MONSTER: THE JEFFREY DAHMER STORY. (2022) A NETFLIX SERIES REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS.

DAHMER: THE JEFFREY DAHMER STORY. (2022) CREATED BY RYAN MURPHY AND IAN BRENNAN.
STARRING EVAN PETERS, NIECY NASH, RICHARD JENKINS, MOLLY RINGWALD, MICHAEL LEARNED AND PENELOPE ANN MILLER.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

Set your faces to stunned admiration, people, because this is the best piece of television I’ve seen all year, and it’s been a good year for television. It’s the Jeffrey Dahmer story in series form, and it’s a terrific achievement on the part of Ryan everything he touches turns to gold Murphy and his screen-writing team.

The acting is superb, the story-telling is the right mix of the gruesome and the sympathetic, the era of the early ‘Nineties is perfectly re-created and Evan Peters as the serial killer is just so good as the murderer with the adorably cute grin and occasional quirky sense of black humour.

This is the only Netflix series I’ve seen so far that I’ve been seriously tempted to re-watch again from the beginning as soon as it ended. I’m actually sad that I’m not watching it any more, that’s how compelling it is.

Ready for some plot now? ‘Course you are, lol. The past is expertly blended in with the present as we see Jeffrey Dahmer growing up as a shy, awkward, somewhat weird lonely kid from Milwaukee who doesn’t really care about school or making friends or getting a head start in life.

His home-life is what one might delicately refer to as a shit-show. His mother Joyce doesn’t seem to want to be married with children; she pops pills, threatens suicide constantly and does everything in her power to be mentally if not physically absent from her husband and Jeff.

She screams and throws things and brandishes a knife at her husband in front of a traumatised Jeffrey, and she finally walks out on her family, taking her other child with her, when Jeff is about eighteen. Jeff misses her, crazy and out-of-control as she is, and takes to drinking heavily and mooning round the house, aimless and depressed, in her absence.

Richard Jenkins as the father, Lionel Dahmer, is superb. He’s the person who inadvertently sparks off Jeff’s interest in dissecting body parts. In Jeff’s youth, his father shows him how to cut up the roadkill they find on their car journeys together. If he had the slightest idea where that was going to lead to, he might have thought twice about involving his son in such a gory activity.

Lionel’s marriage to Joyce is in a terrible state. He walks out on Joyce a lot during Jeff’s childhood because of Joyce’s erratic behaviour, and is already married to the kindly and supportive Shari (played by the marvellous Molly Ringwald) by the time Joyce walks out on the Dahmer family for good.

Dad really, really loves his gormless-acting son, the golden-haired Jeffrey, and is genuinely concerned about the adult Jeff’s burgeoning alcoholism, his almost complete lack of a work ethic and seeming inability to get on with people and make friends.

He pushes Jeff into a community college and then, when that fails, into the army. When that fails too, it’s a case of ‘You’re moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel Air!’ For auntie and uncle, read Grandma; he moves in with his grandma, Lionel’s elderly mum, in West Allis, Wisconsin, after college and the US Army have both bombed, and terrorizes her with his strange behaviour.

Grandma is a quiet, God-fearing Church-going woman, and Jeffrey’s behaviour quickly becomes unacceptable to her. His alcoholism, compulsive lying and swearing, his occasional outbursts of violence, and, worst of all, the constant parade of young black or Latino men he brings back home with him at night to do God-knows-what-with. She’s deeply uncomfortable about what this last thing might say about her beloved grandson’s sexuality.

When Grandma interferes with what he’s trying to do with these men (drug, kill, dissect and even preserve bits of them), Jeffrey gets angry and there’s a moment there when I genuinely fear for Grandma’s life. You’ll literally never believe who plays her; Michael Learned, who once upon a time used to portray the mother in a little-known American television programme called THE WALTONS…

Between 1978 and 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer kills and dismembers seventeen mostly black young men and boys. He commits necrophilia and cannibalism and preserves a number of body parts for his own amusements.

He seems to prefer to have sex with dead or incapacitated males, as he doesn’t like his sexual partners to move around too much or take the initiative. He gets a bad reputation around the gay bathhouses for being a man who drugs and rapes his partners.

Niecy WHEN THEY SEE US Nash is fabulous as Glenda Cleveland, the black single mother living next door to Jeffrey Dahmer in the Oxford Apartments, his last address before his imprisonment. Can you imagine living next door to him? He’s the original Neighbour from Hell.

Through the vent that connects their two apartments, she hears the fighting and shouting as Dahmer subdues his victims, and the sawing and hammering noises he makes as he cuts them up. She also smells the foul odours of the decomposing bodies.

