Review of "Ted Bundy" DVD (2002)

Review by Staci Layne Wilson for Horror.com

After the excellent television mini-series, The Deliberate Stranger, there seems little point in making another movie about Ted Bundy. But in making an R-rated slash-fest made for the big screen (Ted Bundy played at film festivals only) and now on DVD, you can show several rapes and murders in naked and gory detail.

Hey, I'm all for the gory details -- but in Ted Bundy, that is almost all there is. There isn't much about Bundy's background, little about what made him so charming and nondescript, and nothing on the victim's or police's sides of the story. I found fault with the movie in several areas: for some inexplicable reason, several oft-published real names were changed; there were glaring costume, music and dialogue errors in the 1970s setting, not to mention a plethora of factual errors; and much of the flashy editing and camera angles were more student-film than art-film. There are an awful lot of interesting things about Bundy's life, capture, trial, and death which were completely ignored.

And yet... Ted Bundy held my attention from start to finish. The actor who plays the serial killer, Michael Reilly Burke, is very well-cast (though he does have a shallowness about him, which still leaves Mark Harmon's portrayal of Bundy far and away the best) and the scenes of rape, aberrant sexual practices and murder are properly disturbing and not the least bit embellished. The killings are cold, brutal and quick. The scenes depicting bludgeonings, bodiless heads, and mummified bodies are stark, shocking and maybe a little too realistic. Director Matthew Bright ("Freeway" and "The Forbidden Zone") does a good job of showing an unvarnished, unromanticized view of the notorious killer and conjures up a chilling, somehow believable atmosphere.

The DVD includes commentary by Bright, in which he sorta kinda explains why he left out all the important details:  "I wasn't interested in shooting that stuff." Overall, Bright doesn't come off as too bright, as he talks about the women in the film ("Can't remember her name," "She's jailbait," he admits he changed the victim's names, then says, "the names I used are of every girl I have been intimate with since the eighth grade," and so on). But perhaps it's apropos -- a misogynist making a movie about a misogynist. At any rate, the commentary is amusing if for nothing other than its blatant stupidity (there are more insensitive remarks, aimed at a variety of folks).

The subject matter of serial killers is not new for the film's distributor, First Look, which also released Dahmer and Ed Gein. Of the trio, Ted Bundy is the best.