If you’re like me and you need a comprehensive guide to the big flicks of 2023, you’re in luck. This year is easily one of the biggest years yet for Hollywood, boasting everything from supernatural indies and stylized horror to comic book tentpoles and summer blockbusters. Finally released, it has, if anything, benefited by the delay five years ago, we would not have known how much Charles Reece resembles Jeffrey Dahmer, how little the face can reveal of the soul.New year, new movies to add to our watch roster. The film is realistic and matterof-fact, subdued compared to Friedkin's great film of evil, " The Exorcist." Alex McArthur, as the killer, is as unemotional and inoffensive as the protagonist of " Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer." The movie was completed five years ago and then caught in the bankruptcy of the Dino De Laurentiis studio. It simply lays out the facts of a series of gruesome crimes, and then shows us how our gut feelings of good and evil grow confused after the testimony. "Rampage" is not, however, a polemical film it doesn't press its points and doesn't spend a lot of time on theory. ![]() You kill somebody, you fry - unless the verdict is murky or there were extenuating circumstances. So it goes.įriedkin does not quite say so in as many words, but his message is clear: Those who commit heinous crimes should pay for them, sane or insane. The prosecution offers an expert psychiatrist known as "Doctor Death" because of his invariable diagnosis of sanity. He was insane, the other side argues, because his crimes could not have been contemplated by a sane man. Reece was sane, the prosecution argues, because he planned ahead to buy the gun and fled to avoid arrest. We are not much persuaded by the court arguments for either side. The difference between these two theories is the death penalty. His killer's crimes are beyond our conception of possible human behavior, and then, in court, he is defended on the grounds that he must have been insane, and prosecuted on the grounds that he acted reasonably in so many other ways that he must have been sane. Friedkin plays with two decks and is happy to stack them both. This is not a movie about murder so much as a movie about insanity - as it applies to murder in modern American criminal courts. The act of a reasonable man.Įventually we see where Friedkin is going with the story. Cornered at the gas station where he provides service with a smile, Reece leaps the back fence and runs away. We meet a cop ( Michael Biehn) who tracks the killer, and then we see Reece captured by a simple means: He is identified by an eyewitness. Jeffrey Dahmer, a bystander said on television, looked like such a nice young man.įriedkin tells the story of his killer more or less as a police procedural. ![]() ![]() ![]() Serial killing is the crime of our times, and who knows what confluence of forces has led to these strange people who stare out at us from the covers of true crime paperbacks, their appearance as normal as their crimes are bizarre. William Friedkin's "Rampage" is based, the movie assures us, on a real story. He doesn't even make much of an attempt to evade discovery, wearing the same windbreaker to all of his crimes. And yet the man, whose name is Charles Reece, is played by Alex McArthur as the kind of guy you'd see at a football game, or out washing his car. Nobody in his right mind could commit an act like this, without apparent motive or even with one. A few days later, he strikes again, in broad daylight, walking into a home and butchering a woman while her helpless child looks on in terror. The police, confronted by the murder scene, call it the work of a madman.
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