The police don’t come out smelling of roses in this case. Glenda calls them numerous times to report the highly suspicious noises and stench coming from Jeff’s apartment, but Jeff just trots out the old ‘Oh, I left out some meat and it went bad’ excuse and the cops just thank him and apologise for disturbing his evening…!

The cops really mess up when a young Laotian boy, Konerak Sinthasomphone, Dahmer’s youngest victim, is trying desperately to escape Jeff’s clutches and very nearly makes it. Jeff turns up and is so convincing in his assertions that Konerak is his ‘boyfriend’ that the police actually return the young man to Dahmer’s custody, leaving a horrified Glenda looking on, barely able to believe their stupidity, and also their willingness to accept the word of a white man over that of anyone black or Asian or Hispanic.

This is such a good television series; I honestly can’t commend it enough. Well done to Ryan Murphy and his team. I can’t wait to see who they’re giving the ‘magic treatment’ to next…!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
 
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her new book, THIRTEEN STOPS EARLIER, is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://amzn.to/3ulKWkv
Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Stops-Sandra-Harris-ebook/dp/B089DJMH64
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thirteen-Stops-Later-Book-ebook/dp/B091J75WNB/

THE SILENCE. (2010) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE SILENCE. (2010) WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY BARAN BO ODAR. BASED ON THE BOOK OF THE SAME NAME, DAS SCHWEIGEN, BY JAN KOSTIN WAGNER.
STARRING WOTAN WILKE MOHRING, ULRICH THOMSEN AND KATRIN SASS.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I thoroughly enjoyed this German thriller film based on a famous crime fiction novel by a German writer, inasmuch as anyone could enjoy a film about a pair of paedophile murderers and rapists. It’s beautifully shot with gorgeous scenery, it’s not overloaded with useless dialogue and it grips like a giant squid all the way through from start to finish.

The story begins in the summer of 1986. Do you remember what you were doing back then? It’s a long time ago. In the summer of 1986 in a small provincial German town, two men meet by chance in a children’s playground.

Shortly afterwards, an eleven-year-old girl called Pia is cycling happily through a cornfield when she is raped and murdered by a fully-fledged paedophile who may have killed other children before now.

He is watched from his car by his new young ‘friend,’ a fledgling paedophile horrified by what he sees the older, more experienced man do to the child. The younger man helps with the body disposal, as he feels he has no choice, but then he walks away from the older man, who is actually greatly saddened at the loss of his new ‘buddy.’

I suppose that when your interests revolve around looking at things and doing things that the rest of society would vomit to witness, you don’t have too many people around you whom you can call friends.

This is a daring film indeed if it’s making us examine the relationship between two paedophiles, one older and desperately lonely, who knows the ropes and probably accepts himself as he is by now, the other one younger, inexperienced, and crippled with guilt and shame about where his mind is taking him.

Twenty-three years pass in the little village. The mother of the murdered girl, Elena Lange, still lives in the village, as does Pia’s still-undiscovered murderer. When another little girl is suddenly found to be missing after visiting a local fun fair, in identical circumstances to Pia’s murder-abduction, the townspeople start to get a serious feeling of déjà vu. Everyone immediately assumes she’s dead too, like Pia, and all that remains is to find her waterlogged corpse in a ditch somewhere.

The older paedophile, Peer, has been the caretaker for the same building complex for thirty years. The younger man, Timo, has moved away, changed his own surname to his wife’s and had a family with her.

We don’t know if Timo has committed any child sex abuse crimes in the last twenty-three years, but we would have little difficulty in believing that Peer has certainly ‘dabbled.’ Not that he seems evil, exactly, just ‘competent,’ if you get me. More competent than Timo, at least, which wouldn’t be hard.

Has Peer killed this new missing child, Sinikka? And, if so, is the older man sending a message to his younger ‘friend’ across the deafening ‘silence’ of twenty-three long years? A message that says, maybe, I miss you, friend! Come back, we can have fun together and do stuff like this together all the time…?

 Who would ever have thought that paedophiles could have such tender feelings? I’m deliberately using the word ‘paedophile’ in nearly every sentence just so I don’t start to feel sorry for these particular two men, which would be easier than you might think.

Peer is a quiet, mild-mannered man, a good citizen and a conscientious caretaker. Timo is a good husband and father. On the outside, they both present as perfectly normal, nice quiet men, good people. And Timo doesn’t welcome or accept his paedophile tendencies; rather, he tries to reject them and fight them off, and, when he can’t, he’s disgusted and sickened by himself. He literally can’t stomach himself. Peer, on the other hand, has had longer to get used to it all than Timo, and, although we can’t know this for a fact, has probably given up trying to fight it.
  
