Bundy: A Legacy of Evil

Anything I have to say about this abomination has to be judged in the context of my not having been able to sit through more than 28 minutes of it.

Here's the opening scene -- just in case a viewer might be uncertain about switching the channel. Bundy has one of his helpless victims screaming and tied up out in the boondocks at night. He wraps a cable about her neck while she whines and sobs. Bundy tells her what he's going to do to her -- kill her, then cut her head off and burn it in the camp fire until the eyeballs pop out. He orders her to look up at the stars while he strangles her almost into unconsciousness, then allows her to breathe again. Then he flings her aside, still muttering nonsense, and lifts up a spade and bashes her head in. Fade to Ted Bundy in his jail cell telling his own story, beginning when he was a deprived little boy. That's just the first few minutes.

I don't know where to begin. (The writers of this execrable offal would probably advise me: "Begin at the beginning." That's about the extent of their imagination.) Nemec has the character all wrong. It isn't as if this were a story about Jack the Ripper, a character on whom any pattern of traits could be imposed. The problem is that people now alive REMEMBER Ted Bundy. And Ted Bundy was not a soulful imitation of James Dean. Bundy was a handsome glib psychopath, a con man with a murderous streak. He would quote Shakespeare to a girl in a college hallway only if he'd memorized the passage five minutes before because he thought it might be useful in seducing her or might otherwise play to his advantage. Nemec plays him as a romantic, which is exactly bass ackwards.

But then so many things are just plain wrong. The viewer will be surprised to learn that Washington state, where Bundy began his career, has tall royal palms, just like Beverley Hills.

The worst thing is the emphasis on torture. It's becoming a genre unto itself. It's a reflection of our darkest impulses that we allow ourselves to watch a movie like this rude lump of foul deformity, which does to our national character what Bundy did to his victims.

What is it that drives some of us to excitement while watching a helpless victim tortured and slaughtered? It can't be completely alien to us because the US used to have well-attended public executions, and before that there were exhibitions like gladiator battles and bear baiting. Can that impulse, whatever part of the reptilian brain generates it, be very far from our common habit of buying tabloids in the supermarket checkout counters, the ones that feature color photos of celebrities now grown old and fat? This difference between Bundy's ecstasy and the adrenalin rush we get from watching this movie, isn't it a matter of degree, after all?

I think the title here is appropriate in that I do believe that this film may be the worst film that I have ever seen. I am in complete accordance with member "lovemyhayabusa" and I too read Ann Rule's "The Stranger Beside Me". This film is a gross misrepresentation of Ted Bundy on a personal level. In addition the film is seriously disturbing and this is not balanced by the interesting features of the case. I mean come on the World has been fascinated by the case of Ted Bundy since the 1970s! How can you make a movie about such a fascinating subject so pointless and uninteresting? Also, I take particular offense at how careless the film makers were with regard to the actual facts of the case and in the misrepresentation of Ted himself. I live in LA and I recognized many of the locations in which this film was shot. At no time did Ted Bundy live or kill in Los Angeles and many of the killing scenes are filmed in desert and he mostly killed in Washington State and Florida. I know that it was low budget (obviously) but there could've been some effort made to make the locations look reminiscent of the actual places the murders occurred. Its ridiculous and almost funny how inaccurate this film is. This is my advice for the film makers and those involved: If you're not going to make a film well (or at least descent for Christ's sake) don't make it at all. In addition the acting is very clumsy and the lead seriously botched his job. This was horrible and quite possibly the worst ever. Frankly, I don't understand how it was rated as high as it is (3.8) it should be at most a 2, I think. But that's just me.

This movie is awful. It's as if someone scanned through the Ted Bundy wiki page and then wrote a screenplay from what they could remember. I can count on my hand the moments in the film that were accurate (not including character names) - and most of them were very small aspects.

Besides the obvious COMPLETE butchery of all the facts, the movie was poorly paced. The acting was often very cheesy. The lead actor might have done a decent job with a good script and director. However, he seemed to have a pallet of creepy facial expressions he'd rotate through. Furthermore, he limped for the whole movie. I realize that some of the only footage available of Ted Bundy walking shows him limping, but it was because he had shackles around his ankles.

This movie was made out of an obsession with serial killers, which is probably why the focus was so helplessly off of the REAL Ted Bundy case - and who he actually was as a person. The part where he howls like a werewolf? Please. They even missed the boat on the method he used to kill. So many things missed - and for no apparent reason. Anyone who has read any account of his killing spree, or trials, would be able to write a better screenplay.

Also: This movie literally took me a month to finish. I'd stop about every three times something was so bad that I couldn't continue anymore. And it took me a month to get through the entire thing.

An episodic plot renders this film structurally inane. One scene has Ted in the desert on his hands and knees howling like a wolf. Cut to an interior scene in some house at Christmas where Ted is on the phone as a suicide prevention counselor. Where's the connection between these two events? The film doesn't tell us. The plot is filled with these random scenes from random periods in Bundy's life, sans any sense of flow or continuity.

Slow, dull, and boring, this film reeks of a quickly written script and overall quick, superficial production. There's not an ounce of suspense or tension. Episodes are long and drawn out. Bundy's manipulation skills are not well displayed, though the one sequence at the restaurant wherein he proposes marriage comes close to showing how he could deceive. Dialogue lacks subtext. The final twenty-minute segment is marginally interesting but only because the real-life outcome is so gripping.

Corin Nemec is dreadfully miscast as Bundy. Nemec, who vaguely resembles a youthful Pat Boone, looks nothing at all like the real Ted Bundy. The crooked smile comes across as contrived. And Nemec plays Bundy like a caricature. Many of the supporting performances are overplayed.

If ever there was a real-life serial killer whose public persona offers the potential for a riveting movie, surely Ted Bundy is the one. Unfortunately, a dreadful script makes for a muddled, incoherent storyline, helped not at all by poor casting and bad acting.

I read the book by Ann Rule The Stranger Beside Me and this movie was a complete failure at portraying Ted Bundy. The judge who sentenced Bundy to death in the case of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman was NOT Foggerty it was Edward Cowart. He was not picked up and his car was NOT searched in the middle of the desert, his car was searched by 3 policemen not one. And the Warden was NOT the one who recorded the confessions it was Bob Keppel. He killed 2 girls at the Chi Omega house with a WOOD CLUB not a baseball bat that was in the girls' room, and he seriously injured 2 more girls in the same sorority house, then he killed another woman down the road from them. The movie left out SOOOO many important details. Like where was Ann Rule at the Crisis Center, and what about Carol Ann Boone?, the woman he had a daughter with? It is a TERRIBLE, AWFUL, movie don't bother to rent it or buy it, Read Ann Rule's book along with Bob Keppel's for the real story of Ted Bundy!