Green River Killer

I'm not usually one to slam a movie,but WOW!!!I know it was made for TV or whatever,but still....there's no excuse for this type of crap to be out there.What a bad,bad,bad movie.Terrible acting,filming,plot layout.....really nothing positive to say at all.I love most of the serial killer movies like Bundy,Dahmer,Hillside Strangler....etc,but this is NOTHING like those at all.I don't know what kind of filming it is that has the look that this film has,but it should be stopped immediately.It has that look like maybe someone filmed it on a $300 digital camera and took it home and made it on their computer overnight or something.The beginning credits is a long panning scene of a river with a crappy font coming up ever so slowly showing the credits.Then it goes into a montage of "arty" shots of dead body's around the river as the credits roll on before the movie even starts for 5 minutes.Sooo dramatic for such a crappy flick.Do yourself a favor and AVOID THIS LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!!

Having survived Guy Ritchie's Revolver recently, I thought it would be months to find a worse movie than that, but nope. Fate had thrown a friend's copy of GREEN RIVER KILLER my way. Having never heard of it, I checked the rating on IMDb. 2.2. Pathetic. Even Uwe Boll's movies score better! But reading the few comments made me laugh out loud, so I decided to watch the beginning to see if it was as bad as the reviewers said. I became hypnotised by the atrocious acting and awful video-8 (it seems) camera work. I could not believe my eyes, it was so bad. I don't know where they found the "actors" but they didn't seem very experienced to say the least LOL! It was probably their first appearance in front of a camera. That would explain the overacting, particularly the killer's two work colleagues, both hilariously bad! It looks like the worst made for TV movie ever. I was shaking my head in amazement. So will you.

My wife and I always seem to be suckered in by packaging of an unpopular title. From it's cover Green River Killer looked somewhat interesting having been based on a true story about a real serial killer. The moment we saw the first scene that it was on video and not film, the lead actor's (if you can call him an actor at all) stumbling through his lines to the awful cinematography and boxy audio we knew it was a terrible stinker and realized the watch ahead would be painful and excruciating. There were flashes of scenes that looked like they spliced from another awful film, probably one that was too bad to complete so they used the bits for whatever effects they were going after. You even could hear that the gun was plastic! If there's any good in the movie it was some actual police confession footage of the real killer, even he was a better actor than the guy they got as the lead. Someone should have just used the real killer's confession video, hired Bill Kurtis and let A&E or Discovery make a decent documentary instead. I should have checked IMDb first because all of its reviews from other victims (watchers) were dead on accurate.

I have to hand it to its marketing and artwork, however I suppose that's where the entire budget was spent on and the best part of the movie but not worth the four-dollars wasted. I can't say if I've seen worse movies than this, some were at least equal, like comparing a skunk's smell to a dead fish. Even those by Ed Wood or others from B movie directors at least provided laughter, this was too bad to be funny. A film as bad as this deserves an award, its awfulness just can't go unnoticed.

Since the actual Green river killings occurred around my area and in the neighboring state of Washington, I was interested in the real murder cases. I mean, nearly fifty female victims have been counted, some of them never identified, and the murderer, Gary Ridgeway, was one sick man. So, naturally, I thought I'd rent "Green River Killer" when I saw it at a local video store. The DVD packaging looked rather professional, so I decided to give the film a chance. Boy, I'm so very sorry that I even wasted the three dollars.

Where do I even begin with how completely horrible this film is? It's supposed to be a semi-biography on Gary Ridgeway and the murders he committed, but it's so horrible constructed that I could hardly bare to watch it. First of all, the story is a complete and utter mess. It makes absolutely no sense and is extremely confusing. Second, the acting. Oh, the acting. It was horrible amateur, and extremely unbelievable. Third, the direction and cinematography. This film had to have been shot on an old VHS camcorder, or at least that's how the quality looks. The camera angles were terrible and the film just looked bad. Really, really bad. I also had the viewing pleasure of Ulli Lommel's other film "Black Dahlia", which was almost as bad as this. I would have reviewed that film also, but for some reason IMDb doesn't have a listing for it yet (hm... I wonder why?).

Lommel seems to have a history of directing true-crime films, but the problem is that they are all so horrible. This guy really needs to give up on his film career, because his movies are an insult to the film industry. Please, no more of these cheapo, straight-to-video true crime films. If I could give it a zero, I would. Overall, this film is purely and simply pathetic. Avoid at all costs, and never rent a film from this director, because it's guaranteed to be bad. 1/10.

The director Ulli Lommel studied under the great Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but it has become increasingly apparent that none of Fassbinder's magnificent edge and insight has rubbed off on Lommel. With no true sense of the outrageous and satirical elements that made Fassbinder's melodramas so provoking, Lommel is nothing more than a man who endeavors to be controversial simply for the sake of controversiality.

This was just a horribly directed and told story, I'm pretty sure the history you would get say on A&E would be much better than the stuff Ulli is shoveling here. Please, don't waste your time on this film....