The town is understandably in upheaval with this new horrific event. Sinikka’s parents are at each other’s throats, each blaming the other for their difficult relationship with their teenage daughter. They torture themselves by listening over and over to her last telephone message to them both, saying she was sorry they’d fought but she loves them anyway.

The retired detective who unsuccessfully investigated Pia’s murder years ago is now sleeping with Pia’s mother because they’re both so goddamned lonely, and the two detectives in charge of Sinikka’s sinister disappearance are at odds with each other over the possible number of perpetrators and the motivation for this new monstrous crime.

It’s undoubtedly a difficult subject, but if you think you can stomach it, this is an excellent police procedural mixed with domestic thriller. It will make you think outrageously unpopular thoughts, such as, are paedophiles people too, but, if you don’t care to give headroom to such things, you can always do what I did and bonk them on the head with a metaphorical hammer until they’re good and flat.

 AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
 
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her new book, THIRTEEN STOPS EARLIER, is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://amzn.to/3ulKWkv
Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Stops-Sandra-Harris-ebook/dp/B089DJMH64
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thirteen-Stops-Later-Book-ebook/dp/B091J75WNB/

RED DRAGON. (2002) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

RED DRAGON. (2002) DIRECTED BY BRETT RATNER. STARRING ANTHONY HOPKINS, ED NORTON, HARVEY KEITEL, PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN, RALPH FIENNES, MARY-LOUISE PARKER AND EMILY WATSON. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is a superb horror film. There isn’t a single bad thing to say about it. It’s one fifth of the fantastic quintet of Hannibal Lecter films that also includes THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, HANNIBAL and HANNIBAL RISING and MANHUNTER.

This film, though it was made after THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, is actually the prequel to it. It first of all tells us how evil genius Hannibal Lecter came to the attention of the police in the first place, and the gory circumstances of his apprehension and incarceration in that special cell for the criminally insane in which we are accustomed to seeing him. You know, with the mask on and everything so he can’t (literally) bite the hand that feeds him, haha.

Then it tells us a different and equally thrilling story. The story, to be precise, of the deranged serial killer known to the police and the media as The Tooth Fairy. This is a killer who slaughters entire families in the most sickening ways. Who, if anyone, is capable of catching such a maniac…? The FBI are putting all of their eggs in one basket on this one, folks.

These eggs take the form of Special Agent Will Graham, the man who caught Hannibal Lecter. (I’m not really saying he’s an egg, of course, it’s just a metaphor!) Now, Graham adroitly picks Lecter’s brains in an attempt to figure out the identity of The Tooth Fairy.

The scenes of verbal thrust and parry in which the two engage with each other are terrific fun. Anthony Hopkins is just so good as Hannibal Lecter that you feel you could watch him in the role for all eternity. Well, that’s how I feel about his faultless and gripping performances, anyway. The reader, naturally, may have a different opinion…!

Ralph Fiennes is also utterly electrifying as the messed-up photograph-and-home-movies development technician whose upbringing was so abusive you could almost forgive him for turning out so loopy. We see rather a lot of Ralph’s naked butt in the movie. He’s in great shape and one gets the impression that he likes to show off his body.

It’s certainly not the first time we’ve seen his naked butt in a film. Remember THE END OF THE AFFAIR with Julianne Moore and Stephen Ray…? Phwoarrr…! (On another note, one can’t help but wonder what Professor Dumbledore would have made of such flagrantly saucy shenanigans on the part of Voldemort, the Harry Potter villain…!)

In SCHINDLER’S LIST, I think he might have been nekkid as well, just before the famous balcony scene in which he picks off concentration camp inmates with his rifle while his lady love bitches from the bed at him. ‘Amon, you fucking idiot, knock it off!’ Or words to that effect.

Harvey Keitel as FBI Agent Jack Crawford is another actor whose naked butt we’ve also seen on the big screen, THE PIANO with Holly Hunter being a definite case in point. The late great Philip Seymour Hoffman does not show off his naked butt in his film, though he does appear partially-dressed in one scene, haha. He turns in a great performance as the loathsome investigative journalist Freddy Lounds who meets with a gruesome death at the hands of the killer.

There are so many memorable scenes in the film that it’s hard to single out just one or two for special mention. I love when Ralph Fiennes is getting a blow-job from ANGELA’S ASHES lead actress Emily Watson while he’s watching the home movies of the next family he plans to kill.

Reba McClane is blind, you see, so she doesn’t know what he’s looking at. She actually thinks he’s turned-on because of her…! It’s just so twisted and somehow disturbed that it makes for unmissable viewing. 

Can you imagine getting a blow-job off your wan from ANGELA’S ASHES? She’s an excellent actress and I honestly dig her but she’s got such a miserable face, God love her. If she was giving someone a blow-job, it’s probably be with the same pained expression of someone performing a tiresome but necessary chore that she seems to wear in all her films. I also love the tiger-petting scene for the powerful emotions which it unleashes in both Reba and Dolarhyde.

