Here’s a bland movie about an extremely bad boy named Bundy that bagged a bunch of showbiz buzz, but didn’t open big, because, although it stars “Baywatch” beefcake Zac Efron, it’s almost blasphemously blah.
One of the main reasons is miscasting: Lead actor Zac Efron excels at hunky heartthrobs. He’s got comedic chops, and after bulking up for the movie version of “Baywatch” (so he wouldn’t disappear standing next to Dwayne Johnson), Efron pretty much put the bodybuilding world on notice that he could have a second career if he wanted to.
What Efron doesn’t have is the underlying menace needed to play a foul creature like Ted Bundy, serial killer of upward of 30 women. Look-wise and intensity-wise, this would have been the perfect Jason Patric role were he a little younger.
First Things First
It’s based on Elizabeth Kloepfer’s memoir (her pen name is Elizabeth Kendall), “The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy.” And the movie title, “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” is a line said by drama-queen-y Judge Edward Cowart (John Malkovich) while sentencing Ted Bundy to death by the electric chair in 1979.
My daddy is a handsome devil He’s got a chain five miles long And on every link a heart does dangle Of another maid he’s loved and wronged.
Wronged? Wronged?? Try head-smashing with crowbars and head-removal with hacksaws. It needed to be said.
Why It Should Have Been So Much Better
What’s surprising is that director Joe Berlinger has long been an acclaimed documentary producer-director. He produced and directed “Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes,” which is a documentary series that started streaming on Netflix in January 2019. A four-part series, it’s apparently comprehensive. This movie would appear to be a condensed version of the series. But does he get the facts right? I'll come back to this.
Psychopathic serial killers are smart. They’re chameleons, they walk among us, they have ice water in their veins, and they can tread the razor’s edge of almost getting caught and yet hiding in plain sight. Which is why they’re terrifying; it’s a fascinating, if morbid topic.
But even with this A-list cast, the film stagnates. Like a flaccid, third-rate documentary, it perfunctorily checks a bunch of boxes, but “riveting” is not one of them. The reason is that the movie focuses primarily on Ted’s charm, and only at the end do we get a glimpse of the ghastliness of what he was really up to. The problem that director Berlinger must have had here is that mostly the facts and a little bit of drama is not enough to be interesting.
The Deal With Satanism
There’s stuff swirling around the internet that claims that Bundy was most likely a member of the infamous Bundy family, which happens to be on the list of illuminati families. Scoff if you wanna—it’s pretty interesting. There are parallels drawn regarding Bundy’s methods of killing, which are similar to those of other known serial killers, who all turn out to have been satanists. Charles Manson, anyone?
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