City in Panic (1986)

I.

Toronto is being plagued by a series of murders that are seemingly targeting gay men. Reporting on the murders, radio talk-show host Dave Miller (Dave Adamson) and newspaper columnist Alex Ramsey (Peter Roberts) engage in a public feud on the best way to calm the city and catch the killer. Meanwhile, the police are blundering in the dark.

City in Panic is one of the many direct-to-video slasher films churned out in the 80s and 90s. (To be fair, the film may have had a 1986 Canadian theatrical release, but it went direct-to-video in the US in 1987.) It stands out, however, as something different – and possibly one to offend all tastes – and much smarter and more compelling in the plotting and the presentation than the typical slasher video.

Based on the disappearance of 14 men from Toronto’s Gay Village between 1975 and 1978 (only seven of the murders were ever solved), City in Panic revisits these mean streets for a fictionalized set of murders that takes place during the very real rise of the AIDS crisis in the gay community.

Director Robert Bouvier enhances the obviously thread-bare production by borrowing liberally from better known sources: from the voiceover narration of the TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-75) (one of the film’s working titles was The Fear Stalker) to the many references to Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Brief, though cursory, nods to Dressed to Kill and Cruising (both 1980) are also apparent as well.

In the gruesome murders, one also recognizes the trauma, revenge and insanity that fueled any number of giallo films, notably What Have You Done to Solange (1972), Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972), The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972) and the equally sleazy Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975).

II.

City in Panic has much in common with those Italian thrillers, from the black-gloved killer to the clueless cops (all low-rent actors who get far more screen time than their roles require or their performances deserve). Another giallo trope present here is the murderer’s motivation of revenge for an earlier traumatic event: in this case, the death or destruction of a loved one.

Here, the loved one is a child, lost by its stillborn death – revealed much too late in the film to elicit much sympathy for any of the characters involved. The reason behind both the child’s death and the choice of the murderer’s victims presents viewers with City in Panic’s most audacious plot device and, arguably, its most transgressive twist: the all-too real horrors of AIDS (another working title for the film was The AIDS Murders).

AIDS was effectively a “death sentence” when City in Panic was made. Moreover, AIDS victims – particularly gay men – were thought to be out there infecting others (gasp! Non-gays!) too. For many, it may seem distasteful, disrespectful or downright repellent to use what was then routinely referred to as the “gay disease” as a mere plot device. To allegorize AIDS – as John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) or David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) were often read – was probably preferred.

But this isn’t so much a film about AIDS in the way, say, Buddies or An Early Frost (both 1985) are. City in Panic aims not to “normalize” the frightening or unknown as much as it shows how badly people can react to it. Indeed, the public feud between the two media figures at the heart of the film symbolizes the struggle: which of the two wolves win? The one you feed. (If you listen to all the radio callers throughout the film, it’s easy to figure out which wolf has the winning voice.)

Who really wins the propaganda war in City in Panic is hard to say. Even though the murderer is stopped by the film’s end (unlike Cruising), there is clearly no consensus on whether compassion or revenge wins the day. But the film’s sole voice of reason gets the last word. For a horror film – and, let’s face it, a cheap exploitation film at that – to have such a strong underlying message (not the least bit preachy either) makes this Canadian film’s highly-contentious plot device neither wholly objectionable nor entirely unreasonable.

III.

The murder set-pieces are mostly well-staged, if not more than a little implausible. The first murder we see – actually the plot’s third murder, or as the voiceover informs us, “For me, it began on Saturday, day three,” indicating that several murders (including the later “lovers in bed”) were either never filmed or edited out – baldly restages Psycho’s shower sequence.

Here, though, not only is the victim a man (a plot point likely to turn off heterosexual male viewers), but Bouvier’s appropriation of Hitchcock unexpectedly elicits the same sympathy toward the man that the Master brought to Marion Crane’s sudden murder.

Despite his brief screen time – a fraction of the time Hitchcock gave to Janet Leigh in the earlier film – the handsome actor invests a surfeit of emotion into his ultimately thankless role. He exits Toronto’s notorious “Men Only” Oak Leaf Steam Bath, clearly upset by whatever has or hasn’t happened inside. Curiously, the man sports a ring on the third finger of his right hand, possibly inferring he is already in a committed gay relationship; yet when he arrives at his apartment no one is there to greet him.

