Director Report Card: Matthew Bright (2002)

3. Ted Bundy

Serial killers have always fascinated people. A lot of folks can't help but wonder what would draw someone to perform such heinous acts, what pathological obsessions and compulsions compel people to kill again and again. There's also the "car crash" factor, of simply being unable to look away from the lurid details of such vile crimes. Unsurprisingly, this twin revulsion and fascination has had a huge influence on pop culture. There are at least as many, if not many more, serial killers in fiction as they are in reality. Inevitably, this has led to numerous films directly based on actual killers. In the early 2000s, Tartan Films and DEJ Productions began producing direct-to-video biographies about notorious murderers. Following "Ed Gein" and "Dahmer," there was "Ted Bundy." 

This was, of course, a controversial series of films. Many family members of these men's victims are still alive. There's always a question of taste, as filmmakers risk glorifying these horrible men or making them too sympathetic, invalidating the pain their victims and their families went through. Or maybe the idea of making a movie about a real life killer is so tawdry, that tact should just go out the window in pursuit of a documentary-style truth. While the "Gein" and "Dahmer" movies attempted to walk this balance (with the former still ending up being a lurid horror film), Tartan Films seemingly discarded all of that when they hired Matthew Bright to direct "Ted Bundy." Obviously, the guy who made "Freeway" is going to make a sensationalist, perhaps even satirical film about America's most notorious serial killer. This, unsurprisingly, led to the movie receiving mixed reviews upon release in 2002. 

The film begins in 1974 when Theodore Bundy was a college student in Seattle, Washington. He struggles in his classes and maintains a troubled but committed relationship with Lee, the single mom he's dating. Yet Ted presents a respectable outer image. He volunteers at a suicide hotline and holds down steady jobs, seeming attractive and friendly to most people around him. They don't know that Bundy is compelled to shoplift and spy on women in their homes, to satisfy a perverse, violent lust inside him. Soon afterwards, his focus shifts to murder. He begins a killing spree across the American southwest, abducting, assaulting, and murdering women. After a victim escapes, Bundy is arrested. Even this is not enough to stop him, as he escapes twice and resumes his murderous activities. All the while, Bundy remained strangely charming to those who knew him. 

If you're one of those people who demand utmost fidelity to the truth when it comes to fact-based movies, I'd recommend you just not watch "Ted Bundy." The film takes a broad approach to the actual timeline of Bundy's murders. In real life, Bundy's victims were never alive when he carried them off to his hiding places. In the movie, they are frequently alive to facilitate grisly horror movie chase sequences. The details of the crimes are largely fictionalized, with only a few abduction/murder scenes being based on actual events. The film both simplifies, by cutting out his affairs and the abuse of her daughter, and complicates, by adding more arguments, Bundy's relationship with ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer. (The inspiration for Lee here.) The movie can't even get the color of Bundy's notorious Volkswagen Bug right. It was tan in real life but, here, it's yellow. "Ted Bundy" definitely leans on the "inspired by" side of the "inspired by true events" disclaimer.

Considering the exaggerated grindhouse style of the "Freeway" movies, it's unsurprising that Matthew Bright focuses on Bundy's sexual-sadistic instincts. In fact, the film depicts Bundy's desire to sexually dominate his victims as the main motivator factor of his killing spree. There are scenes where he tries to sodomize Lee or convinces her to try rough bondage sex, much to her chagrin. The film repeatedly draws attention to how Bundy's crimes were as much about rape and necrophilia as they were murder, with a few graphic scenes of assault and corpse husbandry. So often, the true crime genre tries to explain horrible men's compulsions by expounding on complicated childhood trauma or other psychological issues. Bright's "Bundy" is almost refreshing by taking this route, of portraying Bundy as simply a sick fuck who couldn't get off unless he killed someone. 

One of the most fascinating factors about the real Ted Bundy is how outwardly charming he was. He wasn't a creepy loner, like Gein or Dahmer. He had perfected the mask of sanity, learning to expertly fake the ability to empathize that he probably lacked. This is why he was able to pull off his modus operandi, of immediately gaining young girls' trust, so many times. Bright's film depicts this repeatedly, showing Bundy luring girls back to his car by wearing a fake cast, pretending to be a cop, or simply chatting them up in a friendly manner. Yet the film also subverts this popular perception of Bundy as a master manipulator. He's also depicted here as a leering weirdo, who fumbles while stalking girls in a grocery store or drinks booze and tugs his cock while driving around. The film comes to the conclusion that there were signs that Bundy was a monster and everyone ignored them.

In fact, Bright's script repeatedly depicts there being witnesses to Bundy's disturbing activities. He's caught masturbating outside a woman's house in the opening scene. He carries a body shaped package over his shoulder to his car, in full view of a group of people. He abducts girl from the beach, in broad daylight, with multiple people around to see. Even his first daring escape from captivity is shown to happen because the guard watching him stepped out of the room. "Ted Bundy's" main idea seems to be that Bundy got away with it for so long not because he was a genius criminal but because nobody said anything sooner. Is that because nobody is going to question a clean-cut, charming seeming white guy? Are we just culturally predisposed to dismiss men doing anything bad? As our understanding of true crime continues to evolve, it's impossible not to consider this as a factor. 

