Caseus Archivelox: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer & Metropolis

2002-04-16 - 11:22 p.m.
Then we watched Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Michael Rooker, he of Mallrats, JFK, and Eight Men Out fame (among others) was incredibly good in it. The movie itself was pretty disturbing, but mainly because it focuses entirely upon a homicidal maniac who never feels regret. However, I tend to agree with Roger Ebert, who decried the film's release as unrated, and I support his proposal for a new A rating for adult, for films that are not pornographic, but too far from mainstream for the MPAA to give it an R. Kids and Requiem for a Dream would have been two other films to get the rating in my opinion. The film wasn't scary, but it was definitely disturbing.

Then I went off to Griffith to watch Metropolis. It was a really crappy VHS copy of the movie. Watching VHS movies on the big screen is bad, because the colors bleed way too much. Also, again, the movie took a somewhat muddled plot full of incredible visuals (Metropolis 1926) and made it into an anime movie (i.e. completely incomprehensible plot with nice visuals). Anime just makes no sense. [Ed. note: my opinion has changed slightly since then.]

2002-04-16
After the previous few movies (since Peeping Tom) disappointing to some extent (although The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was bad mainly for its length and the fact that I was not watching it on the big screen like I did last Halloween), Henry was a slap in the face. Here is a serial killer movie that does not bother with the normal clichés of the genre, with a pair of mismatched detectives triumphing over all odds and making huge leaps of judgment to catch the wily (but ultimately insane) serial killer. For Henry, it really is a Portrait of a Serial Killer, as it focuses entirely upon the serial killer, his motives (or lack thereof) and his sick sense of quid pro quo. After he seemingly recants his life when running away with Becky in the line “I guess I love you too”, he brutally murders her off screen. My guess would be that he used his razor to do that, but the main clue to the brutality is that she ends up in a suitcase on the side of the road. There will be no happy ending for this killer and no redemption for the audience. Although the audience despises Otis for his incestuous, homosexual, and drug dealing ways, Henry is a mass murderer, and clearly has some serious mental issues, and cannot be a fully sympathetic character, and thus when Becky is hacked up, the audience is symbolically as well, with parts wishing that she had been able to change him into a functioning member of society, parts wishing that she had killed him, and parts wishing she had turned him in to the police. However, the movie is unsure exactly what it really wanted to say about Henry’s deeper conflict. The little that is there in an attempt to explain why he is a killer are told with so many contradictions (baseball bat, knife, gun) that we are left wondering whether there is nothing inside him, and that is shown when he looks into the mirror shaving before the last scene. There is nothing that can save him, and nothing that can save the audience from having to face the reality that there are people out there who kill because they can.

Except for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (where the meaning is somewhere in the film, but is completely irrelevant to anything remotely linked to the semblance of a plot), every film we have seen has had a killer of some sort that had a reason to kill, but for this, we have no real reason for the killing. Few films are as mindlessly brutal as Henry, and few films as completely disturbing. Is it as scary as Halloween or Psycho or the Shining? Not really, but it is much more disturbing than most movies I have ever seen.