Ted Bundy

What is the point of making this movie? Next to this, the TV series, "The Deliberate Stranger," is a masterpiece of information and good taste. I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later it would occur to someone that there was a nickel or two left in the story of Ted Bundy, who slaughtered and raped all those young women and was put to death for it.

But how to improve on the TV series? Simple, you throw out almost all of the background involving family and police and leave in the murders, only this time, this being a feature film, you can show the slaughters and the rapes in all their gory detail.

Mission accomplished. It's a disgusting and exploitative movie. We don't get to know any of the victims of course. They're as faceless as the guys that Dirty Harry shoots during a holdup. Nothing about their families of course. Nothing about Ted Bundy either, for that matter -- not that there's very much to know about a major anti-social personality who invents himself as he goes along. Why does he kill? He has a little speech he makes to his girl friend about finding out that he was illegitimate, but so what? Who knows? Who cares? We don't know how the police manage to catch him twice. All of that sort of thing would detract from the time devoted to the murders. If we learned anything more about the police or about Ted, we'd be able to see fewer bloody naked female bodies being slung about. Only the juicy parts of the story are left in, with just enough non-juicy stuff for the film makers to deny that only the juicy parts of the story are left in.

The last murder we see is that of Ted Bundy himself. He's electrocuted in Florida. Does the director skip any details of this final death? Are you kidding? We get to learn so much about how electrocutions are carried out that we could probably follow the procedure as well as the professionals. I'll bet you didn't know that before the victim becomes part of a serial circuit with the chair he has cotton forced into his rectum and made to wear Depends. The ghouls must be jumping in their seat with excitement. More time is spent on the electrocution (almost 10 minutes) than on any of the other deaths in the movie. If this isn't "pandering" then the word has no referent at all.

The acting is passable. The direction, aside from the content of the movie, isn't objectionable. It's not very good either. Okay -- example. Bundy escapes from prison. The whole country is searching for him. Cut to his former girl friend sleeping alone in her bed. The door to her room slowly opens and Bundy enters without a shirt but holding a machete. He tiptoes to the bed, raises the knife above his head, and -- WHACK. But what do you know, folks. It's a nightmare. We know it's a nightmare because the girl wakes up screaming and shoves her face into the camera lens. I don't know how far back in cinematic history this hoary device goes, the wakee sitting up and screaming into the lens. The first time I remember seeing something like it was, I think, in "Carrie," about a quarter of a century ago. It was an effective shocker -- once. Now it's almost obligatory. Instead of wincing, you yawn. (I also think a moratorium should be placed on scenes in which a patient is being wheeled hurriedly on a gurney down a hospital corridor and the camera takes the patient's point of view, so we see all these worried faces staring down into the lens and snapping medical-type orders at one another. While we're at it, let's have a moratorium on any further commercial use of Beethoven's ninth symphony. Let's throw in Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks," too.)

There is an especially nauseating scene of Bundy chasing a girl through the woods. He's just kidnapped her from the beach, so she's wearing only a skimpy bikini. She's running, howling, falling down, getting up, running again with the camera a few feet behind her at every step, every fall, so that the viewer gets a good sexy view of her wobbling buttocks before Bundy catches her and bashes her brains out. The shot may have been plagiarized from "I Spit on Your Grave," which see.

I'm happy that censorship is relaxed enough to allow gore on screen but this film provides an exercise in the use of moral restraint. Just exactly who are we supposed to identify with while the camera follows the terrified victim through the woods? What pleasure is to be derived from simply looking at the butchery of strangers? What comes next? Should we skip ALL of the background details, drop any concern with insight or ethics, and just have one and a half hour's worth of some nameless monster chopping up nameless bodies and splattering everything with blood and intestines? If that's not the direction in which a film like this points, then what IS the reason it was made in the first place?