There’s a nice little twist at the end which leads us neatly into THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Watching all five Hannibal Lecter films back-to-back or, say, over the course of one weekend, would make for a great horror movie marathon or film festival theme. Feel free to use my idea. Don’t worry, you won’t be stealing it or anything. It’s already totally patent-pending, I can assure you…!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
 
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her new book, THIRTEEN STOPS EARLIER, is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://amzn.to/3ulKWkv
Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Stops-Sandra-Harris-ebook/dp/B089DJMH64
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thirteen-Stops-Later-Book-ebook/dp/B091J75WNB/
 

APPROPRIATE ADULT. (2011) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

APPROPRIATE ADULT. (2011) BASED ON TRUE EVENTS. WRITTEN BY NEIL MCKAY. DIRECTED BY JULIAN JARROLD.

STARRING EMILY WATSON, DOMINIC WEST, MONICA DOLAN, SYLVESTRA LE TOUZEL AND ROBERT GLENISTER.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘I’m not your friend, Fred.’

‘Can I just ask if the appropriate adult’s all right…?’

‘Heather’s not under the patio. She’s in Bahrain, working as a mule for a drugs cartel. Now, whether you believe that or not is entirely up to you.’

I love this made for television crime drama, first shown in two parts on ITV. It’s considered to be the third part in a trilogy of made for television films about Britain’s most notorious murders from the second half of the twentieth century: THIS IS PERSONAL: THE HUNT FOR THE YORKSHIRE RIPPER from 1999 is one of the best true crime movies I’ve ever seen in my life. SEE NO EVIL: THE MOORS MURDERS (2006) is almost equally good.

APPROPRIATE ADULT is not the story of the horrific abductions, rapes and murders of innocent young women carried out by the loathsome serial killers Fred and Rose West in Gloucestershire between 1967 and 1987, although they did very much commit these crimes with which they were charged and of which they were found guilty. (Fred, of course, committed suicide before he could stand trial, but there was never any doubt as to his guilt.)

Rather, it is the extraordinary story of the ordinary woman training to be a social worker- Emily Watson playing Janet Leach- who had put her name down on a list of volunteers to be the ‘appropriate adult’ for when the police have charged someone of limited mental capacity or with learning difficulties, who might have trouble understanding the charges against them.

The appropriate adult would then sit in on the interview sessions between the police and the person charged with the offences and make sure that the person is okay to go on with the sessions and that they have everything they need, etc. It’s kind of like baby-sitting but with more serious implications…!

Janet Leach, thirty-eight, is a divorced mum-of-five with all the usual worries about money, kids and career. Her current partner is bipolar and needs to be hospitalised when he is going through one of his manic phases. So, as we see, this lady is not without her share of problems even before she encounters one of the twentieth century’s worst ever serial murderers.  

This case is Janet Leach’s first time to be chosen as an ‘appropriate adult.’ When she realises that it’s not only a murder case, but a multiple murder case in which heads have been cut off as casually as chopping up a lettuce for a salad and bodies stuffed into suitcases before being buried in the back garden or cellar, you can tell that she’s been knocked for six a bit.

Dominic West (no relation, I’m sure!) does a cracking job of portraying the evil but oddly genial Fred, a labourer for whom no job was too small, too big or too dirty and who liked to present an obliging, pleasantly hail-fellow-well-met face to the world at all times. He gives the impression that there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for you if you asked him, he’s so congenial.

Janet is obviously repelled by Fred when she meets him first and hears his dreadful stories of lust murders and the sado-masochistic torture of victims before they were murdered. But Fred takes an immediate liking to his ‘appropriate adult’ and it’s not long before Janet, too, falls under his so-called ‘spell.’

Here’s the thing about Fred, and this is my own personal opinion now. He loves all women, but especially the woman he’s with at any given time. He’d probably love D.C. Hazel Savage, who’s conducting the interviewing, except he’s sneaky and he instinctively knows she’s too smart to fall for his bullshit.

But Janet Leach is a tiny, timid little bird of a thing whose shyness and vulnerability Fred probably sniffs out immediately. Here’s a woman he can manipulate, a woman who’ll believe his lies.

He’s the most complete picture of a pathological liar you’ll ever see; if he told you it was raining, you’d be well advised to stick your own head out the window just to check for yourself.

Janet is probably exactly the kind of easily manipulated little mouse of a woman Fred would have gone for in real life. And now, here she is, in his life every day for a while, hanging on to his every word and giving him her undivided attention, which is all Fred ever wanted from a woman.

