Kemper

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.

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?

Only thing I have to say is after 10 minutes, I was slack jawed. If you have read any of the history of Ed Kemper and his crimes, you would know that only a REAL director with REAL actors and REAL money could give this tale justice and paint it the way it should be. Maybe it is just to difficult because of how horrifying the truth is or to horrifying to revisit. But all the same, this has no worth. Rent Predator.

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.

When you see the name Kemper you would expect there to be some accuracy between his crimes and what this movie depicts. There's not. Kempers crimes were horrific there's no need to make up things. Fail. Epic, colossal fail.