Gacy

I was pretty disappointed with this one. The primary reason this film was even remotely disturbing was due to the fact it was based on a true story. The direction and acting was quite terrible. Really, really bad. Thankfully, the bad acting is so much so that it turns from bad to kind of funny. I haven't seen the other film based on the same situation, but can't image it to be much worse than this. It's worth seeing for the sake of it being an interesting true story...well, that and John Gacy is played by none other than Mark Holton (Francis from Pee Wee's Big Adventure). Somehow, the relation between the two films makes them both that much scarier.

This film is part biopic, part psychological portrait of real-life serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (played here by Mark Holton). It begins with a brief scene of an 11-year old Gacy with his father, before jumping to Gacy's later life with his second wife, when he was living just outside of Chicago. It roughly covers a number of events up to Gacy's arrest, but not his trial or later years.

This is one heck of a difficult film to rate. Co-writer David Birke also co-wrote another serial killer biopic/psychological portrait, Dahmer (2002), and both films suffer from many of the same flaws. Gacy may have even more problems. There are countless things that could have been done better.

Yet in combination with co-writer and director Clive Saunders, Gacy manages to retain your interest, and excels at the prime directive of serial killer flicks--it makes the viewer feel profoundly uncomfortable. If judged solely on that aspect, the film would deserve a 10 out of 10. Of course, not everyone wants that kind of emotional experience with a film, but it seems to me that if a serial killer flick doesn't make you uncomfortable, something went wrong. The subject isn't exactly puppy dogs and pixie sticks, unless we're talking about barbecuing puppies and using the pixie sticks for spice.

Let's get out of the way that the film isn't precisely, historically accurate, and it's far more historically incomplete. I don't consider that a flaw. Saunders makes it more than clear a couple times that he's used facts about Gacy's life as inspiration. This is not a documentary, but a fictionalization--specifically it's "historical fiction". Gacy had a relatively complicated life, and understanding his crimes "realistically" involves looking at a huge time span of complex events. There's no way it could be done in 90 minutes, or even 180 minutes.

However, the events that Birke and Saunders choose to show too often seem random, and there's too much exposition missing. We get one scene of Gacy-as-a-boy with his dad, whom we see being mildly abusive. This isn't sufficient to establish anything significant about Gacy's youth. There either should have been more material like this, or it should have been dropped altogether and simply mentioned at some point, perhaps during a bit of self-reflective dialogue (which we get later anyway).

Next we jump to a screen full of text telling us that Gacy was convicted of sodomizing a boy and spent 18 months in prison. Then we jump again, and suddenly we see Gacy living with a woman about his age, two younger girls and an older woman. We can figure out that this is his wife (it was actually his second wife) and mother, and we assume it's his kids (they weren't, they were stepdaughters). Eventually we're told their relationships (except my parenthetical facts), but it doesn't help that it is initially presented as something of a mystery.

There's a general lack of exposition as exemplified above that makes the film play more surrealistically if you're not familiar with Gacy's story. Sometimes this works--the inserts of Gacy eating chicken and dressed up as an alternate world Colonel Sanders (Gacy's first wife's family owned a number of Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Iowa) are particularly striking, even if the viewer can't quite figure out why they're present. But just as often the lack of exposition is more of a problem, as with the two hippie-looking guys who are staking out Gacy near the end of the film. It's never quite clear who they are, why they're around, or why in some cases they appear to have lawn chairs set up within about 30 feet of Gacy's front door.

There are a lot of interesting facts about Gacy that are hinted at but not shown very well. For example, he was actually well liked by a number of people and he was very involved with community groups such as the Jaycees at one point. His fascination with clowns was also much more bizarre than is shown in the film. He had unusual makeup that friends recommended he change because it had potential to scare children, and he was an amateur artist who painted weird but wonderful clown/skeleton canvases (well, I like it at least, but I have a taste for outsider art, including psychotic stuff). In conjunction with the clown fascination, Saunders employs subtle carnival music in the score at one point. This worked well, but would have been better if more regular and prominent.

