Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story

Even the Devil has a sad tale to tell and Milton told it in glittering prose attaining unapproachable literary heights.

I saw Overkill some time ago. There were some respects in which I found it superior to Monster. Aileen was far less a sympathetic character in Overkill. Her motives were more clearly self-aggrandizement and anti-social. True she suffered the sting of betrayal; Ailleen was betrayed by someone she had trusted and cared for but such is the way of the street.

I find it interesting how the same story can be retold from a different perspective. Just compare the old tear-jerker weaper I WANT TO LIVE made in the more liberal 1950s with the made for TV version from the 1970s.

Made the same year as the Nick Broomfield documentary The Selling of a Serial Killer, though presumably after it, since there is talk of the movie rights in the doco, this TVM is the tale of a woman who graduated from being a career criminal and prostitute to the first American female serial killer, accused of killing 7 men in Florida.

The strength of this treatment is in the performance of Jean Smart as Aileen, also known as Lee, who is intense and makes odd choices to reveal Aileen's state of mind. She maniacally cleans a crashed car she and hotel maid Tyria Moore (Park Overall) are in, to remove fingerprints and blood as she does in the killings, she is jealous "mean" to Tyria's visiting sister Amy (TC Warner), screams after Tyria cannot be found in their hotel room, fearful when seeing news of the police hunt for her on television, makes one of those cliched waking-from-a-nightmare scenes work for once, and even survives a scene where she dances alone wildly in a pub and is made to see her girlhood reflection in the mirror.

Aileen's lesbianism is white-washed here as her being an "older sister" and "the best friend I ever had" to Tyria, and although we see how alcohol alters Aileen's behaviour, we get the standard explaination that her hatred of men, disguised behind provocatism, stems from child abuse. However Smart also makes Aileen's feeling "lost" vulnerable, with a stunned response to men that are nice to her. In the killings we are shown and the aural flashbacks, Aileen's victims are insulting to her (they all call her "baby" and "whore"), and her pathologically angry response explains the title, a police term describing the excess of her gun shooting. Aileen's future is also made more bleak when she "drifts" away from Tyria, and the second half of the narrative focuses on the police efforts to arrest her, since it is her believed her drifting will inevitably result in another killing.

The teleplay by Fred Mills has Aileen confess to being "crazy", someone who "doesn't know how to be, sometimes", who justifies her actions by saying that the men who "came to her like flies on crap" "messed" with her. Mills presenting Aileen as a humanitarian, giving money to a homeless person, is inexplicable, though a parallel is made where she hands over the proceeds of the post murder robberies to Tyria, and the duplicity of Tyria as a witness against Aileen has less of an impact than it does in the Broomfield.

But while Mills stoops to Tyria explaining Aileen as a hooker as "It's just what she does, not who she is" and later Tyria "I knew it would come to this", he also provides some laugh lines. A policeman tells us that when women kill, they kill people they know, not strangers - "They murder their husbands. They murder their lovers. They murder their husband's lovers", and a pickup tells Aileen "I had an easier time in ‘Nam than I do with most women". Mills also uses flashbacks of Aileen's past which director Peter Levin improves with tinted lighting and bold use of colour, a Santa with a southern accent, the song Crazy on a jukebox, and the police holding a meeting on a beach.

Levin cuts from the discovery of one dead body to a child screaming at a party, and from a police image of Aileen's thumbprint to Aileen using her thumb to make a jukebox choice, uses It's a Wonderful Life on TV, dirt on the camera and the car coming at us in the opening crash, but also an unnecessary reflected prison wire pattern on Smart's face for a telephone conversation.

This story was done again in 2003. It was done much better. TV movies generally restrict the viewers and this is no exception. It's a horribly botched film with explicit content toned down to fit the television standards. Aileen Wuornos deserves better than this. Her story was done justice in "Monster" (2003) with Charlize Theron, who won an Oscar(tm) for her performance. Just kidding. Both films suck. It's better to stuck to the documentary.

Aileen Wuornos was a prostitute with a lesbian lover who murdered her clients. Why? I have no idea; at least not after watching this movie. Jean Smart is bad as Wuornos and the film is incompetent.

This is just bad acting filling in for a mediocre movie, and bad directing trying to make up for absence of quality. Bring on the Monster.

Released in 1992, eleven years before ´Monster', and about one year after Aileen was arrested, this TV production offers an authenticity that 'Monster' lacked because it was filmed during the era when the events happened. The opening scene with Aileen and Tyria drunk driving in one of the victim´s stolen cars, laughing and enjoying themselves just before the crash, is realistic. The scene with Aileen dancing in (presumably) the Last Resort bar to the music on the jukebox really channeled her spirit. This is exactly the way I would have imagined Aileen in a bar: drinking beer and dancing to her favorite tunes. The setting of this film, unfortunately looks more like Southern California rather than Florida. On the other hand, Jean Smart did a great job portraying Aileen, and was completely natural without tons of makeup. Park Overall as Tyria was also good and didn't act as naive and clueless as her portrayal in 'Monster'. I also liked that they used Tyria's real name as well as the investigator Bruce Munster (how much was he paid for this?) And wow, it sure took the police a long time to connect all these murders. Watch 'Monster' and then watch this for a different perspective.

I accept the view of other contributors that this TV version of the story presents a sanitised picture with some aspects of the Wuornos story being reduced or ignored. In particular the motivation behind the murders is only peripherally explored and the true relationship between Wuornos and Tyria is really ignored being presented as room-sharing "sisters" almost.

However I do disagree with one commentator who says Jean Smart is awful in the title role. This is an actress I hadn't come across before but I can see from her IMDb entry that she has appeared in many films. I shall certainly keep an eye out for her in the future. I found her performance here compelling. She puts across the serial killer characteristics of someone who can function some of the time in their normal environment in a relatively "normal" manner but who is subsumed by an overwhelming compulsion in other circumstances. The scenes before her capture where she is dancing frenetically and aimlessly in a club and then is slouched in a yard full of bike-riders is a case in point.

I think an excellent performance from Smart well supported by Park Overall as Tyria though the police roles are perfunctory and basic at times.

Although the Charlize Theron version of this story is much more well known and garnered her worthy accolades this TV film is well worth watching if you get the chance.