How does he manipulate her fragile emotions, then? He tells her she’s special, that she understands him in a way no-one else, not even his precious Rose, does. He implies he can’t do any of this without her, and that there’s a special bond between the pair of them that no-one else, outside of their little protective circle, can possibly ever hope to understand.

Janet is probably immensely flattered. What woman wouldn’t be? Has anyone else ever needed her so thoroughly, she’s probably wondering, has anyone else every placed so much trust in her? God Almighty, she’s probably honoured that she was the chosen one.

When he starts comparing her physical appearance to that of the so-called ‘love of his life,’ poor murdered Anna McFall, she’s more than likely half in love with him already. She starts to help the semi-literate Fred with his ‘autobiography,’ ‘I was Loved by an Angle.’ (Yes, yes, he means to write ‘angel!’)

She continues to visit him in prison, bringing him clothes and offering her support, long after her role as appropriate adult has officially ceased to be a thing. When Fred does what he does over the New Year of 1995, Janet Leach has a very curious reaction which I’m not going to tell you about here for fear of the dreaded spoiler. You’ll have to watch the film yourself to find out…!

I’m not saying that Fred was happy about being caught, but, Lord, he must have been in his element, his absolute element, during those long police interviews with the ever-attentive Janet Leach by his side!

Talking, talking, talking to his heart’s content, always with a captive audience and with a new woman now to ‘woo,’ congratulating himself inwardly on being smarter than the police and sending them on a wild goose-chase or leading them- quite literally- up the garden path as they desperately try to wriggle it out of him where he’s buried his own daughter’s remains. Did he believe his own wild stories? I guess we’ll never know.

A word about Rose, the wife. Here, she’s wonderfully portrayed by Monica Dolan exactly as I imagine she was in real life: a liar, vulgar, loud, aggressive, foul-mouthed, threatening violence, making enemies right left and centre. She won’t be free any time soon, if ever. I would say that’s for the best.

     AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.

TED BUNDY. (2002) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

TED BUNDY. (2002) DIRECTED AND CO-WRITTEN BY MATTHEW BRIGHT.

STARRING MICHAEL REILLY BURKE, BOTI BLISS, TRACEY WALTER AND TOM SAVINI.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Well, out here is the court of Ted! Here, what I say is law!’

I saw this film on video- yes, that’s right, video, lol!- back in 2002, and it scared the living daylights out of me. Since then, I’ve toughened up a lot and I’ve read a lot of the books about American serial killer Ted Bundy, so I’m well able for it nowadays. It’s still a very gruesome watch, mind you.

What I like about this version is that it doesn’t really glamorise Ted and his awful crimes. The more recent film, starring Zac Efron as the man himself, was a drastically sanitised re-telling of Ted’s story– EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE (2019)– and portrayed the brutal woman-killer and rapist as a heart-throb beloved of women everywhere.

This film really shows the ugly side of Ted. Okay, sure, he’s good-looking and well-dressed, although I personally think those daft dicky-bows and checked jackets make him look a bit dorky. All he’s really got to commend him to women is a pretty enough face and the gift of the gab, and that’s all you need with some women.

But here, even in the opening scenes, set in the early 1970s, we see him as the kleptomaniac Peeping Tom and disgusting chronic masturbator that he really was, making those ugly weird gurning faces when he ejaculates or when he looks at himself in the mirror. Was he a narcissist as well? Probably!

His modus operandi is well known by now. We see him chatting up attractive young brunette women smoothly and slickly, often wearing a cast on a ‘busted’ arm so that women will help him to his car with his books or whatever else.

When they’re not looking, he hits them viciously over the head with a tire iron and shoves them in the car. Then he takes them to a deserted place, where he rapes, tortures and murders them. Nice guy, huh? He returns, often several times, to the body ‘dump sites’ to have sex with the rotting corpses, until such time as they’ve become too decomposed for his enjoyment.

We see him putting make-up on a woman’s severed head which he’s brought home and is keeping in his house. Disturbingly, he carries the wrapped body of an unconscious or dead woman out of her house and into his car in front of a passing group of four people and a dog, who apparently don’t see anything strange at all in what he’s doing.

In between the abductions, rapes and brutal murders, he studies law (sporadically), works as a volunteer in a telephone crisis centre (that’s a bit like the Samaritans over here) and checks in with his girlfriend, single parent and student Lee and her young daughter, for a dose of much-need family life. After one murder in particular, he’s starving with the hunger and Lee obligingly cooks a meal for him!

This film doesn’t make Lee (based on Elizabeth Kloepfer) look too good either. In fact, here, she’s a whingy, whiny nightmare who wants to keep tabs on Ted round the clock, but Ted has the wanderlust (he cruises for women constantly in his little Volkswagen Bug) and he just doesn’t operate that way.

