You really have to wonder when director Chuck Parello will get the serial killer theme out of his system.

After the largely redundant Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer: Part II and the gory biopic Ed Gein, he brings us The Hillside Strangler.

Without taking time out for a romantic comedy or even an urban drama, Chuck plunges straight back into the murky world of the mass murderer.

Or to be strictly correct, the two mass murderers who strangled, injected, smothered and raped their way through a death toll into double figures.

Security guard and wannabe cop Kenny (Thomas Howell) seemingly tires of his East Coast life of blow-up dolls and strip searching teenage shoplifters.

He heads out to LA, where his Phil Jupitus-lookalike cousin Angelo (Turturro) runs a marginal business re-upholstering cars.

Dipping their toes into the sordid waters of LA's sex entertainment industry, the cousins decide to set themselves up as pimps and violently con a couple of dimwitted gals to provide their services.

When one hooker gets them into trouble with a rival gang with a stolen list of Johns and their telephone numbers, Kenny and Angelo decide to vent their anger...on the local streetwalkers.

If you are going to dramatise the vicious crimes of a couple of sex-obsessed sleazeballs then the least the film-makers owe the victim's families is competent film-making.

This is totally inept. Ultimately, it's a voyeuristic wallowing in the sheer terror of fifteen young women who died at the hands of the killing cousins.

Context is restricted to the self-pitying whinges of Angelo at his dying trailer-trash mom over a bottle of Californian red.

Kenny, we learn, had a dominant mother and a disintegrating marriage to his nice-but-dim wife. Plenty of reason, then, to rape and strangle.

Not a movie that really adds to the sum total of human happiness.

Tim Evans