Despite who Henry is, one almost wants to see the two of them get together. Were Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer any less a film there might have been something comic to the two’s exchanges – like the scene where Henry and Otis shoot a motorist who pulls up to help and then Henry almost mockingly asks Otis “Feel better now?” The most sympathetic character in the film is Becky – her sympathies are clearly misplaced and far too simplistic but her plaintiveness is the most normal and appealing thing in the film. And it is a scary definition of normalcy – “You tellin’ me you never killed anybody before?” Henry asks Otis incredulously at one point. (l to r) Otis (Tom Towles) and Henry (Michael Rooker)īy deliberately making Tom Towles irritably crass and unlikable – but also the one who at first objects to Henry’s killing but then joins in with hick sensibility – John McNaughton draws one into a disturbing redefinition of normalcy. His looks and silky voiced soft-spokenness seem attuned towards portraying an inexpressive sullenness that broods and then explodes forth into blank psychopathic violence. Michael Rooker went on to build a reputation as a beefily solid supporting character in films but has never seemed more suited to a role than that of Henry here. At most, Henry offers an “It’s either you or them, one way or another,” as explanation of his motivations. John McNaughton achieves a great deal in the way he etches his characters, although ironically doing so largely by allowing their motivations to go unspoken. However, at the end of the telling he confuses how he killed her, as though all the women he has killed since have blurred into an indistinguishable whole in his memory. One of the more disturbing scenes is where Michael Rooker and Tracy Arnold sit at the table, where she tells about how her father sexually abused her and then the camera closes in on his impassive face and he states with cold chill vehemence “My mother was a whore” and launches into the story of how he killed her for making him watch her have sex with her men friends. In the opening scenes, Michael Rooker is seen picking up a hitch-hiker who has a guitar and then a couple of scenes later casually gives the guitar to Tom Towles, saying it was just “something I came by.” Or the scene where the two of them get a motorist to pull over on the side of a road and then shoot him and stand laughing over the act like two drinking buddies celebrating. The understated nonchalance of the film is disturbing. Instead of being set in a mansion or some variation on the old dark house, the majority of the film is set around a kitchen table in a dreary apartment and the result is in some ways even more scary. The lead psycho is no Hannibal Lecter manipulating and scheming or a one-liner spouting camp villain – as the film’s advertising byline says, “He’s not Freddy, He’s not Jason, He’s real” – just an ordinary unemployed stiff. Instead, the camera seems to just blankly focus on the action, recording it as disinterestedly as it does say a car driving through the Chicago streets. John McNaughton does not dress his direction up in horror film trappings – suspense, stalking scenes, jumps out of the edge of the frame and the like. What makes Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer so disturbing is its very ordinariness. Even in lessened form, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is still powerful viewing. This version (released on video in New Zealand in 1991 after being banned from film festival showings) is seen in truncated form, having been shorn of six minutes of running time, including the notorious scene where Henry and Otis blow away a kid. The other thing that accompanies these films is controversy – and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer has suffered that, having been banned in several countries and it being held up three years until 1989 before receiving a US release. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer did much the same in the late 1980s. Every few years along comes a film out of nowhere, made on a zero budget, that is so ferocious in the way it bites its teeth into society and all good sensibility that it sometimes turns the horror genre on its head – you could include the likes of Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Evil Dead (1981) and NEKRomantik (1987).
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