Ted Bundy

"Ted Bundy" is definitely one of the most unpleasant viewing experiences I struggled myself through this year, but - then again - that is only logical since the actual Ted Bundy also was one of the most unpleasant persons to ever walk the planet's surface. And then still, I certainly don't have to complain about feeling unpleasant, because the (too) many people that crossed paths with Bundy, notably the victims and their families, truly must have gone through hell.

Between 2000 and 2009, there was a gigantic wave of true crime movies about US serial killers. Since horror cinema was going through a long non-fertile and uninspired period, this was a God's gift for many directors (*) because portraits of real serial killers don't much of a plot. All the notorious figures received one or even several biopics: Ed Gein, Aileen Wuornos, Zodiac Killer, John Wayne Gacy, BTK-killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, the Lonely Heart Killers. Ted Bundy could not be left out of this list, of course, but just as Bundy himself was an unusual killer who could not be classified within the known profiles, his biopic also can't be compared to all the routine and inferior films about other serial killers.

Why is "Ted Bundy" worth your time if you have the stomach for it? For starters because there was a multi-talented and promising (at the time, at least) director involved. Matthew Bright demonstrated, with the excellent "Freeway" and "Confessions of a Trick Baby", that he doesn't avoid sensitive taboo subjects like teen prostitution, drug addiction and child abuse. He was the ideal man to narrate the shocking but story of Bundy as raw, nihilistic, and disturbing as it really was.

Secondly, Matthew Bright was enormously "helped" by how absurd and unfathomable the facts in the case of Ted Bundy were. His story is one of those that simply must be factual because, if it had been written as fiction, people would claim it's totally implausible and unrealistic. How is it possible that Bundy made so many victims and remained under the radar for so long, even though his modus operandi and means of transportation were so conspicuous? How can a woman remain so loyal to a man who abuses and humiliates her, like Bundy did to Lee? How can it be that someone like Bundy escapes from jail twice or receives declarations of love from hundreds of women after his conviction? The explicit violence and cruelty in this film is often hard to look at, notably the scene in the cabin and the "submission fantasy", especially when realizing this freak and monster could do whatever he pleased for several years.

Be prepared to leave your lights on in order to sleep for at least three days after first viewing this morbidly fascinating account of mass-murdering, intelligent sociopath Ted Bundy and his descent into soul-less depravity. As a study in human nature gone wrong, this is a fascinating body of work. Particularly because this movie is, unfortunately, based on the facts, I am grateful that the viewer is not forced to witness Bundy's every demonic act, though little is actually left to mystery. Chilling, thought-provoking, disturbing, tragic, and well-made, this movie is an often shocking account of one cold-blooded monster's reign of terror.

The best part for this viewer is that the movie allows us to see Bundy sentenced to death.

A. Freimann

The story of Ted Bundy is a truly fascinating one. The movie "Ted Bundy" however, failed to portray many of the most interesting periods in his life. That, along with one glaring bit of unrealism and a complete lack of tastefulness kept me from enjoying this movie. Some fine acting performances make the film watchable, but only barely.

Ted Bundy had a troubling childhood where he discovered in his early teens that he was illegitimate and that the man who had acted his father was in fact not. This was a terrible shock to young Ted and he retreated into pulp fiction detective stories that were actually soft-core pornography. Between feeling he had been betrayed by his mother and the sexual arousal he got from these stories, his pathos began to form.

All the while, Ted Bundy got good grades and kept up appearances at school. He graduated high school and college without real difficulty. He became very politically active for the Republican party here in Seattle, and made some contacts that would later be horrified to learn to whom they had given allegiance, most notably a man named Ralph Munro who would become the Attorney General of the state of Washington.

It is at this point where the movie starts, and not with his political prowess, but rather with a relationship he had with a local woman. The film depicts him trying to have genuine human contact and showing real concern to this woman, two things of which this monster was completely incapable. It only briefly shows him in a social situation where he proves highly charismatic, and can get almost anyone to like him within a few moments, a trait necessary to his future endeavors.

These scenes in Seattle offer a technical quibble as they seem to have been shot in Pasadena or some other southern CA location. There are shots with the San Gabriel Mountains in the background and some dreadful scenes at a park where the background is very sparse. Here in Seattle, one would have to drive 100 miles or more to find a park with a hillside barren of trees in the background, but this does not discourage our film makers. The most aggravating part of this is the fact that there are many places in northern CA that could have been used for Seattle without running the cost up too much, but the producers of the film were evidently not concerned.

Most of the rest of the film is devoted to his killings, and even shows a couple with seemingly perverse pleasure. While they do show him as a monster, there is almost a sick humor to them that I found somewhat inappropriate. The film does well to show that one of his jail breaks was facilitated by his befriending a guard.

The film completely disregards one of the most fascinating periods of his life however; his trial. Ted Bundy proved to be a fairly adept attorney and was able to mount a creative defense and the judge even complimented him on his litigation skills when pronouncing the verdict. While in prison awaiting trial, Ted Bundy developed a romance and went so far as to call the woman as a witness in his trial, and make his wedding vows part of his murder trial. This is totally overlooked by the movie.

All in all, this movie seems to be an excuse to show a couple of rape-murders rather than a serious attempt to understand the mental mis-wiring of one of the sickest persons ever to walk the face of the earth.

What is the point of making this movie? Next to this, the TV series, "The Deliberate Stranger," is a masterpiece of information and good taste. I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later it would occur to someone that there was a nickel or two left in the story of Ted Bundy, who slaughtered and raped all those young women and was put to death for it.

