Bundy: A Legacy of Evil

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!

I happened to find this movie by random coincidence at the local secondhand DVD store for about $2. I do enjoy horror movies, and a movie based on the actual serial killer couldn't be all bad. But I was a bit hesitant about it when I saw who had the lead part.

Without going into much details about the story, then it can be easily summarized as a movie about notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.

Story-wise then "Bundy: A Legacy of Evil" was unfathomably boring and rather uneventful actually. You don't care for any of the characters in the movie, be it victims or killer. Why? Well, because everything was so superficial and shallow that you can't emerge yourself into anything. And the actual killing scenes were just unimpressive.

One thing that did work for the movie, and which was much of a surprise for me. This was perhaps one of the best performances by Corin Nemec. It was just a shame that he was held back by a flaccid storyline and script. Also, Kane Hodder is in the movie, which was a bonus for any horror fan, but it was nowhere near enough to salvage this movie, not by a long shot.

"Bundy: A Legacy of Evil" is really not worth wasting your time or money on. If you like movies about real serial killers, then there are some better choices available.

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?

Corin Nemec is a talented actor and best remembered for his performance on the Fox series, "Parker Lewis Can't Lose," and playing Steven Stayner in "I Know My First Name is Steven." In this low budget thriller, he plays Ted Bundy. He has already played Richard Speck and the Boston strangler. Ted Bundy was a complex man and one of the most notorious serial killers of all time. The scene where he opens a file and closes it without mentioning what was in it about his birth father. As somebody who read Ann Rule's book, his paternity has never been explained. Ted was attractive, charming and intelligent but he couldn't overcome his inner demons. Unlike the Green River Killer, his victims were not the usual prostitutes. Bundy killed women after tricking them into his car. We never really know what he with his victims besides killing them. Nemec's performance is the only salvageable part of this forgettable film. You should watch Mark Harmon in the role.

This has got to be the most awful film I have watched in a long time. In fact, I will as go as far as to say that it's worse than my all time movie low (which near enough caused me to have a mental breakdown and was only saved by disappearing out of the cinema to do some retail therapy) Scooby Doo the movie.

This is a waste of time, the acting is poor and I mean POOR - low budget doesn't have to mean this BAD. I am a little tired of these so called biography films where the writer and director get off on scenes of violence (in between scenes of pure mind numbing tedious acting).

SO - if you get your kicks from listening to piercing screams, with not one great attempt at acting in site, this is the film for you! If they had to tell this lunatics story, then they could have done it so much better than this. I shudder to think who would call it a great film - but then the word 'cult' will no doubt be used instead of the word 'crap'. But hey, you never know how drunk you need to be to get through to the end.