of artist Colleen Hudson (Leslie Parrish, of Missile to the Moon and The Giant Spider Invasion) and actress Bambi Greer (Marianna Hill, from Messiah of Evil and Black Zoo) in addition to those of the targets they already knew about. Over the course of the investigation, the killer’s knack for evading capture under even the most unforgiving circumstances eventually causes Barrett to take seriously a strange tape played for him by Sands’s psychiatrist, Dr. Jacobs (Eddie Firestone, from Conquest of the Earth and Duel), in which a parapsychologist from the Psychic Research Institute (Alex Dreier, of Lady Cocoa and Sweet, Sweet Rachel) attributes superhuman abilities to Sands. But although Barrett himself becomes enough of a believer to plan his moves accordingly, he naturally can’t let on to his colleagues, his superiors, or even the women he’s charged with protecting that he suspects Sands of having more than a homicidal mania to separate him from the rest of humanity.

     Once again, however, it makes a surprisingly big difference how that familiar material is presented, especially with regard to the order and duration of the recycled scenes. Invisible Strangler is fully eleven minutes shorter than The Astral Factor, with most of the changes coming from abbreviations within sequences rather than from wholesale deletions. Not only does that quicken the overall pace, but because most of what got cut was comic relief tomfoolery from Detective Holt and Barrett’s nutball girlfriend, Candy (Stephanie Powers, from Someone Is Watching and Paper Man), it also markedly improves Invisible Strangler’s narrative discipline. Even more remarkable is the effect of trimming a single line of dialogue from the Darlene De Long murder sequence. In The Astral Factor, Sands had addressed De Long as “mother” before strangling her, hopelessly muddling the issue of the motive behind his post-escape killing spree. But with that line gone, Invisible Strangler is free to reinterpret Roger’s crimes as an uncomplicated quest for vengeance. Similarly, snipping out or replacing everything that shows Sands employing any paranormal power apart from invisibility renders the film more focused and intelligible. And although the two scenes that were straight-up removed were among my favorites in The Astral Factor (the sadistic murders of the night watchman and the beat cop, each of whom interrupts Sands while he’s plotting deviltry), the plain fact is that both were extraneous to everything but the final body count. Invisible Strangler is better off without them.

     Let’s not discount, either, the effect of the new title, especially in conjunction with the aforementioned removal of scenes depicting Sands with a broader repertoire of unusual abilities. The Astral Factor, as a title, sets up expectations which the filmmakers had seemingly no intention of ever meeting, but Invisible Strangler is exactly what it says on the package. And since Sands is no longer telekinetic in this cut, Invisible Strangler sidesteps as well the nagging question of why he employed that power so rarely and inconsistently.

     It’s the reordering of existing footage, however, together with the reshooting of old scenes to include new information, that accounts for the lion’s share of this cut’s superiority over the original. In retrospect, one of The Astral Factor’s less obvious but more significant weaknesses was its tendency to present crucial details about Sands and his background after the events that hinged on them, treating them as solutions to some aspect of a mystery that was never mysterious in the first place. My guess is that doing so was a side effect of the film’s grounding in the conventions of the police procedural, but because the very first shot of the picture told us that Sands was a lunatic, it generally wasn’t apparent in the moment that any given plot point had need for a rational explanation. Invisible Strangler, on the other hand, consistently shows the signposts first, so that we always understand what the killer is trying to accomplish and why. The longer and more detailed flashback about life and death with Carlotta comes before Roger has even sprung himself from the asylum, as does the introduction of the women who will become his prey going forward. The detectives’ interview with Dr. Jacobs has been moved forward to become part of the initial setting up of the police investigation, whereas before it came after the rather long first meeting between Barrett and Chris Hartmann. The longer and more involved recording of Dr. Ulmer’s examination of Sands in the asylum lays much firmer groundwork for Barrett’s eventual acceptance of the killer’s power, and reshuffling the order of the murders lets Barrett reach that acceptance rather earlier in the game. In every way, Invisible Strangler is a tighter and more internally logical movie than The Astral Factor despite all the limitations inherited from it, and it’s instructive how little truly new material was necessary in order to make it so.

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