REVIEWED - THE HILLSIDE STRANGLER: In the recent film The Station Agent, we learned that there is a class of movie directly aimed at railway enthusiasts in which the camera merely follows the progress of a train along its journey, writes Donald Clarke

Boys (and they are always boys) too odd even to become trainspotters sometimes drift towards an interest in serial killers. One could regard the sequence of true crime pictures produced by Hamish McAlpine - Ed Gein, Ted Bundy and now The Hillside Strangler - as a ghoulish equivalent of The Station Agent's more uneventful, though perhaps less boring, train porn.

Telling the story of two cousins who butchered 15 women in 1970s LA, The Hillside Strangler details every aspect of a good half-dozen of those terrible crimes without invoking either the consciously banal naturalism of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or the merry Grand Guignol of the teen slasher genre. Disgusting, ugly and repetitive, The Hillside Strangler is so focussed on the murderers' hopes and desires that identification becomes inevitable - or it would if the film were a little better made.

Creepy hobbyists should find plenty to email each other about. But really . . . Eugh!