Vietnam vet, amateur bodybuilder, and talented porno-photographer Kirk Smith is a crazed killer who stalks the streets of Los Angeles, strangles young women in lurid fashion, and sexually abuses their dead bodies.

Hatcher and McCabe show the photographs to the local pornography dealer Sam Gluckman; he identifies them as the work of Kirk Smith, who has provided him with high-quality pornographic pictures in the past.

The film ends with a shot of Smith's bullet-ridden floating body as McCabe snarls, "Adios, creep!"

[3] Robert Hammer drew inspiration from a wave of murders by strangulation that occurred in 1978 in Los Angeles; the film working title was Hollywood Strangler.

[12] Vincent Canby in The New York Times felt the film was "a nasty, dimly executed exploitation movie about a psychopathic fellow who roams around Los Angeles strangling women with stockings and then mutilating their bodies.

The performances are terrible, as are the writing and the direction…"[13] Paul Taylor in Time Out magazine called it "a routinely mindless sickie".

[16] However, the review further observed that Nicholas Worth's performance as the lunatic killer was "so outrageously over-the-top, and so bizarrely eccentric as to be horribly fascinating and the final line of 'Adios, creep', delivered over a shot of Worth's corpse floating in a swimming pool, is curiously resonant".

[17] The websites Letterboxd, The Grindhouse Database and The Spinning Image list this movie as belonging to the vetsploitation subgenre.