Matthew Bright's "Ted Bundy" gives us what might contain the best portrayal of a modern serial murderer on film. In the title role, Michael Burke is so revolting and psychopathic, he shows us what the slain and surviving women who met up with Bundy must have seen. His nonstop criminal was a compulsive thief and peeping tom before attempting to take a life for the first time. Ted follows a college gal home from a discotheque and, after he spies on her and masturbates in public while doing so, eventually in a subsequent scene, he steps up to the next level and beats a woman near death (that poor lady apparently survived her ordeal).
Once he has crossed that line, all hell breaks loose and any female who comes into his gaze could be a potential crime statistic. His relationship with Boti Bliss is a sick imitation of a loving man who positions himself in society as an upstanding figure and actually is a lethal destruction machine capable of taking lives until stopped by police or a bullet. Or both.
Ted later takes his homicidal self on the road and terrorizes several states in the Northwestern US (contrary to the urban legend concerning Debbie Harry, there's no evidence Ted ever went to New York). He manages to con person after person and the crime he eventually was sentenced to die for in Florida shouldn't have been logistically possible. He is the ultimate opportunist and his ability to resume his violence in the last third of the film when that should have been the end of his freedom will disgust any viewer in their right mind.
Too many filmmakers try to explain the motives for their subjects' acts. Bright and Burke simply present Ted as he was, a disturbed little boy who never "grew up", but enlarged into an adult offender with twisted fantasies of torture, rape and necrophilia that he brought into a world not ready to deal with these pathologies. He blamed the alcohol and pornography he consumed for his acts, of course, because the extreme audacity any felon like this would need to live with their lack of a conscience never admits that they are at fault.
Once he has crossed that line, all hell breaks loose and any female who comes into his gaze could be a potential crime statistic. His relationship with Boti Bliss is a sick imitation of a loving man who positions himself in society as an upstanding figure and actually is a lethal destruction machine capable of taking lives until stopped by police or a bullet. Or both.
Ted later takes his homicidal self on the road and terrorizes several states in the Northwestern US (contrary to the urban legend concerning Debbie Harry, there's no evidence Ted ever went to New York). He manages to con person after person and the crime he eventually was sentenced to die for in Florida shouldn't have been logistically possible. He is the ultimate opportunist and his ability to resume his violence in the last third of the film when that should have been the end of his freedom will disgust any viewer in their right mind.
Too many filmmakers try to explain the motives for their subjects' acts. Bright and Burke simply present Ted as he was, a disturbed little boy who never "grew up", but enlarged into an adult offender with twisted fantasies of torture, rape and necrophilia that he brought into a world not ready to deal with these pathologies. He blamed the alcohol and pornography he consumed for his acts, of course, because the extreme audacity any felon like this would need to live with their lack of a conscience never admits that they are at fault.