"Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer"

            About ten minutes into this ghastly film, I turned to my wife and asked “I wonder if all the dead women will be listed in the credits.”  The only reason I kept watching the movie was to find out, and to save you from having to repeat my sorry example, permit me to assure you that yes, the dead women are listed in the credits.  There’s the “Murdered Family,” the “Murdered Woman”, the “Floating Woman,” the “Strangulated Woman”, the “Dead Hooker #1”, the “Dead Hooker #2” and so forth.  The movie is desperately short on speaking parts – I can only think of seven.

            Three are played by Henry, Otis and Otis’s sister, whose name I don’t recall.  Henry is a psychopath, Otis is a leering, drug-dealing, vile, incestuous, easily-led buffoon.  The sister at first seems sympathetic and likable, but when you remember that she abandoned her kids and ran away from home, well, it strikes you that she’s only sympathetic and likable because she’s surrounded by people so incredibly vile they make Doctor Mengele seem suitable for a guest appearance on Captain Kangaroo.  They’re all knuckleheads.  When Henry says “I don’t know,” you believe him because he doesn’t, in fact, know anything at all.  Ditto for Otis, who is, if anything, even viler than Henry.  At least Henry didn’t rape his own sister.  Yes, it’s that kind of movie, a movie so full of such wretched people that we are forced to judge them on the basis of whether or not they’ve raped their own family members.

            The movie is flat, direct and unemotional.  The most horrendous things possible are depicted with the kind of flat, detached style one expects from a documentary.  It’s as though This Old House directed the movie, not John McNaughton.  "Now, what we're doing here, Bob, is strangulating some people, and after that, we're going to nail up the wainscoting in the dining room."  It isn’t really that gory, at least not compared to sanguinary geysers like Death Spa, promoed on the same tape, but it isn't exactly Spongebob Squarepants either.  I think it’s the sheer coldness of it all that got to me.  People, mostly women, are tortured and murdered in various ways and the tone from the movie is quite neutral, as though people kill women all the time and it isn’t anything special.  I guess the sad news is that people really do kill women all the time, but the real horror is that John McNaughton can make a movie about it without managing to interpose any sense of outrage or horror.  If he were making a movie about people mowing a lawn, this detachment might be appropriate.  He didn’t, however.  He made a movie about people being brutally murdered, where such detachment is either a sign of a deep-rooted sexual dysfunction or nothing more than artistic posing.  I suspect a little of both.

            The high point of the movie is when Henry finally kills Otis.  But just as you cheer this delicious relief from Otis, Henry then kills the halfway likeable sister, so you don't know what to think any more.  I kept waiting for Henry to be killed, but it never happened. 

            Henry isn’t the worst movie ever made.  There are worse things out there, but just because Henry isn’t the worst movie ever made is no reason to actually go out and watch it. 

1 Skull.  Read it and weep.