Kemper

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.

I rated this movie a 2 out of 10 for the simple reason it is fictional. The story of Ed Kemper is interesting especially to people who enjoy reading and studying serial killers like him, but this movie isn't that. They take the name of Ed Kemper and use it to make a movie and use the whole "based on actual events" trick to get it to sell. While they did use little tid bits here and there that were factual(like Ed sticking his moms vocal cords in the garbage disposal), this movie was fictional. That ruined the movie for me knowing that while watching it I wasn't seeing the actual story of Ed Kemper. Overall, if this was just another movie I would rate this up to a 5 for it just being a straight up independent film of new actors and directors(people have to start somewhere). But since this film used a serial killer's name to sell and claim to tell a true story, I give a 2.

This movie was downright wretched. I watched it on Showtime Extreme and found myself cleaning while it was on, it was THAT awful.

What offends me most is this has nothing to do with the killings.

The real story is so much more compelling. A 15 year old kills both grandparents, then gets committed, only to go on a killing spree when he gets out of the psychiatric facility at the age of 21. He was also 6'9".

This film has the era wrong...this was the late 60s and early 70s. It also has all the facts, essentially wrong. Kemper was not an average-size man in his 40s. He was a giant of a man in his early 20s.

A decent film would have recreated the entire case, so there would at least be come thought provoking questions (i.e. how do you let out a psychopath to kill again). Halloween (the remake), is probably closer to the true story than this one was.

This was just a cheesy, badly-done splatter film that slapped the name Kemper on it, for no apparent reason.

"Psycho" really had little to do with the Ed Gein case. But it didn't really pretend to, and it was extremely well made.

"Kemper," on the other hand.....bottom of the barrel.

First of all, Ed Kemper was 6'9" tall - the actor playing him was short and way too old for the role. Kemper trolled college campuses for his victims and would not have been able to get to as many young women if he were in his 40's as he was portrayed.

Kemper was extremely intelligent and likable, but this merely portrays him as a one-note freak. Which he was not.

Dialogue terrible, and cell phones and computers in the 1970's! Who was the production designer? Glad I didn't pay to see this one. I wish a really fine movie would be made about this brilliant killer - too bad he wasn't able to use his smarts for the good of the world.

Even Kemper (he is still alive in prison) would roll with laughter at the way he's portrayed here.

Boring boring boring and pathetic piece of tripe.