*Get "Albert Fish: In Sin He Found Salvation" on Amazon here*
*Get "The Gray Man" on Amazon here*
*Watch "Serial Killer Culture" on Screambox through Amazon here*
*Get Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer! by Harold Schechter on Amazon here*
While a sometimes interesting documentary about child murderer Albert Fish, film maker John Borowski tries to one up the horror of Fish's crimes with little success.
On the surface, Albert Fish was a kindly old man shuffling around New York in the 1930s. In reality, he was a child molester, killer, and cannibal who was regularly nabbed by police on lesser charges but released and not charged for being harmless to society at large. Little did society know he was racking up a body count when he wasn't feeding his sadomasochistic lifestyle.
Dramatically narrated by Tony Jay, the documentary is very informative. Fish was a single father to six children, all adults when he was finally caught and later executed, and his descendants are still around today. His crimes were monstrous, and he wrote about them with a sick glee, preying on the impoverished because no one cared about them enough to look into their missing children cases- who's going to kidnap the child of a poor family if they can't pay a ransom? Katherine Ramsland is interviewed for her psychological insights, and artist Joe Coleman is interviewed because he owns the original confessional letter written by Fish about the last murder he committed.
Borowski's direction and script run hot and cold as his budget can't quite cover his desire to make this more than a talking-heads-and-reenactments documentary. Cheap video effects and drawn-out fantasy elements to Fish's crimes don't play as well as they may have looked on paper. This is an unrated documentary, so there are some nude scenes and profanity, but not any gory dramatizations of Fish's crimes. Coleman is always an interesting interview subject, but he gets caught up in his own navel gazing about Fish, assigning him ethereal qualities and elevating him to god-like status, when he was actually an insane individual who needs to be studied by forensic psychiatrists to find out just what happened to create him. I would be interested to see if his children and their progeny suffered the same mental problems, and what kind of lives they led knowing about Grandpa Albert.
Also known as simply "Albert Fish," this documentary isn't as unwatchable as some reviews would have you believe, but I wish Borowski would have stuck to the facts of the case and not tried to subjugate the viewers' imagination as well. Fish was evil enough on his own, he didn't need help.
Stats:
(2007) 86 min. (5/10)
-Written and Directed by John Borowski
-With Tony Jay, Albert Fish, Oto Brezina, Joe Coleman, Katherine Ramsland, Derek Gaspar, Cooney Horvath, Garrett Shriver, Nathan Hall, Kasey Skinner, Harvey Fisher, Bob Dunsworth, David Sherman
-(Not Rated)- Physical violence, sexual violence, violence against children, some extreme gore, very strong violence against children references, profanity, very strong sexual references, some sexual content, nudity, very strong adult situations
-Media Viewed: Streaming
