The Park Maniac

The Park Maniac is a movie based on the true story of Francisco, a Brazilian serial killer who lived in São Paulo in the 1990s.

As the movie begins, his entire arc quickly becomes secondary to the plot and feels rushed. You don't get to learn his full story or how he began killing. Instead, he has already killed many women, and there is no development of his character.

The spotlight shifts to the story of Elena, a journalist on a quest to discover herself while struggling against machism in the brazilian press and society.

My main criticism is that you never feel connected to her story. If the intention was to highlight the struggles of women during that time, I believe focusing on the victims would have made for a much richer and more compelling story.

The whole film misses the point, and in the end, you feel cheated, expecting a serial killer story but getting something completely different.

The Park Maniac of 2024 on Prime Amazon. The story revolves around a person who works for a food/parcel courier company. He is a champion of scates and achieve his targets set by his boss much in advance of the rest of the staff. He has a mental craze for young girls. He lures these girls under some pretext takes them to woods rapes and kill them.

There is a young girl working for a news paper, follows these murders closely and manages to find out the delivery man. She gives a name of The Park Maniac, to this man and prints a write up with pictures in the news papers. This Maniac reads about his article and destroys all his belongings runs away to Argentina. But while attacking a lady, the police comes and catches him. The film is good till here. Thereafter the pace slows down and the film becomes boring.

Terrible script, actress Giovana Grigio does not convince with her forced performance. The story is not real and still treats the viewer as an idiot. Once the maniac is arrested, he asks her for an interview, and she goes there so he can confess to the crimes. That's ridiculous, that doesn't happen. The script and actors act by "imitating" Americans in police series. But in Brazil this doesn't make sense. This one deserves to go in the trash. I feel sorry for the main actor who didn't deserve to be in a film like this. Because he is a good actor. Silverio Pereira should receive extra money for taking part in a shameful film. I felt treated like an idiot watching an absurdly untrue film. And the police and investigators being treated like idiots while the journalist is treated like the investigator of the case.

I am Brazilian and I totally remember the story back in the end of the 90's about this guy. Famous Brazilian serial killers are rare, we do have some. We also have a sort of them disguised as "congressmen", because what they do is continuously steal, embezzlement, corruption, and that in the end totally take away lives. But that is another story. Back to this movie, it really seems it was rushed all the way. The movie is a flop. The producers added a character that did not exist. A movie has to be a story very well told, this is not. This movie has never captured the horror of the real victims, the family, what was the killer's thinking process. I love going to the movies, even writing about it, this was so amateur it hurts me as a Brazilian movie theater goer. Not really half -a** made. I'd say 1/3-a** made maybe. A real shame these people missed an opportunity to make a great movie despite the category. It looks like a bunch of cinema students, not even senior ones, went out for a happy hour.], and after some drinks, they decided they could join and make a movie. Rating this movie 4 is fair but I am not sure it is not a "3". I understand that budget in Brazil is a challenge, but hey, it looks like they made this movie out boy and girl scouts cookies sales.

True crime stories can indeed be great inspirations for interesting movies, but this movie missed a big opportunity. The story of one of the most infamous brazilian serial killers was poorly executed with a sloppy direction. They added a fictional character, an investigative journalist from a tabloid newspaper. The idea of focusing on this character isn't all that bad, but they could've dug deeper into the killer's perspective and leaned more into the horror genre. There's no suspense, no mysteries and the movie fails to hold your attention. Sometimes, the script gets disjointed and everything feels mechanical. There's a lack of background history, the characters seem shallow and hard to connect with. They don't show their motivations. The acting is awful and the killer feels like a caricature. Honestly, a total waste of time.