This cheap, lousy entry was my first viewing of the "Becoming Evil" series that documents infamous crimes and serial killers. It might be my last.
Narrated by Tom Kimball, the film is made up of badly rendered historical reenactment footage telling the story of how serial killers are not a modern product- outlaws and gunfighters could be lumped into the category based on their body count. The film then plunges into some surface information about different "serial killers" (a term used dozens of times throughout the film), with talking heads and actual photographs of dead bodies.
This is an interesting hypothesis, one I have been supporting for years in the face of the Hollywood Heroization of many of these career criminals (for me, it started with "American Outlaws," the mostest funnest Jesse James biopic evah), and don't even get me started on Bonnie and Clyde. The film makers gather their material, which never rises above daytime basic cable television quality, and plop it onscreen. Even at under two hours, this took me three days to complete. I was quickly bored, snorting awake when narrator Kimball would imitate one of the historical subjects' voices- they all had Southern drawls, go figure- or when a couple of racial slurs slip out since the film is obsessed with the skin colors of the killers and victims. As artificial intelligence becomes a worry in Hollywood, I think I would prefer it to this internet search-type of writing- dates and names are bandied about, old photographs are shown of people who may not be the subjects talked about, and by the time you get caught up in a case, the film makers breathlessly go on to the next Wiki-sounding biography or bring up a few modern serial killers for comparison. Come on, the Servant Girl Murders, the Bender family, and John Wesley Hardin deserve their own dark documentaries, not the scant coverage here.
True crime and historical documentary viewers will be very disappointed in this, as will the average moviegoer. Additional online homework shouldn't be a requirement after watching a film like this.
Stats:
(2021) 108 min. (1/10)
-Written and Directed by Ronald C. Meyer
-Featuring Tom Kimball, Bob Boze Bell, Nick Volich, Kathy Weiser-Alexander, Rick Beyer, Dirk Duran-Gibson, Larry D. O'Neal, Deb Goodrich, Tom Goodrich, Gary Chilcote, Marc Ferguson, Doris Scism, Jared Chatterley, Steven Zimmer
(Not Rated)- Physical violence, gun violence, sexual violence references, some extreme gore, some profanity, strong adult situations
