11/22/2023 0 Comments Henry portrait of a serial killer![]() In this initial exchange, they presumably form a bond. Becky discloses that as a teenager, her father had taken advantage of her, to which Henry responds that he does not like sexual abuse towards women. Becky gets to know Henry by asking her how he murdered his mom, and he remorselessly answers her questions, justifying it because of her abuse towards him. He lives with Otis ( Tom Towles), who subsequently brings her sister Becky ( Tracy Arnold) back to their shared apartment. What we suspect, finally, is that the deficiencies belong more to the artist than to his subject.Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer unapologetically opens with a montage of dead bodies, the handiwork of the film's titular character, Henry ( Michael Rooker), a psychopathic, constantly traveling individual who kills along the way. But the emptiness in Henry seems like an artistic convenience or, worse, an evasion. In one scene he gazes into a mirror, and there's absolutely nothing in his eyes. The point McNaughton seems to make about his protagonist is that he's dead inside. What you want "Henry" to be is "Taxi Driver" - a movie that, while avoiding facile explanations, knows what it wants to say about its subject. What you may wonder, though, is why you needed to be subjected to it. There's a grotesque horror in these scenes, and it gets into your system. Watching these scenes - which the murderers record with a video camera and play over and over again - we feel as if we've been drawn into something we didn't quite expect as if, unwittingly, we've become accomplices in the making of a snuff film. Given this context, it's hard to know how to react to a scene like the one in which Henry and Otis torture a suburban housewife in front of her husband, snap her son's neck, then kill her. But when the crucial killing moment comes and, say, a victim's head has to be sawed off, the director pours on the slurpy "Friday the 13th" sound effects. When he zeroes in on Henry, the soundtrack resounds with portentous thunderclaps and muffled screams. But McNaughton can't resolve the contradictions in his material. ![]() In their rough, schematic fashion, these scenes function as an explanation for Henry's action they're the filmmakers' attempt to redeem the story with some sort of social meaning. (First he says he shot her, then that he stabbed her.) When Becky shares a story about her childhood, telling how her father used to sneak into her room, Henry tops it with a lurid tale of how he killed his mother. The acting is clumsy, the dialogue awkward, and the exchanges almost comically blunt. In most of its details, it feels like what it is - a small-budget film made for limited release. Most of the film's action takes place on the seamier side of Chicago, in the squalid flat Henry shares with his drug-dealing friend Otis (Tom Towles) and Otis's sister, Becky (Tracy Arnold). McNaughton's Henry is a man almost devoid of normal human feeling - a beast, a killing machine. And McNaughton has opted for a kind of documentary flatness of style - a blank style for a blank subject. The movie has a grainy, low-budget scuzziness that some may read as directness or honesty. And yet there's a kind of "conceptual" white space surrounding the barbarity - it lives in its own art bubble. ![]() From its opening shot - a long, dreamy camera move around the corpse of a woman, lying all in a heap with a slight smile on her face - it's unrelievedly ugly. Half art film, half schlock-horror cheapie, "Henry" isn't quite sure what it wants to be. But "Henry" leaves us feeling more numbed than moved. ![]() It's precisely Henry's coldblooded affectlessness that is meant to shock and disturb us. And where we expect to see passion or violence or release, we see only the casual disengagement of an assembly-line worker. We watch horrified from a distance as Henry (Michael Rooker) goes about his murderous business, prowling, singling out his victims, making the kills. He and screenwriter Richard Fire restrict us to a cruel outside view. John McNaughton, the film's director, doesn't attempt to put us inside Henry's thought processes so that we can make sense of them. The movie, which fictionalizes the story of mass murderer Henry Lee Lucas, isn't a psychological study in the conventional sense. "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" is the portrait of a predator, pure and simple, and in that, its ambitions are scaled back almost to the bone. ![]()
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