I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER. (2016) DIRECTED BY BILLY O'BRIEN. BASED ON THE BOOK BY DAN WELLS. STARRING MAX RECORDS, CHRISTOPHER LLOYD, LAURA FRASER AND KARL GEARY. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
This is the most interesting and unusual horror film to land on my desk in a while. Well, I say desk, but it's more of a space at an already overcrowded kitchen table at which everyone in the house has dibs on their own little bit. It's a serial killer-type horror film, but it has a supernatural element and even science fiction element to it as well, so that's quite a few genres we've got all mixed together in here.
First off, it's about an American teenage lad called John Wayne Cleaver (great name!) who is first and foremost obsessed with serial killers. Pretty much everyone goes through a phase of being interested in serial killers. It's a perfectly healthy- if gruesome- interest, born out of sheer curiosity.
I'm a woman, and even I went through a phase where I devoured every detail on serial killers that I could lay my hands on. I learned quite a bit about 'em, as well. It was back when I used to read forensic-type thrillers by American women authors like Patricia Cornwell, Lisa Gardner, Karin Slaughter and then the English writers Sophie Hannah and Nicci French.
I don't read these authors any more, brilliant though they are, because the genre became so very, very technical with the march of progress and the dawning of the super-duper technological age, as opposed to just the plain old technological age. The forensic stuff just became too damn high-falutin' for a computer cretin like myself, haha. Such is life.
Mentioned in the film are serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Ted, of course, was the charming law student to whom the term 'serial killer' was first applied. He'd drive around in his little Volkswagen Beetle that had its front passenger seat removed for ease of transporting unconscious women whom he'd found walking alone and clubbed over the head before bundling them into his car.
What he did with the women after he'd abducted them is well-documented. For these crimes, all committed in America in the early 'Seventies, he was executed in January 1989, but not before he'd escaped from prison not once but twice and gone on the crime spree of a lifetime in a college sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida, in the dead of night.
His modus operandi or his thing, if you like, was to wear one arm in a cast, pretending obviously that it was broken, and tricking young women into helping him carry his books. You'd be surprised how often that that worked for him. Mind you, the most frightening thing about Ted Bundy always was that he appeared so charming, handsome and normal. He could so easily have been the guy-next-door.
Jeffrey Dahmer is also mentioned, the homosexual serial killer who cannibalised his young male victims and kept their body parts in the freezer at his flat. Imagine being the police officers who first had the privilege of searching his apartment! I reckon you wouldn't forget that experience in a hurry. 'Honey, I'm gonna be late home tonight, something's come up...!'
And was our hero, John Wayne Cleaver, named for the Duke (Western actor John Wayne) or for the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, the guy who played a clown at childrens' parties while all the time he had the bodies of his male murder victims crammed like sardines into the crawlspace of his house?
See, that's why I'm glad that Irish houses (I'm Irish!) don't have crawlspaces. At least, I don't think they do. If they do, I absolutely positively do not want to know about it and that's that.
But I digress. We were talking about John Wayne Cleaver, our American teenager who's obsessed with serial killers. He works in the family funeral home, where his Mom April also prepares the bodies for burial and John assists her with this gruesome work after school.
Given his obsession with serial killers and the fact that murder victims are brought in routinely to the funeral home, it's probably not the right environment for wee John. John also has his own therapist, by the way, because he's been diagnosed as being a 'sociopath' and he's worried that he might commit a crime of murder himself unless he sticks rigidly to a body of 'rules' he's set for himself.
To go back to the funeral home, it's not just a case of slapping some rouge on the stiff's face,
either, let me tell you. Bodies are cut open, drained of what's in 'em and some other stuff (it's pink) is sent in through a tube. It's messy, gory work, with bags of body parts lying around like grocery sacks.
I'm actually not sure if this is the autopsy process, or if every dead body has to be 'treated' in this way before they can be laid out, viewed by loved ones and eventually buried. I definitely know that there's some stuff they have to do that involves formaldehyde and what about the embalming fluid?
I'm actually not sure if this is the autopsy process, or if every dead body has to be 'treated' in this way before they can be laid out, viewed by loved ones and eventually buried. I definitely know that there's some stuff they have to do that involves formaldehyde and what about the embalming fluid?
Because of his Mom's job and his overall weirdness, John is jeered at and mostly shunned at school. John doesn't give a flying shit. All John's interested in is the fact that a bonafide real-life serial killer appears to be at work in his tiny home town of Clayton, somewhere in the Midwest of the good old US of A.
Cadavers are coming into his Mom's funeral home with- get this- organs missing. What's up with that? Serial killers do sometimes keep grisly souvenirs of their crimes but who wants an icky kidney or a stinky, oozy heart when they can keep a shirt button or a hairslide, much more practical keepsakes?
John keeps his eyes and ears open. As the town is so tiny, it's not long before the long-haired, monosyllabic teenager accomplishes what the cops seemingly cannot. He finds out who's been mangling the decent people of Clayton and strewing their remains around the place like they've been savaged by a pack of wolves.
What's he going to do about it? After all, he sincerely thinks he's got the qualities of a serial killer himself. Will he watch and admire the killer from afar, maybe even learn a few tricks of the trade from him? Or will he do the decent thing and set the cops (the ones who are still alive, that is!) on him/her/it? You'll have to watch this excellent horror/sci-fi/black comedy to find out, folks.
I must just touch on the therapist issue. In America, is it really possible to phone your analyst on his home phone number at all hours just to bitch at him about your thoughts and feelings? Or, if you call him in the middle of the night, acting all weird and suicidal, will he rush out into the night, still in his pyjamas and dressing-gown, to come to your house to talk you down off that metaphorical roof?
This happens in the film but it sure as feck doesn't happen in Ireland. Over here, you can't get anyone on the phone after five o'clock in the evening because we're all eating the bit of bacon and cabbage with spuds and watching the Angelus, and if you do it's a feckin' miracle.
The Age Action or Active Age people will be happy to see an elderly person playing such a major role in the film. Fans of the movie BACK TO THE FUTURE will be thrilled to see that the septuagenarian (soon to be an octogenosaurus, as Homer Simpson would say!) in question is Christopher Lloyd, who has a filmography as long as the afterlife itself. He's brilliant in this film, although he did mumble so much that I actually missed a lot of his dialogue, haha.
I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER is out now on DVD, BLU-RAY and DIGITAL HD courtesy of BULLDOG FILM DISTRIBUTION and FETCH PUBLICITY.
The special effects are terrific and the film-makers have put a genuinely unusual spin on the serial killer movie genre with their choice of villain. There are gorgeous snow-scapes on view everywhere and lovely, heartwarming scenes of America during Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, three calendar events which the Americans know how to do so well.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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