Director: John Erick Dowdle
Writers: Drew Dowdle (story), John Erick Dowdle
Stars: Stacy Chbosky, Ben Messmer, Samantha Robson
It’s a documentary about a killer who made hundreds of videotapes (2400 hours worth) of him torturing and killing people in the 1990s. They explain where the tapes were found, and point out the locations where the bodies were buried. The detectives and profilers theorize about how he got his start.
Then we watch him claim his first victims, all done through his video camera. It was amateurish and looked that way. We watch as he gets “better” at it. Clearly, this guy is really good at planning ahead.
The rest of the movie basically switched back and forth from the FBI being interviewed to footage from the killer’s video camera. The tapes, of course, tell the whole story.
We are treated to a mix of modern photography, horrible quality VHS camerawork, unfocused images, and under lit scenery. It’s all very authentic looking. Unfortunately, the grainy video quality goes on for too long, and it gets distracting. There’s just too much; it’s like watching an hour of a videotape.
And then there’s the realism. It all feels real— too real. The serial killer doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen before. He’s really smart, always one step ahead of the law, but otherwise, this feels just like any other “true crime” documentary. It’s all fictitious, but it doesn’t show us anything we haven’t seen in real documentaries. If you watched a real true crime documentary, you’d at least learn something; this is the same thing only fake. What’s the point?
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