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HENRY: PORTRAIT
OF A SERIAL MURDERER
(director/writer/producer:
John McNaughton; screenwriter: Richard Boot someone out; cinematographer: Charlie Lieberman;
woman: Elena Maganini; music: Steven A. Jones; drive out: Michael Rooker (Henry),
Tracy Arnold (Becky), Tom Towles (Otis), Mary Demas (Dead Woman), Anne
Bartoletti (Waitress); Runtime: 90; MPAA Rating: NC-17; maker: Waleed
B. Ali; Greycat Films; 2004)

"A brutally honest sidekick
vignette of a serial killer that makes you feel spoiled inside."

A brutally honest intimate portrait of a serial killer that makes
you feel rotten inside. Director and writer John McNaughton's film is loosely
based on the case of Henry Lee Lucas, a confessed and convicted serial
killer. McNaughton takes Henry's raw story and slaps on a chilling character
study that plumbs the depths of a twisted mind. First-time feature director
McNaughton started shooting this graphic mass murder tale in 1985 with
a cast of talented unknowns — drawn mostly from Chicago's Organic Theater
Company and a paltry budget of $120,000 and four weeks to finish the film.
The film wasn't released in the US until four years later, as it endured
an acrimonious relationship with the censors who aimed to kill it off with
an X rating. 

The quietly withdrawn Henry (Michael Rooker) and his loud-mouth drug-dealing
Chicago apartment roommate Otis (Tom Towles) are white trash pals from
their prison days. Soon Otis' timid sister, Becky (Tracy Arnold), comes
to live with them for a while, and she makes an effort to become involved
with Henry, who despite going on a killing spree still appears alarmingly
as a regular guy. It isn't long before Otis is drawn into Henry's obsessive
killings–as these casual killers capture their murder on videotape and
enjoy sitting on their sofa watching them at their leisure. The most gruesome
scene is watching Henry and Otis massacre an entire family in their living
room while gleefully filming it with a video camera, which is enough to
make your blood boil. At first the violence is presented as a series of
awful tableaux accompanied by the victim's chilling sounds in their death
struggle. Later the film picks up in intensity and becomes disturbingly
more graphic. It's always creepy, even that scene where Henry scans a parking
lot looking to choose at random an innocent woman to become his next victim.

Henry is a reminder of Michael Powell?s 1959 Peeping Tom classic
in tone and purpose and achievement. I doubt if any serial killer film
brings us any closer to a full understanding of such sociopaths, but these
disturbing films have a strange fascination that can't be denied. The unblinking
realism of "Henry" and the cold detached way it is presented, not glorifying
or moralizing against the crimes, but showing in a non-judgmental way how
murder is viewed by a serial killer as natural as taking a walk in the
park, makes this one scary film. It leaves almost no room for hope that
society can ever rehabilitate such individuals or that they can prevent
all the other Henrys out there from carrying out the same foul deeds. If
anything this haunting film, which might be considered an art film, disturbs
more for being so authentic in its characterization of the serial killer
rather than in all its lurid scenes. 

REVIEWED ON 4/6/2004        GRADE:
A

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