She whines at his habit of seeing other women but doesn’t take any decisive action, she asks him what he’s thinking when he’s quiet (a big no-no), she pesters him about meeting his parents when it’s clear there’s some mystery there that he doesn’t want discussed, and she doesn’t question it when she finds a pair of handcuffs in Ted’s car that he says he’s never seen before in his life.

She’s not comfortable about being tied up and asked to play dead when they’re in bed together, but she doesn’t stand up to him because she’s weak and afraid of being on her own. I’m not judging her for that. I’ve done the same thing myself in the not-so-distant past. It’s a very ‘woman’ thing to do, shure.

Anyway, most of Ted’s ‘big moments’ are in here, but with the womens’ names mostly changed. There’s his spectacular abductions of, not one, but two, women from Lake Sammamish State Park on the one day in sunny July, his two escapes from prison, and his horrific attack on the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida, during the second of these escapes.

We see his attempted kidnap of Carol da Ronch (1974) from the Fashion Place Mall, Utah, by the phoney ‘Officer Roseland,’ and one of Ted’s most shameful accomplishments, the abduction and murder of twelve-year-old schoolgirl, Kimberley Leach. Not that the other murders weren’t shameful too, but you know what I mean. A child, a twelve-year-old little girl…

The justice system threw the book at Ted after that. Retribution for his heinous crimes eventually caught up with him on January the twenty-fourth, 1989, when he was executed in the electric chair.

He manages to have sex in prison (bribing the guards was a common practice) and even conceives a child while inside, a daughter, with his new girlfriend and champion, Carol Ann Boone. Although we see the sex, there’s no mention of a child here.

We see the big bold brave Ted bawling like a baby when he has to have his head shaved and his rectum packed with cotton wool prior to talking that last walk to ‘Old Sparky.’ It’s as plain as day that all his pity is for himself, though, and not for the beautiful young women with families and talents and potential whose lives he stole.

What happened to ‘the court of Ted,’ Ted…? A big man around women, he shrinks and shrivels inside himself when he’s dealing with big tough men who are not going to stand any bullshit from him.

Like I said, this film doesn’t glamorise Ted, but instead makes him look like the cowardly weasel he really is. EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE introduced Ted to another generation of young female groupies, but it’s not really the most accurate picture of the man and his crimes. This film from 2002 comes pretty close, I think. Check it out, but be aware that it’ll give you the willies.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.

WOLF CREEK 2. (2013) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

WOLF CREEK 2. (2013) DIRECTED AND CO-WRITTEN BY GREG MCCLEAN. STARRING JOHN JARRATT.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I know that this film probably comes under the heading of torture porn, ie, a sub-genre of horror film that goes out of its way to show the viewers sickeningly graphic portrayals of gore and bloody violence against the human person, but I still love it.

And I find John Jarratt’s Mick Taylor an oddly compelling and sexually attractive serial killer, although that probably says more about me and my warped personality than anything else, lol. But lets’s have a closer look at him, anyway.

When he was a callow youth of twenty-three, John Jarratt played a fairly sizeable role as Albert Crundall in PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, one of the best Australian horror movies ever made. He did it very well, as it happens.

Now, a mature, grizzly-looking John Jarratt plays Mick Taylor, a serial killer probably unequalled anywhere in film or literature in his zest for killing and the hatred against virtually all of society/humanity he harbours in his hairy breast, snigger.

He’s Australian, right, and an extreme example of the original Alpha male. Hunting, tracking, stalking, shooting, gutting, skinning, slicing, chopping, boiling, even sexually violating; is there anything he hasn’t done to the animal- or human- carcass? Mick’s done it all.

He loves the chase almost as much as the kill, and he’s usually pretty confident that he’ll bag his prey. He knows his territory, the deserted outbacks and lonely highways of Australia, like the back of his huge leathery hand, after all.

Dressed in his trademark lumberjack shirt, jeans, boots and a wide-brimmed hat to keep the hot Aussie sun off his widdle noggin, he trawls these largely empty roads looking for unsuspecting tourists and backpackers to lure back to his torture chamber of a home. And, once he gets you there, you’re better off dead…

Waking up in Mick’s torture chamber is the one thing you don’t want to do. And yet, it’s exactly what happens in WOLF CREEK 2 to poor Paul Hammersmith, an English tourist (played by an Australian actor) who unintentionally ‘deprives’ Mick of a beautiful German female captive whom he accidentally lets get away from him.

Mick is hopping mad. He can get months and months of fun and amusement out of a female prisoner, and this jumped-up little ‘pommie cunt’ has done him out of a guaranteed good time.

