The Boston Strangler

Right off the bat I noticed the same thing another reader mentions... the longish, styled 70's haircut the lead detective is sporting. NO police force allowed hair like that in 1965! Also annoying is the fact it is set in Boston, yet I hear ZERO Boston dialect! If you listen carefully there are a lot of phrases that didn't come into vogue until at least the 90's. I realize this is being nitpicky.. but c'mon these were obvious and very easy fixes. Who writes this junk anyway? The frequent night shots of the Boston skyline (same shot repeated over and over) were also annoying. If the set pieces matched the actual time frame I might have boosted this up a notch.

This is a movie that works around a detective taking the confession of "the strangler." 90% of the movie is between the detective and the strangler talking. We are taken briefly through each of the murders, perhaps too briefly. There are a couple sections in the movie towards the end where it jumps ahead in time way to quick. It feels like the director decided to just finish the movie and wanted the quickest way there without resolving much of anything. So while you may have been into the story you feel cheated by the abrupt ending.

It is apparent that it is a low budget film but thats not all that important since there are few scenes that are not the confession scenes. I would assume that is why the director failed to go into detail with the murders individually (to cut costs). As a suspense it is OK... an interesting watch. If you don't expect a lot from the movie you won't be disappointed.

Some extra-dark version of Samuel L. Jackson spends over an hour berating an investigator with severe cystic acne scarring. Annoying full-length shots of women being overpowered and strangled without any real sexual violation, even though the killer(s?) are supposed to be sexually driven. At some random point, some Tim Gunn-type man takes over investigation, advised by his distracting bowties. Flashbacks to the most lame murders of the movie. Boston has an ugly skyline and contributes nothing to the film. Accents change as drama escalates. Random clichés such as "innocent until proved guilty" randomly uttered by cast. Acting on par with that of my first play in elementary school.

I've always had a thing for 'serial-killer-murder-movies', so of course i jumped at the chance to view this one. I'm sure that it has it's qualities, but the music... holy cr... I mean, c'mon. There's this underlying synth-thingie that becomes more or less audible depending on what's being said. That may work in some cheezy horrorflick... but it really put me off this one. Sad but true.

I found myself listening more to the "crescendos" of the music rather that what was being said. So.. i cannot honestly say that I've seen the movie.

Am i being picky? mayhap, but since i could not get past the (sort of) music, there was little or no treasure for me in this one. :(

The 2006 movie Boston Strangler is not a remake of the 1968 movie with that same name, since they have completely different perspectives on the historic basis of the respective stories, although both versions attempt to blend fact and fiction about events in the early to mid 1960s. The 1968 version accepted as fact that Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to the murders of 13 women, was the Boston Strangler. The 2006 movie (which this review will exclusively refer to from now on) raised doubts on whether DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. The movie is a low-budget, independent film and you can tell it. If a person makes allowances for this, which I am personally willing to do, then the movie has some strong points. The movie is directed by Keith Walley. The character of Albert DeSalvo is played by Mauro Lannini and the character of Detective Riley is played by Jason David. DeSalvo was a real person who confessed to 13 murders and was subsequently murdered in prison. Riley is a fictional creation, used in the movie to raise doubts about the validity of DeSalvo's confession. Lannini gave a chillingly believable performance as DeSalvo and David gave a strong performance as a skeptical police detective. For the most part, the less important characters were portrayed in an adequate manner, although there were some lines that were delivered in a stiff manner and a few lines were overdone. Close to the end, the back story about Riley jerks ahead twice, giving insufficient information about what is going on. If we're given this fictional subplot, then it needed to be developed better. There are two anachronisms in this period piece that jumped out at me. In one scene, a character said, "They're all looking for their 15 minutes," an apparent reference to a statement by Andy Warhol made in 1968, three years after the time of the statement in the movie. I confess that I had to look up the time of Warhol's statement and it is a trivial point. To some people, the other anachronism might also be trivial but I found it highly annoying. The time of Detective Riley's first appearance in the movie was identified as March 1965, slightly more than a year after the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, shocking most adults with their not-quite-shoulder-length hair. Not only did Detective Riley have longer hair than the Beatles wore on Ed Sullivan, it was highly styled. This would be roughly the equivalent today of a police officer showing up for duty wearing purple spiked hair and a red rubber clown nose. This bothered me so much through the movie that it lowered my estimation of the movie from fair to mediocre.