But how to improve on the TV series? Simple, you throw out almost all of the background involving family and police and leave in the murders, only this time, this being a feature film, you can show the slaughters and the rapes in all their gory detail.

Mission accomplished. It's a disgusting and exploitative movie. We don't get to know any of the victims of course. They're as faceless as the guys that Dirty Harry shoots during a holdup. Nothing about their families of course. Nothing about Ted Bundy either, for that matter -- not that there's very much to know about a major anti-social personality who invents himself as he goes along. Why does he kill? He has a little speech he makes to his girl friend about finding out that he was illegitimate, but so what? Who knows? Who cares? We don't know how the police manage to catch him twice. All of that sort of thing would detract from the time devoted to the murders. If we learned anything more about the police or about Ted, we'd be able to see fewer bloody naked female bodies being slung about. Only the juicy parts of the story are left in, with just enough non-juicy stuff for the film makers to deny that only the juicy parts of the story are left in.

The last murder we see is that of Ted Bundy himself. He's electrocuted in Florida. Does the director skip any details of this final death? Are you kidding? We get to learn so much about how electrocutions are carried out that we could probably follow the procedure as well as the professionals. I'll bet you didn't know that before the victim becomes part of a serial circuit with the chair he has cotton forced into his rectum and made to wear Depends. The ghouls must be jumping in their seat with excitement. More time is spent on the electrocution (almost 10 minutes) than on any of the other deaths in the movie. If this isn't "pandering" then the word has no referent at all.

The acting is passable. The direction, aside from the content of the movie, isn't objectionable. It's not very good either. Okay -- example. Bundy escapes from prison. The whole country is searching for him. Cut to his former girl friend sleeping alone in her bed. The door to her room slowly opens and Bundy enters without a shirt but holding a machete. He tiptoes to the bed, raises the knife above his head, and -- WHACK. But what do you know, folks. It's a nightmare. We know it's a nightmare because the girl wakes up screaming and shoves her face into the camera lens. I don't know how far back in cinematic history this hoary device goes, the wakee sitting up and screaming into the lens. The first time I remember seeing something like it was, I think, in "Carrie," about a quarter of a century ago. It was an effective shocker -- once. Now it's almost obligatory. Instead of wincing, you yawn. (I also think a moratorium should be placed on scenes in which a patient is being wheeled hurriedly on a gurney down a hospital corridor and the camera takes the patient's point of view, so we see all these worried faces staring down into the lens and snapping medical-type orders at one another. While we're at it, let's have a moratorium on any further commercial use of Beethoven's ninth symphony. Let's throw in Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks," too.)

There is an especially nauseating scene of Bundy chasing a girl through the woods. He's just kidnapped her from the beach, so she's wearing only a skimpy bikini. She's running, howling, falling down, getting up, running again with the camera a few feet behind her at every step, every fall, so that the viewer gets a good sexy view of her wobbling buttocks before Bundy catches her and bashes her brains out. The shot may have been plagiarized from "I Spit on Your Grave," which see.

I'm happy that censorship is relaxed enough to allow gore on screen but this film provides an exercise in the use of moral restraint. Just exactly who are we supposed to identify with while the camera follows the terrified victim through the woods? What pleasure is to be derived from simply looking at the butchery of strangers? What comes next? Should we skip ALL of the background details, drop any concern with insight or ethics, and just have one and a half hour's worth of some nameless monster chopping up nameless bodies and splattering everything with blood and intestines? If that's not the direction in which a film like this points, then what IS the reason it was made in the first place?

This movie is not for the faint-of-heart; it's a story about a vicious serial killer, and does not pretty up the subject matter. Thus there are numerous scenes of bloody and perverse sex, dead bodies galore, lots of profanity, and an overall atmosphere of sickness. None of this is pleasant to watch, but is entirely appropriate for the subject matter.

The script stays close to fact, although it leaves out some important information; neglecting, for example, to mention that one woman Bundy approached at Lake Sammamish refused to follow him into the parking lot. Her evidence provided a description and a name to a previously faceless monster, the first real lead the police had in the case. The movie also fails to give any real sense of the era in which Bundy flourished. In the swinging seventies, it was not so uncommon for women to get into cars or otherwise accept approaches from total strangers -- one reason for Bundy's success.

This film suffers from a lack of focus and purpose. It does give a good sense of the progression of Bundy's hideous career: the burglarizing, purse-snatching, shoplifting peeping tom gradually deteriorates into the brutal, raping, murdering serial killer. We see his alcoholism, his ability to be totally charming when necessary, and his knack for attracting "enabling" girlfriends into his life. What we don't see is anything of the inner Bundy. Granted, any depiction of the "inner Bundy" would be pure speculation, but a good movie would at least make an attempt to give some motive for Bundy's violent compulsions. All this movie does is make some vague references to his illegitimacy.

I need to also mention the incredibly poor taste in background music. In some sequences, light-hearted music is playing while Bundy is committing heinous acts of violence. (Christmas music in one case!) Perhaps the director meant to indicate that all this horror was just plain fun to Bundy; but the effect is to cheapen the scenes and even make them comic.

The verdict: Iffy. Lacks depth, and occasionly shows poor taste. Leaves out important information. On the plus side, it is well-acted, and does not attempt to sugar coat the ugly facts of violence. If you want a thoughtful examination of Bundy's character and the era in which he lived, this is not the right movie.