Tightrope (1984)

Of course it is hard for New Orleans police detective Wes Block (Clint Eastwood) to catch the serial killer on the loose in the city - he is one of those badly drawn 80s-movie serial killers with an everchanging modus operandi, neither disorganised nor organised, at times a random targetter of women on the streets and at other times a player of diabolical games of cat-and-mouse who ends up a balaclava-ed home invader - and it is the macho 80s, so every single woman in this movie is coquettish and aching for it, and it doesn't matter how crotchetty and old and wrinkled the men are or how revolting their come-on lines are, the women are desperate to please - wait to hear Block's attempts at wooing the rape prevention instructor, Beryl Thibodeaux (the only woman in it who isn't a street walker) when they lunch together by the New Orleans' harbour, and wait and baulk when she becomes interested! - and keep in mind Block knows by this stage a serial killer is targeting the women he beds, but I guess Thibodeaux wants it so bad, Block simply has no choice, despite the obvious danger, to scratch her itch like a hero.

★★★☆☆

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Nightwatch ('Nattevagten') (1994)

This, at several key points, very ugly 1994 Danish horror thriller - that restaurant scene! - spawned a sequel and a English-language remake, so is a movie good enough to warrant that and largely, I think, because of the smiley, geek-chic rizz of Nicolaj Coster-Waldau in the lead, whose boyish enthusiasm and jokey disregard and goofy wide-eyed awe - of things like prostitutes, sex, and death - balances nicely with the dark and dread of his new nightshift work at a creepy morgue somehow linked to a spate of serial killings.   

★★★☆☆

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El Angel (2018)

"Serial killer" seems the wrong word for the murderous criminal portrayed here - is it possible to distinguish between serial killers and murderous criminals? - but extra confusingly, this murderous criminal is Rob Puch, a real-life babyfaced killer from Argentina who in the 60s, working as a brazen career thief, killed eleven people, but look him up later - because this striking and well-acted movie will garner your interest in this peculiar character - and discover someone quite different to this eccentric, possibly sociopathic babyface here - staring out from newsppaper photos and Wikipedia pages is a sneering rapist and abuser (did the movie neglect to metnion that?) and it becomes hard to reconcile fact with this, what, fiction?

★★★★☆

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Citizen X (1995)

You have to tolerate an Irish actor (Stephen Rea) and an English one (Imelda Staunton) and a Canadian one (Donald Sutherland) and a Swedish/French one (Max von Sydow) doing Russian accents and with straight faces spouting lines that make Soviet Union bureaucrats investigating serial murders sound like petulant preschoolers more concerned about 'saving Soviet Union face' than apprehending the killer of fifty-two victims, but this grim true crime story builds to something satisfactory over time, about Andrei Chikatilo's crimes and the advent of criminal profiling in the Soviet Union.

★★★☆☆

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Woman of the Hour (2024)

The fact that in 1978 an active serial killer once appeared in real life on a dating game television show seems at first a curious car crash moment to ogle in passing, hardly worth extrapolating into a feature-length movie – not without turning real murder and real victims into sideshow spectacle – but in her directorial debut, Anna Kendrick takes that moment and almost succeeds in finding the balance between respecting its grim reality and lampooning a world – then and now – that idly indulges sick male pathology with a sympathetic "there, there", fails to vet men before, say, letting them on camera, and asks women to laugh gaily at male idiocy.

★★★☆☆

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No Man of God (2021)

It's the American criminal justice system, one in the 1980s with a newly established criminal profiling department, that is the star of this oft-told, awful true crime story, approached from a peculiar angle - somehow Elijah Wood as real-life founding criminal profiler Bill Hagmaier and Luke Kirby's idiosyncratic and distracting Ted "Surely he sat up straight and spoke without a hand in front of his face, once?" Bundy disappear into the beige 1980s backgrounds, achieving little in their conversations about the infamous killer's crimes, and it is the access rules, prison protocols, and government bureaucracy that step forward and gently but insistently drive the interest here.  

