Kemper

I grew up in Santa Cruz when Kemper was doing his terrible work, and so I have some familiarity with the gory details of this story. I mean, I never researched it but one picks things up from local news and talk around town. And without giving anything away, you can be sure that NOTHING in this movie is based on anything that happened in real life. In fact, I'm almost certain that they took an existing serial killer screen play and did a search and replace, swapping out "Mike Killington" with "Ed Kemper."

The locations don't look like Santa Cruz. The characters don't talk like humans. The cars are incorrect cars. The cel phones are... wait THERE WERE NO CEL PHONES IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES. Seriously, if there was any detail that could have been authentic, they found a way to make the exact opposite choice. It's kind of a marvel to see a movie with literally no correct decisions behind it. How does a thing like that happen?

Even if you never heard of Kemper you can appreciate this as a bad movie on its own terms. The acting is wooden and one-dimensional, the music is mostly synths, everyone is too pretty, the plot twists are like straight road through the midwest on a high-visibility day.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you have the attention span for stuff like this, it's the best time you'll ever have.

This movie was downright wretched. I watched it on Showtime Extreme and found myself cleaning while it was on, it was THAT awful.

What offends me most is this has nothing to do with the killings.

The real story is so much more compelling. A 15 year old kills both grandparents, then gets committed, only to go on a killing spree when he gets out of the psychiatric facility at the age of 21. He was also 6'9".

This film has the era wrong...this was the late 60s and early 70s. It also has all the facts, essentially wrong. Kemper was not an average-size man in his 40s. He was a giant of a man in his early 20s.

A decent film would have recreated the entire case, so there would at least be come thought provoking questions (i.e. how do you let out a psychopath to kill again). Halloween (the remake), is probably closer to the true story than this one was.

This was just a cheesy, badly-done splatter film that slapped the name Kemper on it, for no apparent reason.

"Psycho" really had little to do with the Ed Gein case. But it didn't really pretend to, and it was extremely well made.

"Kemper," on the other hand.....bottom of the barrel.

I wish I hadn't wasted my time. The acting made me cringe, possibly the worst acting I've ever seen actually and the plot is fictional, it's not at all accurate.

I rated this movie a 2 out of 10 for the simple reason it is fictional. The story of Ed Kemper is interesting especially to people who enjoy reading and studying serial killers like him, but this movie isn't that. They take the name of Ed Kemper and use it to make a movie and use the whole "based on actual events" trick to get it to sell. While they did use little tid bits here and there that were factual(like Ed sticking his moms vocal cords in the garbage disposal), this movie was fictional. That ruined the movie for me knowing that while watching it I wasn't seeing the actual story of Ed Kemper. Overall, if this was just another movie I would rate this up to a 5 for it just being a straight up independent film of new actors and directors(people have to start somewhere). But since this film used a serial killer's name to sell and claim to tell a true story, I give a 2.

Only for the most desperate true-crime buff, this TV movie-quality dramatization is about serial killer Ed Kemper and one certain cop's bond with him and his pursuit of him. Lame acting, worse dialogue (written by a former soft-core porn screenwriter), plot holes aplenty, and lackadaisical direction and editing. Many scenes are wide angle master-shots with no real framing, as the actors just meander on screen and recite their lines of dialogue. The plot is not very fact based considering it claims to be inspired by true events, it deviates from the facts of the case almost from square one. It seems like the screenwriters were not even familiar with the case when they wrote the screenplay. An interesting movie could have been made out of the story, but they did just about everything wrong here. And I did not know that people had laptop computers and cell phones with text messaging and photos in the 1970s?