Even more curious is that when he takes off his clothes to shower, he removes a formerly unseen red handkerchief: gay code for an interest in fisting. That he removes the hanky from around his neck suggests that he did, in fact, have sex at the bath house that was either unsatisfactory or caused some sort of revulsion in him (or he hid it before something could happen).

The scene’s strangely obvious editing makes it look as though he steps in to the shower while still wearing his leather pants. But the way the man greets the warmth of the water gives a sense of the physical and moral cleaning and cleansing Marion Crane revealed to us in her shower. Until, that is, he is relieved of his miseries by a knife-wielding maniac – who seems to have broken into the man’s apartment with considerable ease.

Had the film’s “lost child” explanation been delivered earlier on – one of the film’s many plot gaffes – the man’s murder, reversing the sex of Psycho’s murder of Marion, would give us a clue as to who the murderer is here (think Mother). But we don’t need it, at least not yet. The murderer’s identity is signaled very early on by a poster for Fritz Lang’s film M - but well before we know the significance of “M,” the killer’s nom-de-murder.

The murderer earns this sobriquet by scrawling the letter “M” into the bodies of the victims, something the film doesn’t bother to bring out until the third on-screen murder. In this scene, one that sort of apes American Gigolo (1980), we see the killer’s mirror-shaded face. Even upside down, it’s easy to figure out at least the sex of the killer.

A clue as to the killer’s motivation is also proposed early on by one of the dim-witted cops who, in recalling Fritz Lang’s film, is savvy enough to determine that the murderer “is branding them like criminals” but not smart enough to figure out why.

Perhaps the film’s most audacious – and vicious – murder is the glory-hole sequence, where a horny security guard hooks up with the wrong stranger, savagely losing his manhood before horribly losing his life. The especially agonizing scene is the film’s bloodiest and appears, in direct contrast to Dario Argento’s arty set-pieces, as messy, nasty and revolting as a real-life knife attack must be. Remarkably, once this sequence becomes a crime scene, it is the photo-taking coroner (?) who alerts the police that the victim had AIDS – well before any blood tests are performed.

One could wish the overly-talky script would have had one of the careless cops ask, “Oh, and how do you know?”

Arguably, this points out one of the film’s weakest links: very late in the game, a doctor alerts the police that all the victims did, in fact, have AIDS. And how does he know? Well, because all of the victims were, wait for it, his patients.

It takes nine killings (!) before this balmy doctor – who astonishingly keeps what he calls his “AIDS files,” literally nothing more than a sheet of paper with a list of names (which raises more than a few questions) – realizes that all the victims were his own patients. And the cops never arrest him or consider him a suspect. To be fair, though, the cops never consider anybody here to be a suspect.

So much for overpraising whatever this film was trying to accomplish.

IV.

The denouement, however surprisingly, makes the attractive yet hyper-heterosexual Dave the film’s “final girl.” This, of course, does nothing to neuter or feminize him. He’s already too desired and self-confident, much like another DJ Dave in Play Misty for Me (1971), to be much deterred.

(Other than the briefly-seen stripper, “He-Man,” Dave is the film’s single most objectified body. If that is meant to appeal to the homosexual audience, then why make him such an obvious shit? Does the film propose that homosexuals are attracted to pretty assholes? Probably. That actually makes sense. But it is demoralizing.)

It also places Dave’s ultimate survival in an incongruous and boringly-lit Bava-esque or Klute-ish warehouse of mannequins; suggesting, of course, that the killer doesn’t see his or her victims as human, but as dolls; or, rather, poisonous, sexually-needy toys.

But let’s face it: Dave is as pretty as a doll and he talks a good game – much, much, much is made of “responsibility” throughout the film, even though Dave displays very little that is responsible in his personal life (he’s an especially shitty friend to the killer) – but the crazy killer sees him exactly for what he is: a selfish opportunist.

The film shows Dave to be the voice of reason and responsibility, but perversely demonstrates that he is anything but authentic. He is a hothead with opinions…exactly like his opponent, the fear-wagering Alex. Dave, as a body, is seemingly more desirable than the over-the-top Addison DeWitt wannabe Alex. But it’s easy to see (or hear) – especially in 2022 – how Dave is compassion’s weak sister to Alex’s ugly and more popular Tucker Carlson-like fiction-based fear-mongerer.

Kudos for not making Dave a saint. But shame for making Dave little better than his rival, Alex, who is, by all accounts, not much better than an opiniated creep. Ultimately, City in Panic reveals, however subversively, that you don’t need to be infected to be diseased. Sadly, and amazingly, this makes the film more relevant than ever.