Bundy: A Legacy of Evil

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.

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!

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.

When I saw this movie, the other day, on cable, it played with the title, "Bundy: A Legacy Of Evil," which is a much better title than the original one. As far as the film goes, I don't know what to complain about first. I guess the poor acting is a good start. The actor who played Bundy in this movie was not very convincing. Neither was anyone else for that matter. What was worse was the story line, or lack of it. At times, they would go from any particular scene and cut to a random shot where he is killing a woman while some crappy Alternative Rock music loudly plays. Now I know that Alternative Rock gets its roots from 60s and 70s rock, but it doesn't quite sound the same. I didn't know if they had momentarily slipped into the 90s or what? The music was so annoying I started to hit the mute button whenever it would come on.

They also got several facts wrong, but what movie doesn't do that anyway? I wouldn't have minded that so much if they had just pieced the story together somehow. By cutting to random killings and scenes in different cities or situations with no explanation or setup, I would not have had any idea what was going on without knowing what I already knew before seeing the movie.

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?