While Bright's film definitely makes some subversive points about the way the Bundy case is typically understood, it's still a grimy exploitation movie. The facts of the Bundy case are used to dress-up horror movie thrill sequences. There's an especially tense and uncomfortable chase scene, devoted to Bundy pursuing an escaped victim through the woods that climaxes with her finding a body of a previous victim. It feels like something out of a slasher movie, which is a questionable tone to invoke in a fact-based film. There's even a fake-out nightmare scene, featuring Ted wielding a machete. Yet it's an effective moment, tense and gruesome. A few times throughout "Ted Bundy," it grasps that gritty atmosphere of hopelessness Bundy's victims surely felt. Such as a key scene where he drops a girl in the forest and lectures her (including telling her he's a Republican) before brutally strangling her to death. Or the shadowy, withdrawn way Bundy's rampage in a sorority house is depicted. It's a questionable way to depict actual crimes but it's still effective. Bright shows off the same command of tension and cramped interiors that worked so well in "Freeway."

But if you think that aspect of the film is tasteless, let's talk about its streak of gallows humor. Yes, much as in Bright's "Freeway" movies, there's definitely a degree of smart-ass, "can you believe this shit?" shock humor in "Ted Bundy." This is most apparent in a flippant montage devoted to Bundy's killing spree across Utah and Colorado. Bloody markers occur across the map as Bundy goes about his habit, smacking girls over the head with blunt objects and dropping dead bodies in the woods. Upbeat music plays over all of this, which is pretty fucked-up. I can't imagine a family member of one of Bundy's victims watching this and not being grossly, justifiably offended. Yet I kind of have to admire the balls on Bright for doing this. This thread reappears a few times throughout the film, during an outrageous scene where Bundy fucks his girlfriend in a crowded prison cafeteria or another upbeat dance song playing over the end credits. The Bundy story is so sickeningly lurid that playing the entire thing as grotesque comedy is maybe not an unreasonable reaction. 

Most actors that have played Bundy have been pretty-boy, all-American types like Mark Harmon or Zac Efron. Obviously, casting decisions like this play up Bundy's reputation as an outwardly charming, handsome young man. Bright's films goes a slightly different route. Michael Reilly Burke, a character actor that has mostly done television and supporting roles, stars as the eponymous murderer. The first scene in the film has Burke's Ted standing in front of a mirror, seemingly getting all his twitchy instincts out first thing in the day so he can appear normal for the rest of it. It's the establishing moment for Burke, who mostly plays Bundy as a sweaty creep. His mask of civility slips many times, especially when arguing with Lee. He can only present himself as respectable for so long, before those homicidal tendencies surface again. This fits the film's thesize, that there were warning signs about Bundy that went unnoticed. It also allows Burke to create a captivatingly creepy performance, as a man torn between being a raging beast and wanting something like a normal life.

Yes, Bright's film does eventually come to the conclusion that Bundy was driven by impulses he could barely control. As the movie goes on, as Bundy escapes again and resumes his murderous activities, he seems more and more like an addict that just can't quit. The film makes a brief reference to Bundy's lingering resentment towards his mother and grandparents, which some have suggested was a factor in his development as a killer. There are suggestions here that maybe Ted did feel some guilt for what he did. Some have read this as a sympathetic portrayal of a hideously evil man, that attempts to excuse his horrible actions. Yet "Ted Bundy" never denies the true horror of his crimes, which makes these moments more curious. Maybe, ultimately, if we're going to make movies about serial killers we have to acknowledge that they are human too, full of complications. It's possible to feel sympathy for someone for their mental illness while also acknowledging how indefensibly evil their actions were. 

This difficult contradiction really comes to the forefront in the film's last act. Bright's film focuses on the media circus that surrounded Bundy's execution, the grotesque carnival atmosphere that arose around him being killed for his crimes. It shows the guards taking sadistic glee in preparing Bundy for his execution, by stuffing him into his rubber diaper in a scene that invokes rape. Finally, as the killer is killed, the camera focuses on his convulsing body, bleeding from the eyes and rendered faceless by the electric chair strap. This is the scene that most seems to upset the critics of "Ted Bundy," that the movie dares to portray a perverted serial killer as a victim too. I don't know if this last act, grimly portrayed, is another one of Bright's tasteless provocation or if he's questioning the purpose of capital punishment. Can we call state-sanctioned executions justice? Ultimately, the film ends with the question of "Who was Ted Bundy?" How could one man be both a brutal serial murderer, a clean-cut nice young man, a depraved sexual predator, a victim of his own uncontrollable impulses, a manipulative sociopath, and someone killed by a state hungry for blood? Perhaps these are the questions such men force us to ask. 

Bright's "Ted Bundy" has been mostly dismissed as a trashy exploitation flick, that doesn't treat its touchy subject matter in the sensitive manner it probably should be handled and tries to cash-in on the notoriety of an infamous killer. And this is not entirely untrue. Yet it's also a more complicated and interesting film than that description implies. It's a tawdry horror flick, a sick black comedy that plays fast and loose with the facts, an attempt to understand what made this disturbed man tick and what that says about the society that birthed him. I think that mix, messy as it may be, is compelling enough to deserve a second look. We've had a flood of Bundy-related projects in the twenty years since this movie has been made, as the horrible man's terrible actions can't help but reflect on our greater understanding of masculinity and crime in this modern age. Despite that, Bright's "Bundy" puts its own spin on things and finds some interesting things to say, though I guess it's up to personal taste whether or not you can stomach its flippant choices. [Grade: B]