heaves.
English documentarian Nick Broomfield raises the muck-encrusted rock of Americana and shines a light on the parasites that squirm beneath in Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. The key word in the title is selling, not serial killer, as most might expect, and those doing the selling are Arlene Pralle, a bottomfeeder disguised as a "good Christian woman" who adopts the killer of seven men, and Steve "Dr. Legal" Glazer, a fat, free-bearded Jerry Garcia wannabe in overtaxed denim, whom Pralle hires to be Wuornos's lawyer and Pralle's "agent." As Broomfield takes us into the true heart of trailer park darkness, a shocking drama unfolds.
Before coming up with the necessary cash to interview the "serial killer" Pralle and Glazer have been hawking, Broomfield tries to make do with a collection of disjointed reports from the local news (look for the goddess of yellow journalism, "A Current Affair"'s Maureen O'Boyle). Included is Wuornos's heartbreaking and graphic testimot her first and only trial in which she describes the brutal assaassault that led to what she called self defense and the judge called first degree murder. She's shown no mercy and sentenced to die in the electric chair, despite the fact that the man she murdered previously served ten years for attempted rape (a fact Wuornos's public defender never thought to bring up at trial). Watch this movie with someone you love.
The outlook for Wuornos goes from bad to worse when she drops her public defender in favor of "Dr. Legal," who convinces her that if she pleads no-contest in the remainder of her trials, the judge will sentence her more leniently. When this proves to be a blatant and sadly foreseeable lie (pleading guilty to murder carries a mandatory death sentence in Florida), Pralle raves triumphantly that her adopted daughter will be "with Jesus" that much sooner. We don't hear the truth behind the plan until Wuornos herself makes it sadly and harshly clear: by not telling her story on the stand (which would make it a matter of public record), Wuornos gives Pralle and Glazer the exclusive rights to sell it after her execution, a veritable eureka for these two parasites. Now, that's love!
The depth and dimensions of Wuornos's crimes are not the point of Broomfield's movie since no one thus far had bothered to weed out the truth in her case. Instead, we see her exploited by virtually everyone she trusts, from Pralle and Glazer to her former lover/possible accomplice Tyria Moore; we see a police force more interested in cash than justice and a legal system bent on blind revenge; and finally, in Wuornos, we witness the sad dignity bred by the naive belief that she should be treated as a human being. By the time Broomfield finally meets the so-called "serial killer," hers is the most human face we've seen so far.
Like all great tragedies, it's impossible to draw your eyes away from this appalling display of greed, incompetence and betrayal. Though sometimes choppy and technically imperfect, Broomfield makes a convincing case that there has been a gross miscarriage of justice in central Florida. Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer is chilling proof that you don't need a rubber suit to make a horror movie.
Jeffrey Dahmer: The Secret Life plays like the video diary of a killer as read by a hyper-pituitary Elmer Fudd ... "I should have gone with God... instead I killed the wabbit"... which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Made on the cheap (always admirable), the film recreates the details of those macabre events that were splashed between the covers of pseudo-highbrow magazines and lurid paperbacks alike and known by virtually every American, although many would rather die than admit it.
In the role of the chocolate factory worker with an uncontrollable appetite for boymeat, Dahmer look-alike and film producer Carl Crew wanders the landscape of the lonely, the forsaken country roads, city streets and gay bars in and around Milwaukee, WI (or budget stand-in Ventura, CA), searching for that special person who will make his life less desperate. We are presented with an unremitting blow-by-blow of Dahmer's 17 murders, all accompanied by that ever-present voice-over of agonized introspection and self-loathing which stretches the film's one hundred minutes into what feels like one whole disgusting week... "I couldn't stand to be alone, so I dwilled a hole in his wittle head and poured acid in it"... (Fudd again). Though the grim tone never lets up, a true highlight is watching obviously straight non-actors attempting to convey a sense of homosexual tenderness, and though their intentions are pure, one gets the feeling that the closest they've been to a gay man was while they were swinging a baseball bat at him.
For all the furor surrounding its production, The Secret Life is an innocuous attempt to demystify the monster, showing the day-to-day daze of a severly deranged everyman, and nowhere near as ethically questionable as that mainstream love letter to the serial killer god, "The Silence of the Lambs." One might guess that this is how Dahmer's own autobiography would read if he were ever inclined to write it, though Dahmer himself seems to understand how wrong such an undertaking would be. His parents, however, seem to have taken the cue from the likes of Arlene Pralle and Steve Glazer: father Lionel recently published his own meditation on how the monster was made, and his mother promises her book won't be far behind.
You made it all the way to the end! For that you get a bonus review!
This and some of my other reviews were originally written for Eulogy Magazine, which will hopefully soon have a Web presence.
heaves.