Ted Bundy (2002)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

A different way of telling a story

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

What I mean is that this movie is on some level revolting in its very nature - It is exploiting a real life monster for entertainment. It is a both a biopic and a horror movie - Because just to portray what this person did is to portray horror.Although some may find the lead performance a bit over the top I think it's fairly appropriate to what the real person was like. This movie gives much more of a sense of what Bundy really did than the Mark Harmon TV movie "The Deliberate Stranger" showed. His evil, his sadism is veritably pushed in your face. The sexual dimension of his crimes is graphically shown.Now I do think the ending was contrived with the "rape" of Bundy by the guards And the execution of him by an attractive female guard. But a lot of the earlier scenes are all too accurate and believable presentations of his real life. You don't have to embellish his crimes to reach horror.Although there are some memorable scenes in the Nemec-starring "Bundy A Legacy of Evil" Which followed this a few years later And also graphically depicts his sadism I find this the most believable performance of Bundy. Virtually all of it sadly happened as it is depicted.

Before seeing this film, I have seen a documentary about the cold blooded killer but I don't know much of him 100%. All I knew was that he hasn't known his real father and his mother was 16 when she had him. Also of course I knew he killed a lot of poor innocent young girls.However, after seeing this film, I have learned a lot of who he was as a person. I know Michael Reilly Burke isn't the real Ted Bundy but, he really did look like him in a killer style of form. He was honestly scary, lemme tell ya!I would probably freak out if I ever saw him on the street or even on films. Although I'm sure he is not like that but still, he played a risky character who was for real, a murderer!I honestly can say, this is a not bad horror/crime/biography film even if it was considered the worst movies to watch!

Ted Bundy is anything but a stranger to our screens; the fascination with this personification of evil, the man who became the first serial killer – in name if not in deed – knows no bounds, and certainly didn't for the daffy women who became his trial groupies. We see none of that here because his trials are glossed over, clearly something had to be in order to keep the film to a manageable length.Michael Reilly Burke puts in a convincing performance, and there are some graphic scenes, but arguably the two most memorable are where he kidnaps Carol DaRonch – called Tina Gabler here – and gets the worst of it from a young woman who fought like a tigress knowing full well that if she didn't escape his clutches then and there, she would not get out of that car alive. The other scene is where across a prison table his girlfriend finally sees him for the monster he is. Bundy's arrest for the DaRonch kidnapping should have been the end of his reign of evil; it beggars belief how such a clearly dangerous individual was permitted to escape not once but twice. The result was the sorority house murders and then his final victim – the youngest we can say for certain – 12 year old Kimberly Leach. She was given a "nom de plume" here, but her name slipped out in the archive footage at the end.There has been criticism of this film from other reviewers, but as with similar efforts, like the more recent "...Dirty Little Secret", the film-makers strived for authenticity and achieved it in some degree. It is our fault rather than theirs that so many of us consider serial murder to be entertainment.

Now, be prepared, because I'm about to save you nearly 2 hours of your life. I can't help but feel that somebody watched American Psycho and decided that it needed to be remade, badly, very badly. What you should have here is a film about Ted Bundy; a sick and twisted man who committed crimes that would make the devil himself lose a boner. It should be a film that is locked inside Bundy's head. A psychoanalysis of a man constantly battling the urge to kill yet never winning and somehow thriving in his defeat. But no, here it is folks, the American Psycho remake I sure as hell don't remembering ordering. I find it incredibly disrespectful to the victims and their families that any murder scenes were shown at all, let alone the fact that they were this graphic. It's torture porn, pure torture porn, the very stuff Bundy ironically blamed for his murders in the first place. The film has no weight to it and is purely a very shoddy attempt at a horror film. All in all, you will gain nothing from this film in relation to Bundy. If you pretend this isn't about Bundy, that the characters are fictional and not genuine people whose families are still no doubt effected everyday by their loss, then what you have is still a below standard horror.