Directed By Daniel Farrands

Starring – Chad Michael Murray, Holland Roden, Jake Hays

The Plot – A specter roams the highways of a gritty 1970s America, his name is Ted Bundy (Murray). Hunting him are intrepid FBI agents Kathleen McChesney (Roden) and Robert Ressler (Hays), organizers of the largest manhunt in history to apprehend America’s most infamous serial killer.

This film is currently not rated

Ted Bundy: American Boogeyman | Official Trailer | Voltage Pictures – YouTube

POSITIVES

– Star power. While not a complete performance in essence, the work of Murray as the titular role does at least satisfy in the uneasy creepiness of Bundy, with all of his deranged psychology that other actors haven’t quite attained. This is a welcome shape-shifting portrayal for Chad, whose roles have been mostly typecast as the pretty boy to this point, but here expands his wings by combining the danger and ferocity of one of America’s greatest serial killers, all the while enhancing his capabilities for the way the audiences see him. What’s most notably missing, however, is the exuberating charm of Bundy, which was a satisfying compliment to an already attractive man, and often the downfall for how Bundy himself could take advantage of vulnerability. It’s hinted at slightly during the opening sequence, but then forgotten quickly after, leaving us with a series of interactions that the ladies feel are every bit as unnerving as we the audience are interpreting them, presenting Bundy as just another bad guy with nothing unique about his demeanor. On top of this, I was pleasantly surprised to see Lin Shaye make a cameo appearance as Bundy’s on-screen mother with her own psychological demons to burn. Shaye’s impeccable timing and displaced priorities help illustrate a growing disconnect in the Bundy household, which convey where this mess may or may not have started, and give Lin another opportunity to emit a scene-stealing presence, which does enhance the movie’s big screen appeal.

– Paved pacing. “American Boogeyman” isn’t an exciting or riveting movie to say the least, but it also isn’t one that I was never particularly bored with, speaking volumes about the sequencing that prescribes very little down time between its moments of physical conflict. The movie begins with Bundy thick in the middle of his career as a legendary murderer, wasting little time with setting the motions in place to the story’s essential plot. On top of this, the second act takes us through much of his various entanglements with the law, as well as a fictional underlining in lore that sets the stage for what’s to come. Finally, the conflict itself takes us to the sorority massacre that Bundy is most famous for, in tow conjuring up the biggest devastation for the moments it can be heard the loudest, and serving as the primary culmination to a lifetime of work. Because of such, the movie breezes by quickly enough to keep me invested without ever truly testing my patience, offering 90 easy minutes of escapism that never truly bored me, for reasons good or bad.

– Atmospheric chill. If there’s one element to production that Farrands does articulate seamlessly, it’s the constant volume of ominous atmosphere that constantly plagues our protagonists, and adds an element of home field advantage to Bundy, despite his many geographic moves throughout. Don’t get me wrong, the elements themselves aren’t as refined as a James Wan movie or anything of that nature, but they do persist with a surprisingly improved manner of focus that wasn’t privy during Farrands other yearly worst disasters “The Haunting of Sharon Tate” or “The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson”. Instead, “American Boogeyman” conjures up as much of the isolation factor and intimidation for these women when being faced with a good looking stranger playing against their internal voices telling them to turn away. It doesn’t quite transfer into scares or scenes of palpable tension, but it does prove Farrands has improved in the aesthetic touches of his presentations, which compliment the elevated lighting accordingly into momentarily fooling audiences into thinking they’re watching a mediocre slasher.

NEGATIVES

– Misfired direction. Once again, Farrands is the biggest adversity to his own visionary prominence, crafting Bundy’s narrative as a hybrid between a TV procedural and the infamous B-movie cult classic “Slumber Party Massacre”. Because of such, the elements of a slasher movie are most prominent in everything from heavy-handed narration, to sketchy lighting that feels anything but natural, to even an antagonist who seems to get stronger the longer the movie persists. Nothing here remotely feels original or riveting in the sense that it reinvents the wheel for literally decades old concepts and themes that did it far better with far less at their disposal, leaving this a predictably bland hodgepodge of fantasy for the Ted Bundy story that doesn’t capitalize on a single solitary element of what made him special as a serial killer in the first place. Instead, Bundy splits time with a detective duo who are hot on his trail, and unfortunately dominate a majority of the screen time, which is sure to alienate most of its audience when they catch on by the halfway point.

