You might have seen an announcement recently that a new film about Ted Bundy, the serial murderer, rapist and all-round turd whom society has managed perfectly well without since they executed him, is in the works, and the general response to his news has not been entirely enthusiastic. Stop glorifying him: do we need yet another exhaustive analysis of the man who bludgeoned and butchered so many women that no-one even knows for sure how many there were or where the bodies are? Has Bundy not had enough moments in the sun yet? If "cancel culture" is an actual thing, how come it's used against people who tweeted about Donald Trump or Israel but it's not used against people who raped and murdered scores of women? And if you have to make Ted Bundy movies (which you absolutely don't), at least stop casting chiselled, good-looking hunky guys to play him.
I've (clearly) never had much truck with True Crime movies: especially the American obsession with actual serial killers like Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, whoever the Hillside Strangler was. Fictional ones, sure: bring it on, pass the popcorn. But real human beings suffered and died at these scumbags' hands and that's an uncomfortable source of entertainment - and let's face it, that's what these films are. This one centres on the Green River Killer, an individual who was new to me but who turns out to be of the same rancid ilk, and is slightly unusual in that it's a British film, specifically Welsh (though the exteriors were shot in the US). Depressingly, it's punishingly shoddy in all departments and borderline unwatchably poor throughout.
Uninspired by a true story, Bundy And The Green River Killer supposedly details the hunt for yet another serial killer after four bodies turn up in a small Washington town. Bundy himself is already on Death Row, for the Chi Omega murders (which we absolutely didn't need to see cheaply re-enacted at the start), and is consulted, Lecter-like, by an FBI profiler and the Green River lead investigator after the bodies keep turning up and they still have no leads. One of his ideas does lead to a possible suspect but there isn't enough evidence and he's soon free to kill again and again and again.... for twenty years in total while they wait for the necessary advances in DNA technology.
To be honest it's perhaps a mercy that we don't see more than one of his victims, the others left unnamed and unseen in a story that has no interest in them, partly because it would be tediously sadistic and partly because such moments would clash with the bland and frankly boring remainder of the film. The dialogue is tiresome, the performances are uninteresting, the look of the film is flat and cold and the music score (from a pre-composed library) does nothing to underline the alleged drama or the alleged characters. When the lead detective's wife complains that the 20 years he's spent working the case have wrecked his life, it would have been nice if there'd been scenes backing that up. It would also have been nice if they'd at least tried to age the characters through the decades beyond one laughable suggestion of greying hair, when all the film's time periods appear to have been shot in a fortnight. For a movie about a man who killed up to seventy people, it has no sense of pace, no sense of urgency, not the slightest sense of horror.
Auteur Andrew Jones has a lot of movies on his CV, churning out four or five titles a year like he's Jess Franco or something. They include the weak killer doll movie Robert (and three sequels, none of which are troubling my rental queue) and scripts for remakes of Night Of The Living Dead and Silent Night, Bloody Night (the latter of which is as ball-achingly substandard as this is), as well as horrors inspired by Jonestown and Charles Manson. There's nothing in there so far to suggest a horror icon in the making, and after this fifth-rate excuse for a soul-crushing bore I'm not going to dig any further.
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