Review by Ray Garton

DAHMER
2002
Written/Directed by - David Jacobson
Starring:
Jeremy Renner - Jeffrey Dahmer
Bruce Davison - Lionel Dahmer

The tagline for Dahmer is, "The Mind is a Place of its Own." Well, so is this movie. It occupies a kind of cinematic no-man's land - it isn't revelatory enough to be a biopic, suspenseful or scary enough to be a horror movie, or even entertaining enough to be simply a movie. It's like a network TV movie-of-the-week that got kicked into a sewer and then crawled out much later, after spending a lot of time down there and finding it liked it.

Jeremy Renner plays infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer as a sour-faced young man. That's it. Absolutely no depth is given the man who tortured and killed, dismembered, eviscerated, and even ate so many. But then, no depth is given to any aspect of Dahmer's life as we bounce through it in a series of confusing and ill-timed flashbacks that show us Jeffrey as a drunken teenager, Jeffrey angry about his parents' divorce, Jeffrey taking a break from his gruesome hobby to get a wild crow out of Grandma's kitchen, and of course, always, always rendering young men unconscious, one after another, so he can have his way with them.

As Dahmer's irritated father, Bruce Davison gives his usual mouth-twisting performance, but he has nothing to work with. Jacobson's script simply refuses to offer up any insight into, interesting perspective on, or even a probing question or two about one of the most horrifying serial killer stories in the annals of crime.

When Dahmer finally dismembers or cuts open a body, we do not recoil in horror or disgust - instead, and this is the movie's worst crime, we are bored, because we have no emotional connection to anyone involved, victim or killer. I've seen characters with more dimension in television commercials. Jacobson appears to have no curiosity about his subject, no questions about the whys behind Dahmer's actions - it seems he is interested in nothing more than getting Dahmer's degenerate activity on film. That lends Dahmer a sticky sheen of ugliness it does not earn on its own; the sheen is there because of what the movie is not, not because of what it is. In the end, viewers are left with one question: "Why was this movie made?"

When you come up with an answer to that one, drop me a line.

[Out of a possible four Bloodshot Eyeballs.]