THE UGLY

INTRODUCTION: What we have here is that rarest of things, a truly disturbing slasher flick, eschewing the buckets-of-blood approach of its 80's forbears and the tongue-in-cheek irony of its contemporaries Reynolds' flick takes us deeper into the disturbed mind of a killer then we could ever hope, or indeed want, to go.

SYNOPSIS: Psychoanalyst Dr. Karen Schumaker arrives in the midst of a terrible storm at an almost deserted Asylum where she is introduced to the sinister administrator and his cherubic charge Simon the serial killer. Nothing out of the ordinary so far at least as far as horror movies go. I don't want you to think that this sort of thing happens to me every day, or indeed every other day. Karen then proceeds to attempt to uncover the reason for his murderous rampages, but as she is drawn into Simon's world we are left wondering how much of his story is true.

REVIEW: Clearly inspired by "The X-Files" Reynolds provides us with a Scully look-a-like in the form of Hobbs, a smattering of good psychological horrors and no easy answers.

Rotondo is truly charming in the lead role, his sympathetic performance, like Perkins in "Psycho" is really what sets this film apart from your normal run-of-the-mill slasher/stalker flick. Hobbs also puts in an excellent performance as the psychoanalyst trying perhaps a tad too hard to get into the mind of a killer. The rest of the cast are given little to do but what they have they handle well.

The murders are told from the perspective of Simon the serial killer, and we are constantly reminded of his unreliability as a witness in this regard. The blood, for example, is inky black indicating either his self imposed distancing from the suffering of his victims or alternatively one of the more bizarre aspects of qualia, personally I'd guess at the former. Hitchcock of course did something similar when he used chocolate sauce for the blood in the "Psycho" shower scene but this was purely because it was black and white so he could get away with it and not because of any deep seated psychological reasons.

I myself have, over the years, been privileged (?) to become close to a couple of convicted murderers and have developed a deep and abiding interest in criminal psychology. Few of us can imagine what would be necessary to drive us to take another human being's life or indeed how we would cope afterwards. Reynolds' film easily ranks alongside the likes of Fritz Lang's "M", Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" and John NcNaughton's "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" as one of the most disturbing looks into the mind of a Killer ever committed to celluloid. Canadian media analyst Marshall McLuhan defines violence as the creativity and search for identity of the oppressed and it is hard to imagine anyone more oppressed or indeed repressed than the erstwhile anti-hero of this piece. Simon's domineering mother prevents him completing his oedipal trajectory until he is left with only one way out.

Really quite amusing and fun, well kind of.

Mutt's Rating: *****

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