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.
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