True Crime Movies

[sdreid]

I watched BTK last night. The actor looks like Rader and does a passable job. That's all I can think of to say positive about the production.

[Mr.Hyde]

Mr.Hyde

True-crime movies occupy an important position in film history. What is generally considered to be the first feature length film, at 70 minutes, was a true-crime movie of a sort. That release was The Story of the Kelly Gang from Australia in 1906. All the movies before this Ned Kelly rendition were either shorts or serials.

Good day cobber!Fair guess for a septic!Really,only kidding mate.Weighed in at ~60 minutes.Beat"Birth of a Nation" by several years.
Just watch what we do with "JTR".

[sdreid]

OK Hyde. I haven't seen it. IMDb says 70 minutes. That's all I had to go by.

[John Hacker]

One of my personal favorites is Memories of Murder by Bong Joon-ho. (Director of The Host)

It's based on an unsolved series of killings that occurred in South Korea 1988-1991.

It's not a happy film, but it's a well told story about unprepared police trying to captuire a serial killer where their standard approach to solving crimes is completely useless.

[kensei]

I watched BTK last night. The actor looks like Rader and does a passable job. That's all I can think of to say positive about the production.

Oh God, that straight-to-video piece of dreck? I feel for you that you had to sit through and endure it. There was a much better movie (how could anything be worse?) made for television in America about BTK, but it didn't deal with the period of the murders, only with the months leading up to his capture when he was writing to the police. Sorry I don't remember the title offhand, but it showed a lot of how he was in his private life, milking his job of "compliance officer" for all it was worth, getting off on being able to make people keep their grass to a certain height, etc. One really nasty sequence dealt with a woman whose dog Rader had brought to the pound, and when she was informed that she had until a certain date and time to contact him to avoid having the animal put to sleep he deliberately avoided her calls and kept her from saving its life, a substitute for murder in his advancing age, just for a little power fix.

I remember the scene showing his arrest, done very accurately. As he's face-down in the street with cops massing around him, he's asked if he knows why he's being arrested. With complete calm he says, "Well, I have some idea."

[sdreid]

John-I've only seen that movie listed on IMDb and haven't been able to find anything in print on an actual case. There are several Chinese/Hong Kong films in the same boat.

Kensei-I have seen that TV movie as well.

[John Hacker]

I haben't been able to track down much detail on the actual crimes. 10 dead, with a wide range of ages in the victims. Never caught. Statute of limitations now expired.

That's about it.

[sdreid]

I sort of think gangster movies based on actual cases are in a special branch of true crime films but has anyone seen the new Dillinger release? If so, what did you think?

[Magpie]

I saw Public Enemies last week.

The first half or so is really, really slow. The second half is much better.
Johnny Depp is great, as always, but Christian Bale is pretty wooden throughout.

[sdreid]

Thanks Magpie! I'll see it some time at the theater or, more likely, in a few months on DVD.

[sdreid]

Yes, I meant Public Enemies not Night of the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.

[sdreid]

I watched Bundy: A Legacy of Evil last night. My expectations were low but it was not bad. There is the expected violence interspersed with scenes that make you think your watching a remake of The Graduate but it isn't really sympathetic toward Bundy, I'm glad to say.

[sdreid]

The new TV movie Manson first plays on September 7. I don't know the time but I believe it's on History channel. For what it is worth, the previews don't look too bad.

[kensei]

Was just searching my memory banks for more true crime movies and came up with these:

"Dahmer" starring Jeremy Renner as Jeffrey Dahmer. I remember thinking "That's it?" when it ended, because it stopped far short of telling the entire story.

"To Catch a Killer" starring Brian Dennehy as John Wayne Gacey. Nicely done.

"Murder in the Hamptons," about Michael Skakel's killing of Martha Moxley. Also nicely done.

And "Perfect Murder, Perfect Town" about the Jonbenet Ramsey case, which featured Kris Kristofferson as a detective. The scene that is burned into my memory from this movie is the one in which Jonbenet's body is found in the basement and in that house already full of cops her father carries her upstairs in a panic, and what the actor was holding had to have been a very realistic prop as opposed to the actual child but looked exactly like her body in rigor mortis with the stiff arms extended up over her head. It still gives me shivers. The movie seemed to lean in the direction of Patsy Ramsey being guilty, which I feel has been pretty much discredited now, but Kristofferson's character was supporting the theory of an unidentified intruder.

[sdreid]

Hi Kensei,

It was actually Murder in Greenwich that was about Moxley. The movie Murder in the Hamptons was about a different crime. There is another excellent film based on Moxley called A Season in Purgatory although the names are changed.