Grover (Bob Jones) is a truck driver who works for West Coast Terminal Co. He is divorced with one daughter. He is also a very bitter man blaming his lack of finances on his wife, Helen (Dion Marinkovich), and accusing her of keeping his daughter from him. Grover commiserates with the local letter carrier, Jerry (Hal Reed). The two men wallow in their misogyny whining about how their lives are miserable because of women. They make an appointment to meet later at a local bar and pick up some of those emasculating females. At the bar, Grover gets drunk and causes a scene.
In the meantime, people are being shot and or stabbed all over the city. A letter is sent to local newspapers from a man claiming to be the killer. He calls himself Zodiac. Grover goes over the deep end, gets drunk, and assaults his ex-wife. He then tries to kidnap his daughter only to be shot by police. During the melee Grover tells the police that he is Zodiac. The real Zodiac is pissed that Grover tried to take credit for his work.
The real Zodiac is actually Jerry the mailman. Mad that Grover tried to take his thunder, Zodiac calls the police to tell them that Grover is not the real killer. To prove it he gives them details of some of his crimes. Sergeant Pittman (Ray Lynch) and Officer Heller (Tom Pittman) are assigned to the Zodiac case. The police now have no suspects. Zodiac goes on a killing spree and begins taunting the police and the newspapers with cryptic messages. Running out of options, the police visit a psychic (Aaron Koslow), but he is not much help. Zodiac continues his spree.
The Zodiac Killer” was released in 1971 and was directed by Tom Hanson, who also produced the film. It is an American mystery thriller and a slasher film.
The real Zodiac was a serial killer that murdered at least five people in the San Francisco Bay area between December 1968 and October 1969. He was never caught. The unknown killer sent several coded messages to newspapers. In his messages he included four cryptograms that when deciphered were supposed to lead authorities to his real identity. Two of the cryptograms were eventually deciphered but two remain unsolved. Zodiac himself claimed to have killed 37 people. Zodiac also claimed that the victims were being “collected” to serve him as slaves in the afterlife.
Other than the case facts already known at the time, the movie’s entire back story of Zodiac was made up out of whole cloth by the filmmakers. Director and Producer Hanson premiered the film in 1971 at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, in the heart of where the murders happened just a couple years earlier. Hanson had attempted to draw Zodiac out thinking that he couldn’t resist seeing the film and hoping for a reaction that would reveal the killer. Hanson had a drop box placed in the lobby and gave patrons questionnaires asking for their opinions on the film and why they thought Zodiac killed. The handwriting on the questionnaires were analyzed in the hopes of matching one of the patrons handwriting to that found on the messages sent to the newspapers. No positive results came from the experiment.
The plan behind the film was far more interesting than the movie itself. The movie was, well, bad. The acting was horrible, and the screenplay was silly. The actual facts about the Zodiac killing were muddled and incidental to the ridiculous haphazard plot. The only thing it delivers is a testament to misogyny.