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The bane and fixation of the latter part of the 20th century has been the serial killer, wherein even the most garden variety killer has the potential to rise to superstar status and have at least one doppelg�nger on the silver screen. Notable examples of this phenomenon include death-row luminary Henry Lee Lucas and his counterparts in both HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and CONFESSIONS OF A SERIAL KILLER. Other faux-serial-celebrities include Richard Chase (the Vampire of Sacramento) in RAMPAGE, as well as the hybrids, Ed Gein-cum-Theodore Bundy (Hannibal) and Theodore Bundy-cum-Ed Gein-cum-Wayne Williams (Buffalo Bill), in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. America's Boogeyman Gein inspired not only the above, but also Tobe Hooper's superlative verite shocker TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, the little-seen, ultra low-budget gem DERANGED, and the Grand Dame of all Ed Gein imitators, Norman Bates, in PSYCHO.
HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER closely mirrors its true-life inspiration, but with a chillingly humane twist. Made on the cheap in Chicago, HENRY takes a dark, somber look at a couple of weeks in the life of an invisible man. Though McNaughton takes liberties with Lucas's real-life story, he sums up the emptiness and desperation of the serial killer better than any other film I've seen on the subject (and I've seen them all). Performances are excellent all around. Henry, as played by the vastly underrated Michael Rooker, is a soft-spoken, even gentle, young man making his way through the world only half-alive. If he didn't kill you, you'd take him home and make him a nice bowl of soup. But this abused child of a monstrous whore-mother responds poorly to kindness from strangers. It makes him uncomfortable. In fact, the only time he feels truly comfortable on this earth is when he's taking other people off of it. Henry's real-life counterpart, multiple murderer extraordinaire Henry Lee Lucas, has killed anywhere from 50 to 400 people, depending on who you believe (UPDATE: Just prior to facing the gas chamber, Lucas changed his story, claiming that he only killed one person: dear old mom.) Henry's first kill was the preteen with whom he lost his virginity, and his last was 14 year-old child bride, Becky -- a jarring event which, he says, ended his killing appetite for good.
Jonathan Demme's THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is the highest-end, biggest-hit serial killer movie around, but boiled down it's not about serial killers at all. It's a love story between Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter (read: between Everyperson and the spectre of the human predator). Hannibal Lecter is a distillation of Ed Gein (cannibal) and Theodore Bundy (who, while on death row, offered the FBI a psychological profile of the Green River Killer), but most of all, he gives the abstract concept of evil a face -- an attractive one, of course, because that's what evil is to Everyperson. A regular joe like the anti-hero of HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER won't do because Henry looks too much like us. The all-seeing, all-knowing Dark Lord is a figure that's been present in literature at least since man learned to communicate. SILENCE gives Old Scratch a 1980s update: Lucifer with a contemporary swagger, a death-row heartthob Satan. Lecter's psychological brilliance and power over anyone with whom he comes in contact destroys all but the most superficial resemblance he may have had to the real-life serial killers who pepper the 20th century (and late 19th). These are creatures of fear, not power, who are plagued by doubt rather than devious master plans. Lecter is the brightest star of serial killer movies because he reassures us that evil is OUT THERE instead of IN HERE.
William Friedkin's RAMPAGE takes place in a world in which any committer of any crime can string through the legal system and end up back on the streets, no matter how dangerous, deadly or deranged -- sound familiar? This is fiction? Chocolate factory worker Jeffrey Dahmer's free-fall into an all-out meat factory is a case in point; Richard Chase's slow, foreseeable downward spiral into a murder spree is an even better one. Compared to SILENCE, RAMPAGE is an infomercial for the death penalty. In and out of institutions, Richard Chase's paranoid schizophrenia grew with age. His symptoms ranged from the relatively humdrum accusation that his parents were poisoning his food to the escalating red flag of his adopting local puppies and kittens for the purpose of drinking their blood. Chase holed himself up in his evil-smelling apartment, complained that his organs were shifting around in his body, among other deviant behaviors -- and never, never, did anyone ever suggest that maybe he'd be better off back in the hospital that had declared him sane and released him well before legal drinking age. Instead, Chase went on to brutally murder and partially cannibalize several people.
Friedkin's movie sticks to most of the facts of the case, concerning itself primarily with the murder trial. The sole detail Friedkin chooses to alter is a subversion of Hollywood's usual tactic. In life, Chase killed himself while in a hospital for the criminally insane by hoarding his meds and dying by O.D. More true-to-life is his fictional counterpart's fate. In RAMPAGE, the killer, played by Alex McArthur, is declared insane and eventually released back into the world.
Of the three movies reviewed here, the only one to achieve critical and boxoffice success was THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS which, as we all know, cleaned up at that popularity contest, the Academy Awards. But for my money, the unbeaten true-crime triumph is and remains HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, with RAMPAGE receiving honorable mention. Alas, the monster is alive. We just like it less when it wears a human face. Remember that next time you pony up your seven fifty to see a clever killer jumping through hoops. The truth is much less entertaining.
This and some of my other reviews were originally written for Eulogy Magazine, which will hopefully soon have a Web presence.
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