THE BLACK MASS

CONTAINS NO REAL SPOILERS

Maybe I'm just weird, but I genuinely don't understand the fascination with true crime. There seems to be something ghoulish about forensically poring over the tiniest details of brutal, pointless murders carried out by brutal, pointless men, as if there's still something to be gleaned from exhuming these horrors yet again. If you were law enforcement, if you were personally connected to the case, if you were a specialist in that kind of psychopathic or sociopathic behaviour, then possibly there's some legitimate justification for diving deep into the ghastly stories of these ghastly people. But for a film?

The Black Mass is yet another Ted Bundy movie, focussing on one single period in 1978 in Florida as he stakes out a sorority house, eventually succeeding in getting in and savagely attacking the young women living there. Though the names (except for his) have been changed, it's still hewing uncomfortably close to known fact - at least according to his extensive Wikipedia page - with date and time captions coming up at every scene change in an authoritative typewriter font. 

On a technical level it's perfectly well done: a misty late 70s ambience, with all the right hairstyles and costumes and no massive anachronisms, and a few familiar genre names in the cast (Lisa Wilcox from a couple of Elm Street sequels, Kathleen Kinmont from Bride Of ReAnimator, Eileen Dietz from The Exorcist). Bundy himself is almost never offscreen, with the camera giving us a scumbag's-eye-view, hovering over his shoulder pretty much the entire time (very rarely is he actually seen in full focus) as he plans and schemes and tries to pick up women in what must, even then, have been an appallingly red-flag creepy manner.

But the problem isn't that The Black Mass is yet another Ted Bundy movie, it's that it's just another Ted Bundy movie. It's not that it's raking over the real deaths and real suffering of real people, it's that that's all the film is doing. No new information is available, no new insight is forthcoming. This is just restaging the cold-blooded assaults on young women: pass the popcorn. The Black Mass could have bypassed all that by simply making everything up and inventing their own fictional serial killer: it's not as if audiences won't enjoy a Hannibal Lecter or a Michael Myers, and personally I'm rarely happier than during a Saw marathon because They're Not Real. But, as with Mansonsploitation movies like Wolves At The Door, if you're telling a true story you have a responsibility to the victims and on that level, this film doesn't make it. And I hated it for that.

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