The Poughkeepsie Tapes

For some reason I was fully expecting this to be brutal and particularly violent and traumatic and as such just instinctively avoided it for a while. But boredom got the better of me and I went and watched it. Thankfully it is not as overly gorey or gruesome as I expected, instead relying a lot on extreme discomfort and the implications of torture without actually seeing much of the actual torture.

The story is one of cops in Poughkeepsie New York finding a huge stash of VCR tapes during a raid on a serial killer's house, and there's literally thousands of tapes chronicling the killer kidnapping and killing people. It all unfolds in a documentary style which serves very well as a framing device.

But right away the film starts to quake a bit. Some of the actors portraying FBI agents or specialists look badly out of place or way too young, some of the actors add in unrealistic comments that are supposedly meant to show just how extreme this killer is/was.

The uneven quality of the acting starts to cause some of these scenes to be literally laughable, as an FBI specialist, in his most overly dramatic "barely holding it together voice" tells us that his wife accidentally watched 30 minutes of a tape and wouldn't let him touch her for over a year. Even remembering it now just made me laugh out loud not because of how it sounds, but just the absurdly serious way it was delivered.

Other events that are supposed to be serious, including even clips from the tapes themselves, filmed by the killer, sometimes struggle to maintain a balance between the theatrical/macabre and the absurd, in particular whenever the killer is shown dressed in his Plague Doctor costume. No matter how brutal or disturbing the content on screen is, the ridiculous theatricality just makes me laugh.

Some of the content matter actually fares better as a result of this unintentional comedy; without the absurd image of the killer walking on all fours with a mask on the back of his head, it would be much more difficult to take in the more brutal and sadistic things he does.

But at the same time, some of these "unintentional comedy" moments aren't a naturally flowing element to leaven a horrible moment. A lot of the police and witness interviews just try too hard to come across as "Serious true crime Netflix presents AmazonPrime documentary" and it comes across as almost wacky as a result.

The way the killer is repeatedly described as being an almost Mary Sue-ish caliber of serial killer, able to always outsmart the cops at every turn, always have everything pre-planned to perfection, described in such a way like if the killer was a Sith Lord, he would be "more powerful than Darth Vader and the Emperor and Darth Maul put together on steroids baaaa"

Some of the unexpected best parts of the film are when it touches upon Cheryl Dempsey, the longest-running victim of the killer, that it could almost become the story of her alone, her experiences and how it permanently damaged her as a person. But most of the film is spent fixating on the serial killer like he was a living Terminator, an absolute unstoppable genius that would make Hannibal Lecter look like a buffoon.

In fact it spends so much time hyping up the killer that I ended up spending more time laughing at the film than being disturbed or grossed out by it.

The Ploughkeepsie Tapes is an absolutely awful movie. It's not even a movie, I would call it a slaughter/torture porn film for people to watch in groups during sleepovers to scare each other. This movie is written by people with the minds of teenagers, for people with the minds of teenagers.

There's very little purpose for the movie other than to utterly horrify the viewer with gruesome details of a fake serial killer. At one point the police go into extreme detail about the intestines of a victim being ripped out and "laying on the floor like Christmas lights". There's absolutely no realism. I didn't believe for a second that it was anything but a mockumentary. The acting and writing were atrocious.

It's pretty much Blair Witch Project meets Saw. It's the mockumentary style which has been done many, many times. It's been done a lot better in Blair Witch, Cloverfield, and dare I say, Diary of the Dead.

And unlike Saw and Blair Witch, there are no characters to root for, all the viewer gets is screaming victims, who are introduced, murdered or survive and get tortured.

This film is pretty much the equivalent to a sucker punch to the balls. You know those youtube videos where nothing is happening and then someone pops up and screams very loudly? That's what this movie is. I'm not sure who enjoyed this movie? Probably the same people who think Ouija boards are scary.

An interview at the Tribeca Film Fest with director John Dowdle revealed - when asked if this movie is based on an actual killer in Poughkeepsie - that (and I quote): "It's actually a combination of a number of them, but there's one -- Edmund Kemper. He was a really, really scary guy and we took a lot of pieces from him and we took some from the Green River Killer. There was a guy in Chicago we took pieces from. There was a duo in Michigan who worked together and filmed everything they did, and we took some stuff from them. Some from Ted Bundy too. So we sort of combined a lot of different real stories. Remember that couple that kidnapped a 19-year old girl and kept her as a slave for six years? We took pieces of that as well." So all of you out there insisting that this is a true story about a Poughkeepsie killer who video-taped his murders are making fools of yourselves.

"The Poughkeepsie Tapes" treads on very familiar ground for any movie watcher who's used to serial killer dramas. Functioning as a faux documentary, it relates the tale of a particularly odious monster, Edward Carver (Ben Messmer). Sadistic and creepy in the extreme, Edward has taken the time to document *practically every second* of the stalking, abduction, and torture of his victims. So investigators have had to go through tape after tape of some very sick stuff. We get to see how this crafty and slick psycho has managed to elude the authorities for a long time.

The filmmaking Dowdle brothers make a serious effort at shocking and disturbing their viewers, but all of this may have had more impact if this viewer hadn't been somewhat inured to this sort of material over the years. The main problem is, this viewer was never convinced that he was watching something "real". Part of that is due to some very amateurish acting. And part of that is due to the fact that Messmer is not really successful at making his villain truly menacing in any way. One way that a viewer can tell this is fictional is the way that the Dowdles take the time to wallow in depravity and gore when an actual documentary would be more likely to exercise restraint rather than go for sensationalism.

Despite the reputation of "The Poughkeepsie Tapes", it would ultimately be much more interesting - and genuinely disturbing - to watch or revisit "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer", the real high water mark as far as this kind of film goes.

Five out of 10.

Based on the trailer for THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES I thought I was going to hate this movie – not because it looked disturbing but because it looked really lame. Truth is – it is a little lame, BUT the movie has a lot more creative juice than I was expecting and ultimately I found myself enjoying it. Similar to J.T. Petty's S&MAN or Remy Belvaux & Andre Bonzel's MAN BITES DOG, THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES is a pseudo documentary about a serial killer. While S&MAN and MAN BITES DOG are superior films, THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES excels due to its strict adherence to/understanding of the documentary format. Personally I didn't find the film as disturbing or horrific as I assume it was trying to be, however it did contain enough well thought out moments to convince me that the writer and director had done their horror homework (in particular a very William Castle "esque" sound bite/moment toward the film's finale). 2 little notes: the first 15 minutes are kind of slow so give the movie time AND I don't see this as a "theater" movie (I saw a DVD screener). THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES feels like a small screen movie. Have a few beers and toss it on during a late Saturday night or early Sunday morning.