Its as if he took a page from the book of some of our sleazier and more sociopathic politicians: Deny, deny, deny.Seen in that light, Ted Bundy was the ultimate compartmentalized monster.
He wasnt the first hideous murderer to become infamous in the media age; that would be Richard Speck, in 1966. But Speck, at the time, seemed a killer out of central casting; he looked like the monumentally damaged cold-blooded demon-creep he was. Charles Manson, likewise, in his zombie-eyed snake-charmer way, was ideally cast for the role of savage hippie psycho. In the key decade of his crimes, the 1970s, when he was caught and put on trial and rose to a new kind of mass notoriety, a lot of people had trouble wrapping their heads around the fact that this guy could have done what he did. Dramatizations, true crime shows, documentaries like the current Netflix offering Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (created by Berlinger): It all feeds the lurid maw of that intrigue. Extremely Wicked Shockingly Evil And Vile Poster Movie Like ExtremelyBut is there something voyeuristic and unseemly about it Or can the fascination with Ted Bundy thats tapped by a movie like Extremely Wicked escape exploitation to become, in its way, a valid and even moral dramatic impulse. In my judgment, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is an honestly unsettling and authentic inquiry into the question of who Ted Bundy was, how he operated, what his capture and trial and ongoing infamy has meant, and what, if anything, his existence tells us about our individual relationship to toxic evil. That said, his story is also freaky as hell, in a jaw-dropping you-cant-make-this-stuff-up way. It now plays as one of those only-in-the-70s sagas, like the Patty Hearst affair, where the nation was spellbound by a criminal spectacle that seemed to say something about how the very essence of our communality was falling apart. With his hair grown out into a sort of Bert Convy do, Efron looks the part just fine, and he uses his insidious charisma to grab us from the start, when Ted, haunting a college bar in Seattle in 1969, meets Liz Kendall ( Lily Collins ), the single mom who will become his romantic and domestic partner throughout the years of his crimes. Ted is a kind of actor, a maniac playing a role, yet doing it with such sincerity and flair that its not just a role. Extremely Wicked Shockingly Evil And Vile Poster How To Play AgainstBut hes a shrewd enough manipulator to know when to play up that image, and to know how to play against it as well. He woos the nave, fawn-like Liz, who thinks no man could be interested in a secretary with a small daughter, and when hes in her presence he puts on a major show of being kind, warm, doting, and gentle. But from what we know (the film is based on Kendalls 1981 memoir The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy), this was a genuine attachment and the fact that Ted, once he gets arrested, lives in trembling fear of the idea that he might lose Liz doesnt seem far-fetched. And that in no way undermines the films portrait of his warped landscape of interior mayhem. What it shows us, with a shudder, is how he can hide that violence even from himself. Hes arrested, picked out of a line-up, and charged with the kidnapping of a victim he didnt succeed in killing. And thats the first act in what becomes the surreal horror circus of his legal odyssey. He is put on trial for kidnapping, and is now vaguely linked to various disappearances of young women in Washington, Utah, and Colorado. But the evidence, from our vantage, is scanty; mostly its his beige VW bug, as well as a police drawing of a suspect who looks like him. Its odd, and dislocating, to see a crime drama set in the late 70s and to realize that though this was hardly the Stone Age, the cops didnt have forensics yet, at least not the way they do now.
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