What Saunders focuses on instead are those elements that provide that uncomfortableness I was talking about earlier. Gacy had a crawl space beneath his house that served as a dumping ground for bodies and that produced an infamous stench. Saunders dwells on the crawl space, appropriately. He also fills it with cockroaches, maggots and other insects. Gacy comes across as consistently pathetic, almost sad, as does most of the rest of the cast, surprisingly enough, including Gacy's family and most of his victims. It's difficult when watching the film to believe that some of the victims would make themselves as available as they did, especially over time, but this is based on truth. A lot of small, subtle "beats" add to the pathetic feeling, including the driving shots through the dirty windshield, and a lot of white trash characters who look unkempt, who drive wrecks, and who work in dilapidated environments. Even though I ended up wishing there was more of the carnival music, I also loved the melancholy score that is prominent about two-thirds of the way through the film.

While the film might not provide a lot of psychological insight into Gacy, if such would be possible--he truly comes across as very rational and completely insane at the same time, and it might have benefited from a more linear, in-depth look at some of the victims, the film still succeeds by delivering a deeply disturbing atmosphere.

I'd like to know what the purpose was behind the making of this film. The Gacy story would have been served better by a more documentary approach, instead of this weak "grand guignol" version which spends more time focusing on maggots and bad smells than on Gacy and his background. Are we to believe that he's a psychopath because his dad whacked him around on a fishing trip (and maybe elsewhere)? His married life is brushed over casually (what happened in all the OTHER years of his marriage?), and his business and social life was also given short shrift. Why did he kill the first boy? When did he lose control over his anger and perversion? He's just a hair-trigger, vulgar and angry guy through the entire film.

BUT HERE'S WHAT BUGS (sic) ME MOST ABOUT THIS FILM...when will L.A. producers realize that other parts of the country look different from California? This story took place in Des Plaines, IL, my wife's home town. (In fact, Gacy's last "pickup" was at a store just a few blocks from her house.) In the movie, Gacy's house and neighborhood look nothing like Chicago. The trees are wrong, the sky is wrong, the other buildings are wrong. They didn't even get the colors quite right on the Chicago police cars. Worst of all...as in many other Hollywood productions about Chicago...you can actually see MOUNTAINS in the background (during Gacy's party scene). Hollywood morons need to get out a little more! There is life beyond L.A. (At least they confessed to it in the closing credits.)

I rented this movie not expecting a lot, but was very interested to see how one of the most disturbing serial killers in American history was portrayed.

Often times movies about serial killers, especially made for TV movies fall short because they get caught up trying to get away with showing as much of the gruesome acts that their subjects committed, rather than delving into the environment that could've produced them, or the circumstances in which their acts were committed.

E! True Hollywood Stories do a better job of relaying the events than movies such as Summer of Sam, the slew of movies made about Charles Manson , the handful of Ted Bundy movies and the recent film Gacy. Gacy is not a bad movie. It is just kind of boring to be honest. There is absolutely no suspense, no true horror, a few kind of gruesome scenes and it doesn't leave the viewer with any answers as to what could have possibly created a monster like John Wayne Gacy, aside from the brief lack luster 2 minute scene with a young Gacy fishing with his father.

To make a film about John Wayne Gacy and have it not be interesting is like messing up a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The part of Gacy is very well acted however by Richard Holton. He is perfect for the role, you may recall him from his role as Francis in Pee Wee's Big Adventure (a true classic.) Back to the point, if you are a serial killer aficionado this could be worth checking out, if you're a Killer Klowns from Outerspace fan don't bother Gavy dresses up like a clown once and its brief. This film would have better spent its time tackling the enigma that was this monster of a man and the double life he led for years instead of simply relaying events in a rather boring way. Not worth the 4 some odd dollar rental fee unless ur a big serial killer or Gacy buff.

When you read the true stories of these horrible serial killers such as Gacy, Dahmer, and Bundy, its easy to think that those stories would make great and terrifying films. However time after time these serial killer bio flicks just fall flat and don't seem to capture the horror of these killers, and "Gacy" is definitely not the exception.

My first complaint is just the whole tone of the movie. It never seems very serious, I felt as if I was watching a comedic made for T.V movie with all the funny parts ripped out. The story was flat and moved at an unusual and unappealing pace. I can't say I am very familiar with the true story of John Wayne Gacy (I know the basics, just not everything there is to know) but I doubt this movie followed it to a tee, some things just seemed out of place.

Overall "Gacy" just doesn't do a very good job of telling the story of John Wayne Gacy. Its rather boring and just not very interesting.

3/10