"Dead-Alive"

"Ted Bundy" is one of a trilogy of direct-to-video films about real killers of some sort (the others being "Ed Gein", and "Gacy"). It seems cheap, and exploitive, and if you saw it on the rental shelves, you probably forgot about it seconds after glazing over it. Well, unlike cheap, ambitiounless pieces of garbage like "Ed Gein", Matthew Bright's "Ted Bundy" is not only a valid work of cinema, it may be one of the most important works of film in the last decade.

And why, if the film does not get into any psychology, does it deserve this kind of praise? Well, it receives it because Bright seeks out to destroy the myth and legend of Ted Bundy. This is not a “portrait” of a serial killer. This is defaming, defacing revenge for the people that Bundy killed.

Bundy is said to be a charmer. He is said to be uncontrollably attractive to women. He is said to have lured women to their deaths because they would do anything that he told them to. Matthew Bright argues that this is not the case. In his film, Bundy is a creep. He masturbates outside the windows of changing teenagers. He touches himself in his car outside of high schools. He walks around with a bow-tie, and an unnerving grin, and fornicates with his cadavers. This is not the same man that mainstream media chose to idolize. He is a disgusting freak, fuck, and a murderer, and any kind of glory that he may have received by being a media darling, is completely destroyed by Bright's film. I am sick to death of modern movies trying to get us to sympathize with killers ("Monster"), when really, we should revile them.

Throughout the film, we never identify with Bundy. As the film runs, we become increasingly disgusted, and by the end, when the prison employees prepare Bundy for his execution by stuffing cotton up his ass (excessively), we laugh at him. This is what a movie about a serial killer should attempt to accomplish. Humiliation. Thank god for Matthew Bright.