the sadist (1963)

AKA Profile of Terror. Sweet Baby Charlie.
"I have been hurt by others. And I will hurt them. I will make them suffer like I have suffered."
Ed, Carl and Doris, (Richard Alden, Don Russell and Helen Hovey), are on their way to Los Angeles but have some car trouble and have to pull into an old garage in the middle of nowhere to try and get the car fixed. At first the place seems deserted, but then they come across Charlie (Arch Hall Jr), an on the run psycho and his equally deranged girlfriend judy (Marilyn Manning).
A simple premise that is allowed to rack up the tension as the unfortunates have to deal with the whims of a deranged killer. Equally disturbing is his girlfriend who seems the more sadist of the duo, egging him on to further and more dramatic violence, and getting an obvious sexual thrill out of events. Where other films would have a hero standing up to the bully, here we have a more realistic reaction to the threat of death: panic, terror and fear. Cinematically the film lingers on the violence, sometimes fixating on the dominance of the gun and the terror it instills, at other points the deranged villains and their obvious delight at the fear they create. A film that deserves to be more widely known, but probably isn't in part due to the brutality and bleakness of the story.