Outside of Joe Dallesandro’s work with Paul Morrissey in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein and The Blood of Dracula, the exploitation films of the ’70s were not usually an advertisement for the male physique. 

Gay director Curtis Harrington, though, definitely cast a loving camera eye onto the young, very fit John Savage in 1973’s The Killing Kind. Often shirtless and/or running around in tiny swimming trunks, Savage’s unstable Terry Lambert is lingeringly obsessed over by his mother (Ann Sothern), a female roommate (Cindy Williams), an uptight neighbor (Luana Anders) and his former lawyer (Ruth Roman).

Often shrinking from their fevered gaze, Lambert’s hesitancy to their affections is truly understood in one mid-act scene. There, Sothern’s Thelma incestuously sneaks into the bathroom while he is showering and, giggling with coy abandon, takes many a steamy photo of him.

Harrington’s lens, meanwhile, is almost as lovingly obsessed with Savage’s rare masculine beauty as the plotline participants. This makes this offering the rare proto-slasher with plenty of sensuously photographed scenes of skin of the red blooded and increasingly bare variety – all reaching a head (or buttock as the case may be) with that daring wet, bathing shot.

Until the next time – SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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