But McNaughton wisely refuses to condescend to these stunted characters or reduce them to their dossiers. In less skilled hands, this psycho-babble might sink the picture. Becky was abused sexually by her father Otis has a yen for a high-school boy to whom he sells marijuana Henry, at fourteen, killed his mother, a hooker who dressed him as a girl and forced him to watch her in bed with johns. Michael Jackson Sexual Abuse Lawsuits Revived by Appeals CourtĪs the three share meals and conversation, McNaughton crams in a heap of background. Otis treats his sister with barely concealed contempt and incestuous lust – though the gentlemanly Henry aims to see he doesn’t follow through on the latter impulse. The plot trigger is the arrival of Otis’s sister Becky (Tracy Arnold), a topless dancer from the South who wants to find a respectable job and send for her daughter her husband is in jail on a murder rap. Henry shares a drab Chicago apartment with a prison buddy named Otis, skillfully played by Tom Towles. It’s a scary, resonant performance, and a great one. Polite and soft-spoken, he uses only an occasional steely glint to betray the rage simmering beneath Henry’s bland façade. Rooker, who later acted in Sea of Love, Eight Men Out and Music Box, is extraordinary as Henry. At first, we see only the aftermath of the crimes: corpses arranged in horrific tableaux while the soundtrack echoes with the victims’ death throes. As in Joseph Ruben’s Stepfather, Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Hitchcock’s classic Shadow of a Doubt, the intent is to demonstrate how madness can wear an ordinary, even pleasing face. McNaughton takes his time showing Henry in the act of murder. “Real nice smile you got there,” he says, before hopping in his car to search for a victim. The film’s initial glimpse of Henry (Michael Rooker) shows him thanking a waitress. Watching a segment about Lucas on TV’s 20/20, McNaughton was struck by Lucas’s low-key charm, a trait he felt explained how a killer could get close to his victims. McNaughton and coscreenwriter Richard Fire based their fictionalized script on Henry Lee Lucas, a convicted serial killer who confessed to murdering more than 300 people over two decades. The film is no masterpiece, but it is spare, intelligent and thought provoking. Those films offer supernatural villains and cardboard victims they’re easy to shake. There’s more mayhem in any of the R-rated Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween movies. But half of the sixteen murders take place offscreen. The movie doesn’t shy away from gore: Bodies are kicked, punched, slashed, shot and dismembered. It’s ironic that those drawn to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer by its title alone are likely to be the most disappointed. (Scenes in Angel Heart and Scandalwere snipped to dodge the MPAA’s kiss of death.) If this defiant, uncut Henry wins over theater owners and audiences, a blow may be struck for other challenging films that don’t deserve to be censored or lumped with snuff flicks and pornography. MPI is battling a system that, in effect, blocks the distribution of films that don’t meet ill-defined moral standards. It’s a risky move and a significant one for American independent films. Rejecting the MPAA decision, MPI decided to release Henry without a rating on a city-by-city basis, starting in Boston late last month. An X on a film means that major theater chains won’t show it, most newspapers won’t advertise it, and nobody makes a buck. At the Chicago International Film Festival in 1986, the film drew interest from distributors, but they were quickly scared off after the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) slapped Henry with an X rating. McNaughton provided something more: a raw, transfixing character study that plumbs a twisted mind. MPI, a local video firm run by the brothers Waleed and Malik Ali, financed the project. He had a cast of talented unknowns – drawn mostly from Chicago’s Organic Theater Company – a meager budget of $120,000 and four weeks to get the job done. First-time feature director John McNaughton started shooting this graphic tale of a mass murderer back in 1985. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a stinging chiller with a provocative past and a potentially bright future. Or at the very least like something you don’t waste time reading or thinking about. It sounds like a bad TV movie, or one of those grind-house rip-and-renders.
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