So, Mick’s determined to pay Paul back, and this is why Paul is cable-tied to the torture chair in Mick’s gracious establishment with Mick sitting opposite him, regarding him quizzically as if wondering which power tool to use on him first.

The astonishing level of knowledge possessed by Mick in regard to Australian culture and history is really quite shocking to witness. After all, he doesn’t strike one as a guy who did well in school and then went voluntarily on to further education.

Yet, the questions he sets Paul, who’s answering them in exchange for his life (and fingers!) here, are extremely in-depth and intelligent. Mick is proud to be an Australian, and he loves his country.

But there’s genuine love of country, and then there’s National Socialism, lol. Mick Taylor, possibly the world’s biggest xenophobe, is an equal opportunities racist. He hates everyone with the same level of contempt and disgust.

Every nationality, from the Germans to the English, is just another bunch of ‘foreign cunts’ to Mick Taylor. He refers to them as a plague of vermin, coming to ‘his’ country to f**k it up and destroy it. And we all know what you do with plagues, right? You wipe ’em out…

Paul’s ‘English wit’ and his pretty passable attempts to get Mick to join him in some buddy-buddy drinking songs is highly amusing to Mick, not unlike the way that King Kong is amused by Naomi Watts’s juggling tricks and acrobatics in the Jack Black/Peter Jackson version of KING KONG. (Both captives here are rather cleverly trying to use psychology to lull their captors into a false sense of security, but will it work?)

Unlike King Kong, however, Mick Taylor does still intend to kill poor unfortunate Paul Hammersmith. He simply doesn’t mind having a bit of craic and bonhomie with him first, a bit of man-banter. After all, the existence he leads is a pretty lonely one.

But Paul has at least some gumption, some balls; maybe he doesn’t want to be killed. Maybe, unlike the terrified females Mick is more used to, he intends to fight for his life, so that one day he can go back to England, as presumably he intends to do, and resume his job and/or his studies there. But, of course, Mick won’t go down without a fight, and Mick Taylor fights dirty…

I think this film is actually better than the 2005 original. The first film is excellent, and it’s fine that it’s just the relatively straightforward story of three young tourists who fall afoul of Mick on their wee driving holiday. It’s the perfect, easy-does-it introduction to the franchise. But WOLF CREEK 2 is so much more complex.

We get to see a whole lot more of Mick’s hate-filled, xenophobic personality, and the plot has a load of very satisfying twists and turns. I love the bit about the crooked, corrupt cops who try to give Mick a speeding ticket when he wasn’t even speeding (I don’t give much for their chances of survival, do you?), and the horror of the subterranean caves shows us that Mick’s evil has even more layers to it than we previously imagined. Roll on WOLF CREEK 3. Some of us need to know where our next Mick-Fix is coming from…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.

HELTER SKELTER. (2004) THE STORY OF THE MANSON FAMILY MURDERS REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

HELTER SKELTER. (2004) A RE-MAKE OF THE 1976 MADE-FOR-TV MOVIE. DIRECTED BY JOHN GRAY. BASED ON THE BOOK OF THE SAME NAME BY VINCENT BUGLIOSI WITH CURT GENTRY.

STARRING JEREMY DAVIES, CLEA DUVALL AND MARGUERITE MOREAU.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This film, based on true events, will give you the willies. At the moment of writing this, I’m about one third of the way through the book on which it’s based, and the book tells you- and shows you- all the things over which the film, of necessity, has to draw a veil of discretion. The film tells the story of the dreadful events which are collectively known as the Manson Family Murders, and it’s told from the point of view of a young girl called Linda Kasabian.

In 1969, the teenaged Linda breaks up with her husband, who basically abandons her and their baby daughter Tanya. Linda, already used to commune life, is invited to join one located on the Spahn movie ranch in the hills outside Los Angeles.

The head of the commune is Charles Manson, a scrawny little beardy weed of a guy who, for the members of his ‘Family,’ has come to represent God, Jesus Christ, the Devil, good and evil, Heaven and Hell. He is the heart and particularly the Soul of the Family.

Charlie Manson tells Linda Kasabian exactly what she wants and needs to hear at this time. ‘No-one will ever throw you away again,’ he assures the emotionally insecure young girl who has already admitted to him that her husband and stepfather have both made her feel ‘disposable.’

They have sex- Charlie has sex with all the long-haired hippy girls, on whom he also bestows aliases- and soon she’s pregnant again. I don’t think the Family feel kindly disposed towards contraceptives and the notion of keeping oneself safe from sexually transmitted diseases!

Life on the commune is weird, man. Everyone has sex with everyone else and the babies and children are communally cared for, although, in some cases, it would seem like they were communally neglected, ie, left out in the sun all day to burn, stuff like that. Women are indoctrinated into believing that their function is to have babies and look after them and their men.

