Movie Review: 'Ted Bundy American Boogeyman'

In my nearly 20 years of writing about the movies I have seen some disreputable filmmakers and Daniel Farrands, the director of such non-classics as The Haunting of Sharon Tate and The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, is among the most disreputable of them all. Targeting some of the most well known true crime stories in American history, Farrands doesn’t seek to shine a light on the gravest of evil, he seeks to exploit it as if it were just another horror story.

In Farrands’ vile hands these stories of tragic murder become popcorn horror flicks where people like the Manson Family and now Ted Bundy, in Ted Bundy: American Boogeyman, become not all too human monsters but rather like Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. In these stories of grim tragedy, Farrands sees not tragedy but dollar signs, not victims but props. It’s not as monstrous as his subjects but it’s in the gloomy, grimy ballpark.

For his latest foray into the ugliest of greedy exploitation, Farrands exploits the legend of Ted Bundy, famed 1970s murderer. Without any intent to reveal anything new about Bundy or bring any humanity to the people he killed, Farrands uses Bundy as a vehicle for exploitative scenes where handsome former TV star Chad Michael Murray chucks a fake head out the back of his car like so much trash. To say Murray is overmatched in playing this character is an understatement. It’s not that Murray isn’t handsome and charismatic, the direction simply renders his take on Bundy as vapid and meaningless beyond Farrands' desire to capitalize on Bundy's name value.

In his book on famous flops, the brilliant writer Nathan Rabin writes about Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance. Rabin recounts how the star of that film, Ryan O’Neal, had begged Mailer to cut a scene where the camera whirled around O’Neal as he mumbled the phrase ‘Oh God, Oh Man’ over and over again. O’Neal worried, quite reasonably, that the scene made him look like a foolish amateur and not the actor he believed he was. Chad Michael Murray has his very own ‘Oh God, Oh Man’ moment in Ted Bundy: American Boogeyman.

The scene comes after Ted Bundy escaped from a Utah prison in 1976. He escaped and went to Florida by 1978 where he murdered the residents of a sorority house. The scene in question takes place just before Bundy committed these atrocious killings. Farrands posits a scene wherein Bundy was refused a date by one of the sorority members. Bundy then goes back to his nearby apartment and begins to have a breakdown and consider murder before Farrands has Bundy imagine an encounter where he masturbates furiously over violent pornography, creeps on mannequins that are being stored in his apartment, and then imagines an orgy of masked women, assumedly the co-eds from the sorority, tying him to the bed and forcibly making love to him.

Sir Lawrence Olivier himself could not act in a scene so ill-conceived so you can imagine how poor Chad Michael Murray fared against this backdrop. Honestly, I feel bad for Murray, his director truly led him down an awful path and does his leading man a great disservice by having him act in this scene. It’s one of the worst scenes in any movie in the last year at least. The editing is abysmal, filled with simpleminded jump cuts, the cinematography, lighting and set design are impossible to look at but mostly, it’s poor Chad Michael Murray forced to betray any dignity he might have to act out this atrocious and embarrassing action.

Murray tries so hard but his effort is desperately in vain. As he picks up a knife and toys with it, drags it across his naked chest, and bangs it against a nearby radiator he resembles poor Tommy Wiseau at the end of The Room, moments before his outlandish suicide scene. Wiseau, at the very least, carried the excuse that he'd never acted in a movie before. Murray, having spent more than two decades on television, has no such excuse. His only solace is people like me who recognize that his director should never have placed him in this position. No actor, Mr Murray, or otherwise, should have been asked to try and play this scene.

And yet, there is somehow another contender for worst scene of the year in this very movie. I don’t know the actor’s name, I don't want to embarrass this poor man, but he’s playing an FBI Psychiatrist. He’s just finished interviewing Ted Bundy after the first time Bundy was caught and imprisoned. In his only scene, this poor man is called upon to deliver a monologue about how Ted Bundy is the most dangerous man he’s ever come across. The stilted dialogue and the desperate overacting of this misguided actor is made worse because Director Farrands decides to use this moment to provide homage to the ending of Hitchcock’s Psycho. To say Farrands is overmatched in this attempt is a grand understatement.

Ted Bundy: American Boogeyman is being released by Fathom Events on August 16th, 2021 for one night only before moving to Video-On-Demand rental services in September. I urge you not to put money in the pockets of Daniel Farrands. It will only cause him to think that his style of exploiting murder is a good way to make money. Please, prove him wrong.