Chicago Massacre: Richard Speck

Being extremely interested in true crime, I decided to watch this movie last night. It was not good. The only thing good at all about it was the fact that Corin Nemec is a great actor. However, he is the only good actor in this movie. Actually, it was so bad, I am not sure how he could have worked along side such terrible acting. We have Candyman and the Wishmaster as very unconvincing police officers. Not to mention, almost every other actor and extra was terrible.

In my opinion, If your interested in the actual case of Richard Speck, Then I suggest you spend 15-20 minutes reading about him on the internet as opposed to wasting an hour and a half watching this movie. Besides, Reading up on it will give you much more insight than this movie ever could.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

This story and the victims deserved so much better than this film. The story line jumps around without any regard for fitting the pieces together. You get small glimpses of his childhood, marriage and previous criminal behavior without ever following through and finishing connecting to why we're being shown that. The acting is absolutely terrible, the actors look nothing like the people they're portraying, the "dorm" where the murders were committed looks nothing like the true location and worst of all is the movie isn't even that accurate. Having spent some time reading up about the events that transpired it's very clear that the movie did not care at all about accuracy. It's very hard to believe that the movie won an award of any kind.

This film should have been pretty easy to make watchable. You've got an intriguing subject - a serial killer - so pretty much just telling his story, documentary-style, would be interesting enough. The film pretty much writes and directs itself.

Yet writer-director Michael Feifer manages to turn an easy win into a massive loss. The plot is absolutely dull and lifeless, performances are unconvincing, production is basic. Hardly the Mindhunter-type story I was expecting.

Avoid.

If I had wanted to see an A&E Biography on Richard Speck, I would have tuned into A&E. I got this DVD because of Debbie Rochon, and it was an extreme disappointment on so many levels.

First, Debbie played a prostitute and was only in the film for five minutes. No. she didn't get naked. In fact, the only titties you see in this movie are on a video of Speck in prison. That is really creepy.

Secondly, the Chicago Police Department, as portrayed in this film, must be equal to the Keystone Cops. Andrew Divoff ("Lost", Wishmaster) played the lead investigator, and he was in a bar with Speck, knowing what he looked like, and lost him. His boss, Tony Todd (Wishmaster, Candyman) was more concerned about keeping things quiet and protecting Mayor Daley. It was so bad that two cops, after they had Specks name and description, interviewed him on a complaint by Rochon and looked at his ID and still walked away. BOLO anyone??? Thank goodness for Chicago that the emergency room doctor was on the ball.

The actual murders had nothing more that a little blood spatter and off-camera horror. Ther were no rapes, unless you count the time Speck supposed raped on girl WITH HIS PANTS STILL ON! Neat trick, if you can do it.

I have to give Corin Nemec props for his performance. He really did a good job in playing a slime-bucket. I wonder if he is so good because he has experience in portraying murderers (Boston Strangler: The Untold Story, Bundy: An American Icon). He was the best thing about this movie.

The camera-work was terrible and the flashbacks to Speck's earlier life were way too short and obscure to give any insight into the man. Did he hate women because of his stepfather? Was it just low self-esteem that made him a wife-beater, drunk and all-around jerk? Did he just think he could get away with anything? Unanswered questions abound.

Don't waste you time here. There is nothing to see unless you want to see a man with titties. Yech!

I am very familiar with the true life case of Richard Speck and have to say that if you are at all interested in learning about him, his victims and the crime, this movie will not give you an accurate representation at all. Like the 2004 movie "Speck" with Doug Cole, this movie lacks realism and strays far from the true story it is supposed to be telling. First off, the dormitory Speck murders the nurses in, in the movie is one story and spread out like a hospital ward with several rooms. The two-story South Chicago townhouse that the real murders took place in was cramped, with three small bedrooms upstairs and a living room and kitchen downstairs. This may seem like nitpicking but it's actually a major mistake that the filmmaker commits, because much of the horror of the real life story comes from the fact that Speck was able to murder all of these women in such close, claustrophobic quarters. It would have added so much to the movie if they had gotten this right. Secondly, Speck was not vicious, violent and murderous all the time whether drunk or sober in real life as the movie portrays him. In actuality the real Speck, when sober, was a sniveling coward who was afraid to fight, lacked self-confidence, was ashamed and embarrassed of his pockmarked face and a mama's boy who, even as an adult, relied on his mother to bail him out of jail and get him out of whatever trouble he got himself into. He only had a modicum of self-confidence and mostly just became nasty, violent and obnoxious when he got drunk and/or high. In prison, the other prisoners turned him into their bitch and forced him into humiliating sexual practices at their whim. Not exactly the scary cowboy-hat wearing outlaw portrayed in the movie. I'm not minimizing the fact that Richard Speck was a dangerous and vicious killer. But it would've been nice to have seen a more accurate 3 dimensional portrayal of what he was really like. Thirdly, the actors in this movie who play the cops are lousy. Their overacting and over-reacting would do William Shatner proud. The performances are laughable and the writing is on par with a cheesy cop show from the sixties or an Ed Wood movie. Fourthly, this ceases to be a horror movie and is just downright nasty and unpleasant in it's, perhaps, too graphic depiction of the murders of the nurses. This is not cartoonish Michael Myers, Halloween horror here. It's a tragic real life story that had horrific, sad and awful consequences. This movie insults the viewer's intelligence and is patronizing in it's spoon fed violence. Richard Speck was a worthless shard of human debris who can't and shouldn't be celebrated or mythologized in any way. After watching this train wreck of a so-called movie, I can only say may no more would-be John Carpenters or George Romeros try to put his vile life to film again, unless of course they do it on a larger budget, with a better script, better director and better actors. I agree with what the other person said about Corin Nemec, his performance is good, but only his performance is good. I am in shock and awe that somebody thought this movie was better than David Fincher's "Zodiac"!