If you are really into serial killers, I strongly recommend this. In some ways it's quite unique, and the lead performance is very menacing. The film almost seems like a farce at times, but in a way that perhaps captures the surreal aspect of serial killing in a way rarely, if ever caught well on camera before(Although American Psycho touches this area as well.). It's far from a perfect film, but it is a worthy watch for many fans of the subject. While the tone of the film may offend some deeply, for others who can stomach the crudeness, they actually may find this film to be very funny at times. I know I did. Now don't get me wrong, the things Ted Bundy did are obviously not funny at all. Nonetheless this film takes a bit of a different look at things from the perspective of Bundy, and at times it can be quite entertaining here. In this way it ends up being a strange but somewhat thought provoking film. As I said, if you are interested in the genre, I strongly recommend taking a look at this film. It's not the best Bundy film, but it is well worth a watch for many. Some of the funniest moments in the film have to do more with Bundy's apparent kleptomaniac tendencies. Some could say that this film is fairly disrespectful to his victims and overall is in bad taste. I can understand this definitely. Though I felt the film sort of evens itself out in the end by showing what a coward Bundy really was. Nor did I feel that the film glorified Bundy in any way. What you see is a monster of a man for sure, which is what he was. A monster when in control, but more like a crybaby when he wasn't. As with all serial killer films, watch at your own risk. 7/10.

"Ted Bundy" is definitely one of the most unpleasant viewing experiences I struggled myself through this year, but - then again - that is only logical since the actual Ted Bundy also was one of the most unpleasant persons to ever walk the planet's surface. And then still, I certainly don't have to complain about feeling unpleasant, because the (too) many people that crossed paths with Bundy, notably the victims and their families, truly must have gone through hell.

Between 2000 and 2009, there was a gigantic wave of true crime movies about US serial killers. Since horror cinema was going through a long non-fertile and uninspired period, this was a God's gift for many directors (*) because portraits of real serial killers don't much of a plot. All the notorious figures received one or even several biopics: Ed Gein, Aileen Wuornos, Zodiac Killer, John Wayne Gacy, BTK-killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, the Lonely Heart Killers. Ted Bundy could not be left out of this list, of course, but just as Bundy himself was an unusual killer who could not be classified within the known profiles, his biopic also can't be compared to all the routine and inferior films about other serial killers.

Why is "Ted Bundy" worth your time if you have the stomach for it? For starters because there was a multi-talented and promising (at the time, at least) director involved. Matthew Bright demonstrated, with the excellent "Freeway" and "Confessions of a Trick Baby", that he doesn't avoid sensitive taboo subjects like teen prostitution, drug addiction and child abuse. He was the ideal man to narrate the shocking but story of Bundy as raw, nihilistic, and disturbing as it really was.

Secondly, Matthew Bright was enormously "helped" by how absurd and unfathomable the facts in the case of Ted Bundy were. His story is one of those that simply must be factual because, if it had been written as fiction, people would claim it's totally implausible and unrealistic. How is it possible that Bundy made so many victims and remained under the radar for so long, even though his modus operandi and means of transportation were so conspicuous? How can a woman remain so loyal to a man who abuses and humiliates her, like Bundy did to Lee? How can it be that someone like Bundy escapes from jail twice or receives declarations of love from hundreds of women after his conviction? The explicit violence and cruelty in this film is often hard to look at, notably the scene in the cabin and the "submission fantasy", especially when realizing this freak and monster could do whatever he pleased for several years.

Be prepared to leave your lights on in order to sleep for at least three days after first viewing this morbidly fascinating account of mass-murdering, intelligent sociopath Ted Bundy and his descent into soul-less depravity. As a study in human nature gone wrong, this is a fascinating body of work. Particularly because this movie is, unfortunately, based on the facts, I am grateful that the viewer is not forced to witness Bundy's every demonic act, though little is actually left to mystery. Chilling, thought-provoking, disturbing, tragic, and well-made, this movie is an often shocking account of one cold-blooded monster's reign of terror.

The best part for this viewer is that the movie allows us to see Bundy sentenced to death.

A. Freimann

This movie was very hard to watch. The guy who played Ted Bundy was actually very convincing. His performance was disturbing and the murders bothered. Not that they were in graphic detail. It's just the way he committed them. Also, the rape scenes made me sick. I'm very much against rape. So that was the only downside to the film. But other than that, it was well acted , disturbing, and frightening. Pick this film up!!!