★★★☆☆

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Strange Darling (2023)

'Strange Darlings', a movie that really needs to be seen - if it needs to be seen at all - not knowing anything about it, starts off troubling and I considered walking out to spare myself the trauma of what I imagined was coming, but sticking with it I was reasonably entertained, though not, as promotional material claims, by "the cleverest thriller of its kind," given that in this thriller some cops remain unaware of un-ignorable neighbourhood violence; because you can see where things are headed very early on; and because the exhilaration I felt when I worked out an audacious surprise turned to disappointment when the surprise didn't eventuate.

★★★☆☆

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عنکبوت مقدس ('Holy Spider') (2022)

This unflinching look at the serial murders of Saeed Hanaei, an Iranian family man who (at least after he was caught) claimed his murders of sixteen prostitutes were religiously motivated (but, let's face it, war trauma, mummy boyness, male entitlement, and psychopathy came first, right?) is extremely hard to watch but utterly compelling given its basis in truth, given its electric performance from Zahra Amin Ebrahimi as the deep undercover journalist who dared bring Saeed Hanaei down, and given its jaw-dropping final scenes in which director Ali Abbasi reveals just how far Iran's corrupt masculinity will go to perpetuate itself.

★★★★☆

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I Saw The Devil (악마를 보았다) (Ang-ma-reul bo-at'da) (2010)

I don't mind ultra violence in movies when revenge is being meted out to those especially deserving of it, like in Harry Brown or Bedevilled, The Brave One or a zillion other bloody revenge fests, and for the first hour or so, that's what's on offer here when a secret service agent goes beserk, seeking revenge on a Korean Max Cady serial killer who has horribly killed rhe agent's pregnant girlfriend, but by film's end, when the secret service agent's very short-sighted plan for revenge has resulted in pain, suffering and death for myriad extraneous others and when so much depravity is on show - so much that the serial killer becomes just one part of a greater universal serial killer problem - the thrill of revenge becomes more than absurd: From Dusk Til Dawn presents a more reasonable, grounded world.

★★★☆☆

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The Abandoned (查無此心) (2022)

This Taiwanese crime flick takes the problem of "runaway workers" (illegal immigrants) in Taiwan (from Thailand and Vietnam, for example) and makes this gritty real issue the context of a run-of-the-mill serial killer thriller, perfectly watchable, except as it reaches its denouement (a "the serial killer wears a birthday party hat and laughs maniacally in his underground lair" denouement) the gritty realism gives way to more and more eye-rolling cliche.

★★★☆☆

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Frozen Ground (2013)

The action is heightened and some of the events clearly can't have happened in real life exactly as they play out here, but this based-on-a-true-story movie is gripping viewing with Nicolas Cage playing a cop who needs to first convince dismissive colleagues and officials that there is a serial killer active in Anchorage, Alaska before he can bring to justice Robert Hansen, a man whose real-life existence and crimes you"ll probably wish you'd stayed unaware of.

★★★☆☆

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The House That Jack Built (2018)

Grisly murder is not the spectacle it used to be and no matter how hard tryhard provocateur Lars von Trier tries to match, say, Twitter/X in its ability to parcel out sudden, unexpected visual depravity, injecting increasingly shocking crime into his rehash of Nymph()mania (that's what this simply is, a third chapter, like the director is stuck on an idea, with Charlotte Gainsborough's Joe replaced by Matt Dillon's Jack, and her sex swapped with his serial murder; the languorous voiceover remains), the net effect of this heavy-handed and really quite silly movie is inanity.

★★☆☆☆

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The Hawk (1993)

A few years after she starred as Jane Tennison in the original Prime Suspect mini-series, Helen Mirren starred in this not terribly interesting, nor very psychologically coherent, BBC flim playing an English housewife who starts to think her husband is The Hawk, a serial killer pecking women's insides out on rainy nights along the freeway.

Natural Born Killers (1994)

Just what Oliver Stone intended with this wafer-thin heavy metal video clip - all symbolism, zero realism, and seemingly a grand thesis of one simplistic note - I don't know but it is loud, long and monotonous: a two-hour fight scene that plays out as though everyone is making it up as they go along, with one-dimensional characters screaming their way through one long unlikely situation, with the chaos of mass murderers Mickey and Mallory's "deep love" affair (read occasional "dry humping" and tongue kisses) and violent crime spree spliced meaninglessly with cartoon clips, black and white photography and - in a last-ditch attempt at relevance - media clips of actual celebrated tv crime reports. 