The guy who plays Charlie here does a terrific job. You can well imagine abused or needy women lapping up his freaky-ass nonsense, silly maxims like ‘No sense makes sense’ and ‘Come to the Now, man!’ He loves the sound of his own voice, which is probably why he founded his own cult.

I could never personally buy into his ridiculous notion that you’re doing people a favour by killing them because you’re ‘bringing them to the Now,’ and it’s hard to imagine how anyone ever did, but they did and that’s how the murders were able to happen. 

Linda is taken out at night by Charlie and various other members of the cult for what they call ‘creepy crawls.’ They wear dark clothing, break into rich peoples’ homes and disarrange stuff so that the occupants of the house will wake up and be freaked out to find that everything’s different.

The ‘creepy crawlers’ all carry knives. If any one of their victims had had the extreme misfortune to wake up during one of these night raids on their homes, I feel confident in saying that murder would have been committed without compunction by the culties.

In August 1969, the ‘creepy crawls’ get really real. In the house known as 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, five horrific murders are committed one sultry night. The victims are as follows: Sharon Tate, the beautiful, eight-months-pregnant actress wife of director Roman Polanski, who’s away filming in London when the murders happen; Jay Sebring, thirty-five, Sharon’s ex-boyfriend (they’re still good friends) and head of an international men’s hairdressing corporation; Abigail Folger, the heiress to a coffee fortune, and her Polish lover Voytek Frykowski; and finally, poor Stephen Parent, a young guy who was only visiting the caretaker of 10050, Cielo Drive, William Garretson, in the lodge house that night to try to sell him a clock radio. Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

By the time Manson’s besotted followers had done their leader’s dirty work, the house and gardens at 10050 Cielo Drive resembled a slaughterhouse. The following night, a rich businessman called Leno LaBianca, who owned a chain of grocery stores, was brutally murdered in his own sitting-room along with his attractive wife Bianca. The two sets of killings were soon being referred to as the Tate-LaBianca murders, and it wasn’t too long before the hippies out at Spahn movie ranch were squarely in the frame for them.

Linda Kasabian ran away from the Family after she witnessed the murders and was utterly sickened and shocked by them. Unlike the other girls, whom Charlie controlled through sex and drugs and the undeniable power of his words, Linda still had a reasonably unskewed sense of right and wrong.

‘Death to piggies’ might have been Charlie’s and his sick-in-the-head followers’ raison d’être, but it wasn’t Linda’s. Although she ran away from the cult, initially without her daughter Tanya so as not to arouse the suspicions of the other cult moms, she came back of her own accord, to tell the police what she knew.

I’ve been reading in prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s book about failed musician, Beatles’ fan and ex-pimp Charles Manson’s disadvantaged upbringing. The child of a teenaged prostitute with no father to speak of, he had spent most of his life before the murders in and out of institutions, from juvenile detention centres to adult prisons. Well, that’s no excuse for any of the things he did. Ted Bundy had only a single mother for a parent too and he never did any of the things… Oh wait, he did. Sorry, bad example, lol.

I must tell you about something absolutely mad that’s referred to in the film but which the book explains in a bit more detail. Before they were all arrested for the murders, the Family were planning en masse to follow their crazy-as-batshit leader out into the desert because there was a ‘hole’ in Death Valley which, if you followed it deep down inside to the very centre of the earth, would lead you to an entire civilization, all apparently living and thriving away underneath the earth. It’s straight out of Jules Verne, is that.

Only Charlie knew where this hole was, and the Family were going to hide out with this other civilization while ‘helter skelter,’ the race war to end all wars, played itself out above ground.

I have only one word to say with regard to this ‘plan,’ which is worse than Homer Simpson’s plan to take his whole clan to live with him under the sea when the heat from his sexual harassment suit becomes too much to bear. (Remember? There’ll be no accusations, just friendly crustaceans, under the sea…!) What is this one word? Well, in a nutshell… Cuckoo…!

Manson, in the end, was sentenced to death for his part in the excessively brutal killings but had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. That was fifty years ago this very year, and he only died recently there, in 2017. Same year as Moors murderer Ian Brady. He was probably still a nut-job when he passed away, a basket-case, a fruit loop.

That’s nearly fifty years that he was living at the American taxpayers’ expense, and every year he remained on earth was probably another slap in the face for the loved ones of the people he ordered his culties to murder in cold blood, simply because they were rich and ‘rich whites’ represented the ‘establishment, the ‘man.’

Oh well. He didn’t live forever, contrary to the impression he might have been trying to give his brainwashed followers. One day he too, the great Charlie Manson, had to answer for his crimes before a higher power, like we all will have to some day. Only then would real justice have been done.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor