Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

Wonderful character development!

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

I seriously put off Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer for three decades because I thought it would be too gruesome. Bah!This movie is easily thrown into three segments: It begins with aftermaths, it follows with "story" and ends with what you'd expect. In fact, there's nothing here you wouldn't anticipate except one thing…Have all the cops been fired? I know there are some great 2016 debates on the police handling our citizens, but this was the 80s! I mean, the movie's title gives away the "protagonist's" profession and we see him do a little serial killing, but nothing major (even for 1980s standards) and no one ever suspects a thing. In fact, we're lead to believe 100% of his victims have no close ties and will remain unnoticed in the afterlife for, I dunno, eternity?Basically, stalker Henry is seeking out women to rid the world of, but he's soon stalked by his roommate's sister and at the same time takes said roommate under his wing.It might have been budgetary as this looked like it fell in the "Who's got $25,000 to make film?" category, but the fact that no police activity takes place, I couldn't get on board. Plus, it was so incredibly slow-paced and nowhere near as gory as I thought it promoted. It's passable and has some decent setup scenes, but it's not recommended and you should really be craving 1970's-80's American Psychos to follow Henry around.***Final thoughts: Day 1 Movie in the Can! I'm watching a NEW-2-ME horror movie every day of October 2016 and this one I've been waiting to see for decades, but never got around to it. Wish I had and just put it out of my misery.

An utterly discomforting journey into the mind of a sadist, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is exactly what its subtitle suggests. Brutal, disturbing & absolutely uncompromising with its content, Henry is unsettling from the very first frame but what really separates it from other examples of its genre is its stringent focus on telling the story from the killer's perspective.Loosely based on real life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, Henry covers the crime spree of its titular character who goes around randomly killing people without any remorse or empathy. The plot mainly focuses on his stay in Chicago where he lives with Otis, a drug dealer he befriended in prison, and the inner turmoil he undergoes when the latter's sister comes to stay with them.Co-written & directed by John McNaughton, Henry establishes an uneasy tone within the first few minutes in which we see this sociopath driving around the town but interspersed within that segment are snippets of the brutality he leaves behind on every corner. Most of Henry's murders take place off the screen and yet its effect is deeply felt, which can be attributed to the film's clever use of sound effects.The film is truly an unhinged view of a mind filled with reckless hate but it is also extremely honest in illustrating the root cause of Henry's evilness, his philosophy of life & the ruthless but calculated nature of his crimes. Shot on a shoestring budget, the movie makes use of real locations & settings that gives its story an added sense of realism, which in turn ends up making the experience all the more horrifying.Despite the low budget, the technical aspects are no slouch here for the film creatively uses its limited resources to full potential and all of it works in harmony to serve its story as well as characters, whether it's the bleak shots of Chicago streets, the stark arrangement of few scenes juxtaposed together, the pace at which its plot unfolds, the brilliant use of sound & music to further amplify its ominous vibe, and keeping it as true to real life as possible.Coming to the performances, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer features a committed cast in Michael Rooker, Tom Towles & Tracy Arnold, with all three of them doing an excellent job in their given roles. Rooker is obviously the show-stealer here for his rendition of Henry is very chilling, effective & exquisitely balanced. Towles begins his act as if his character is dim but as the plot progresses, he adopts a highly repulsive persona that's destined to shock many, and even Arnold does well with what she's given.On an overall scale, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer isn't a film for everyone. It's an absolute horror show that takes a no-holds-barred approach with its content, swims against the tide of its time by discarding a moral conclusion, is bolstered by three convincing performances, utilises its available resources amazingly well, and despite lacking the graphic depiction of murders, barring one family massacre sequence, can leave its viewers emotionally scarred. A low-budget classic that shows that people in real life are capable of inflicting more horror than any monster on film, Henry is definitely worth a shot.

What makes Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer so harrowing, so numbing, is the absence of any judgment of the characters. The film was shot on 16mm film in one month's time for $110,000 in 1985. It did not premiere until 1990, and became one of a handful of international independent films to instigate the NC-17 rating. It does not contain buckets of blood, nor is it particularly explicit sexually. It is, from any and every angle, an omniscient portrait. Two naked women are shown dead, having already been brutally murdered, one in a field and the other in a bedroom, while a troubled man named Henry drives around Chicago. We hear their screams. All we see are their mangled bodies. That is all we need. And it is stomach-churning.Itinerant Henry and his prison buddy Otis are cold-blooded and chillingly casual murderers. Played by gravelly character actor Michael Rooker, Henry never appears or behaves like anyone out of the ordinary. We get the sense that he hardly ever thinks about murder, except for when he does it. As for Otis, played by the imposing Tom Towles, think of when you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, versus one after your morning coffee and one after dinner. Think of the discipline and organization inherent in the latter. That's Otis's problem kind of, only he's not just the one pack a day, he's about five and the tobacco is laced with children's tears. That's why he truly brings out the things about individuals we never see. He does many unforgivably monstrous things here, but he still manages to go about his business without remorse or fear of getting caught, so we presume he's just a good ol' boy with a short fuse. And he is; he just goes a few steps further than most.Portrait is not about the thin line between good and evil. Portrait sees no line. There are innumerable films about serial killers. It is a permanent fixture in the Middle American zeitgeist. We fear them, so we turn them into our own bloodthirsty entertainment. They have become mythology for us to use in order to take our morbid curiosities and sadistic fantasies out for a safe spin. Even after this definitive film on the subject, it is not often that a movie dares to portray the real ones, unmitigated by thriller tropes.John McNaughton and his late collaborator Richard Fire do not feel the need to pigeonhole or explain them, not just as movie characters but as people. Without a frame of compromise, McNaughton defies the hankering to pump up the volume, to frame Henry in chiaroscuro or Otis with Dutch angles. When most human beings see the things that Henry and Otis actually go through with---feeling no other rationale, it would seem, than that it's simply something for them to do---our immediate reaction is to ask how someone could do such things, and why. As Nick Nolte says as a homicide detective in Ole Bornedal's 1997 thriller, "Even when we catch the killer, they wanna know the how and why."That character would agree with McNaughton and Fire that people like Henry and Otis, are well beyond the need to justify what they do. What explanation could there be for slaughtering an entire random family, while recording the whole incident on a camcorder to then watch it later with the blank beer-chugging catatonia of watching an inning of baseball? Horror films, though designed to scare us, are also designed to make us feel safe. The killer was humiliated by his quarries in high school, or has split personality disorder. This film is not a horror film. Explanations are just a fiction to make us feel safe. This film does not have explanations. It has events, key moments in the lives of guys who like to drink beer, smoke weed, hang out with Otis' sister and kill random strangers.

The real life evil of convicted killer Henry Lee Lucas has been well documented elsewhere. This film is a semi-fictional account, based on Lucas' "confessions" ... for what they're worth. In the film, Henry lives with his ex-prison buddy Otis, and Otis' sister Becky, played well by Tracy Arnold. The setting is Chicago. The historical time period is unclear.Most, though not all, of the murders take place off screen, mercifully. It's still, at times, a grizzly affair. Much of the film is like a diary, in that we see Henry, Otis, and Becky engaged in slow, lengthy, pointless conversations, amid drab surroundings. Oh it's grim.This is supposed to be a character study. But there is no arc. Henry's robotic life is so monomaniacal as to preclude dramatic variation or change. What little substantive material there is could have been presented in thirty minutes.The film's pace is slow. Scenes are very, very drawn-out. Screen time is consumed with characters eating grim meals, playing cheap cards, and driving around in a rundown old car. It's as if the scene on page 62 of the script could have been switched with the scene on page 16, and viewers would never know the difference. It's all just an unending grim ... sameness.The film's images are grainy. Lighting is subdued. Music is appropriately eerie and creepy, but manipulative.Real-life serial killers are too diverse in backgrounds and personalities for this film to offer any generalized insight. And the film conveys little understanding of Lucas himself. Sometimes a film that is grim can be entertaining or insightful. This one isn't. It's just pointless.