★☆☆☆☆

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The Black Phone (2021)

It takes an ordeal with a masked troll (upstairs, not under a bridge - a kind of vague reiteration of Buffalo Bill) and conversations with murdered teenagers via a magic wall phone for a boy to finally get the gumption to talk to a girl he likes in science class -- that his sister is psychic, too, who sees things in dreams ends up an irrelevant detail.

★★☆☆☆

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It Happened In Broad Daylight (Es geschah am hellichten Tag) (1958)

The book, adapted by Sean Penn in The Pledge (2001) with Jack Nicholson as the detective who promises a grieving mother he'll catch her child's killer, came later, but this 1958 Swiss-Italian-Spanish co-production is based Friedrich Dürrenmatt's even earlier screenplay - not the book - featuring the chilling child serial killer plot with a more palatable ending - the book's subtitle (The Pledge - Requiem for the Detective Novel) hints at the dark direction Dürrenmatt took with his refashioned plot, while this film, faithful to the earlier screenplay, can be enjoyed as a detective novel proper: a jaunty Swiss mystery with a thrilling police investigation.

★★★★☆

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Midnight (미드나이트) (2021)

The events take place over a compact couple of hours and amount to a string of scenarios bordering on offensive that try to derive thrills from the fact a deaf mute woman is being terrorised by a serial killer: she is unable to alert passersby and unable to convey the intricacies of her plight to police or to her mother, and just as you start to think it is all too silly (the killer, afterall, acts so brazenly, operating in plain sight he's essentially a Freddy Kruger in a dreamscape), something interesting happens with some military service cadets briefly seen on screen and suddenly a very silly, unlikely thriller starts to seriously indict male toxicity in South Korea, and suddenly this woman with no voice and no ownership of her own body and dress is not alone, and the outrageous situation she is in seems not so uncommon.

★★★☆☆

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Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)

With his scrubbing brush bristles for hair and comical way of Where's Wally-ing himself into every other scene, sometimes darting past in a sportscar, sometimes idling nearby in a green lorry and other times turning up in his grey overalls to stare through gates and windows, Michael Myers, the original movie's six-year-old-now-twenty-six-year-old serial killer, is an object of absurdity, not horror, in this retcon that has, for fans, the pleasing aesthetic of the original Halloween and the crowdpleasing reappearance of Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, now living as a boarding school teacher with a new identity, but is otherwise a movie that is over before it starts, blessedly short but a mere breath of a slasher movie with an overabundance of barely developed characters.

★★☆☆☆

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Solace (2015)

Law & Order repeats were playing back-to-back on the other channel and what a far superior viewing experience those police procedurals would have been compared to this heavy-handed claptrap also about a police investigation but one headed by a psychic (Anthony Hopkins) whose heavy metal film-clip visions, in ponderous slow motion, of coffee cups breaking and of eyes bleeding and of drips breaking the surface of some water, help serial killer investigators by telling them minutes in advance of their own human senses which bin to search at a crime scene, what the name of a news kiosk in a train station is, which of five taxis to follow in a traffic jam, and what kind of tattoo a bystander has at yet another of this film's dreary candelabra-decorated, rose-petal-strewn murder scenes. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Cruising (1980)

Because he resembles the murder victims, a policeman (Al Pacino) is sent undercover into the S&M gay sex clubs of NYC to flush out a serial killer, but forget the danger posed by a brutal knife-wielding maniac — what effect will all the gyrating mustachioed bears in leather — with whips, chaps, handcuffs and gimp masks — not to mention coffee dates with a new gay neighbour, have on the young policeman and upon the relationship he has with his girlfriend (Karen Allen), left-in-the-dark about her lover's undercover nocturnal adventures...you'll never know because although there is one fleeting scene that suggests the policeman willingly gets trussed up in masochistic fashion and a line of dialogue that suggests the couple's love life has changed, the movie prefers to skirt ambiguously, frustratingly around this pivotal and at-the-time sensational subject matter.

★★★☆☆

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