– One note characterization. Adding to the conventions within a slasher narrative, are a series of supporting personalities who can’t even spell the word. Nearly everyone in this movie is a slasher movie prototype, beginning with two dumb girls leaving a restaurant and picking the most inappropriate time to blaze a joint, and finishing with four girls in a sorority who were about as diverse and complex as Alvin and the Chipmunks being deciphered by three shirts with the first letter of their names on them. Their appearances alone make each of them easy to pick apart with their obvious intention, and the dialogue that supports each of them is laughably painful and foreshadowing, with lines like “We’re not going dancing? So much for Kai until you die”. The detective protagonists are just as bad, with Roden’s McChesney being written as a basic super serious TV cop, and the officers surrounding her at the precinct being politically incorrect cartoons mumbling lines like “What’s with all the dead chicks” and “We need some good looks here to soften up the suspects”.

– Polar opposite. My main problem with Zac Efron’s “Extremely Wicked and Shockingly Vile” (Still the worst title in cinema history), was there being too many moments of the charming Bundy, and not enough of him executing the ferocity of his vendetta. This is exactly the opposite for “American Boogeyman”, as these moments of nuance and build are sacrificed for nothing but violence and brutality, to which none of it is satisfying in its captivity. Not only is the violence mostly conveyed from the victim’s perspective, allowing us very little insight into the detection of what is being conveyed by Bundy, but it’s also rendered with a foggy out of focus distortion meant to convey the disheveled state of the victims at hand. So there’s certainly violence, in fact, nothing but it, which undercuts the building suspension, and leads us to several sequences of charades style brutality acted out in mime form.

– Exaggerated liberties. I don’t really understand the purpose of crafting a Ted Bundy narrative without capitalizing on the legacy of the infamously dangerous presence who stalked a country for over a decade. The problem here isn’t so much that the events and details are shamelessly falsified, which is typical for Farrands brand of cinema, but that they are traded out for elements that makes Ted Bundy feel like Jason Voorhees, for the abundance of unexplained super powers adding to his already manipulative mystique. That’s right, I said super powers. So it isn’t enough that Bundy takes advantage of women for their smaller frames and internal voices to speak to a good looking man, but now you have to worry about Bundy teleporting before your very eyes. This happens a couple of times throughout the movie, made possible with the kind of first day editing you learn with your first JVC handy-cam, all the while taking the film in directions that repeatedly outline Bundy as a supernatural presence who was unstoppable. And then he was stopped, twice in this movie. I guess facts and historical relevance finally caught up to Daniel.

– Meandering music. I like the instrumental ambition enough from composer Steve Moore, the same man who made my ears tingle with synth-trances in films like “VFW” and “The Guest”, but his work here is too resonant of stock footage from any episode of “Unsolved Mysteries”, complete with boisterous volume taking away from every scene. Because of such, the music itself doesn’t so much flow cohesively with the integrity of the scenes and sequences they accommodate, but instead overrides the essence of the acting (Funny I know) and spontaneity of the dialogue flow for an underlining current of spoon-fed emotionality meant to convey what Moore feels is an audience too dumb to capably interpret. The tracks themselves are not only very repetitive in their manufacturing, but totally feel out of place for a movie presented as a slasher film, but scored as a paranormal thriller, with a helping of electric piano. It makes for a series of tracks lacking any semblance of subtlety to their timely arrival, and would only rival “Shaft” if the tracks themselves said “BUNDY!!! Ya damn right”.

– Stagnant production value. For my money, I couldn’t escape this overwhelming feeling that I was watching a Lifetime TV movie, and not just because the male lead is a psychopathic killer. Instead, it was the flaws within a cheap cinematography from Luka Bazeli that is most to blame here, and plagues the movie’s presentation with a student film level of quality and designs that unfortunately is a constant. Part of the problem is definitely with the minimalist budget ($3 million) inserted to the dynamic of the film, limiting the capabilities in the photographic technology, which immediately articulate low-level to the interpretation of the audience at home. But beyond that, it’s the grounded and uninspired variety of the compositions that are most to blame here, eluding any semblance of substance in style to the integrity of the film that unanimously keeps it from finding an identity of its own in a littered subgenre of Bundy films, that are stacking in recent years.

– Clumsy climax. Aside from the absence of suspense or intrigue that goes missing as a result of the chaotic creative decisions previously mentioned, the last act of this movie is the overwhelming weakness for me because of the way it trips over the feet of its own feeble-minded execution. Not only does it fumble with its decision to pay respect to the many lives and tragedies with as little information about them as possible during a post-credits screen flash, but it also convolutes it with an entirely different on-screen text five minutes prior, conveying the information assembled from Bundy’s last days before execution. It does this before showing us the execution itself, which makes the initial text virtually pointless by what follows, and over-complicates matters in a way that removes any doubt that this film will be as forgettable as the other eight about Bundy that proceeded it.

My Grade: 3/10 or F+