Review of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

Kudos to "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" for taking its subject seriously and not resorting to schlock effects. Prepare yourself for an unrelentingly grim film that will leave you feeling awful (it did me, anyway). It's well acted and fairly well written, but for all that it still didn't really leave much of an impression on me. It's certainly not one of the scariest movies ever made, as many people attest.

I guess I was disappointed in the film maker's choice of a subject. I'm fascinated by the psyches of serial killers, but Henry wasn't the kind of serial killer that most interests me. I prefer to read about the more ritualistic killers who kill to fulfill a basic need. Henry killed more as a way to cope with challenging emotions, and there was no pattern to his actions. He wasn't a serial killer in the conventional sense we've come to associate with serial killers.

Obviously, the film makers wanted their audience to be freaked out at the prospect of killers like this walking among us all the time, checking us out in parking lots, riding next to us on subways, exacting their own brand of revenge on a world that has treated them ill. However, for a more complex and satisfying look into the internal mind of someone teetering on the brink of madness, rent "Taxi Driver." Grade: B-