Owned version: The 2002 DVD released by Navarre Home Entertainment that also contains the sequel to this film.
Acquired: June 11th, 2014, from a seller on the Amazon Marketplace.
Seen before?: Twice - once on December 9th, 2014 and once on November 28th, 2016. The latter viewing led to this review.
...and upon third viewing, I feel like the above was sufficient. So, yeah. Definitely read that, because Addicted to Murder is not the sort of thing that reveals endless treasure upon repeated prodding. This revisit has me convinced I pretty much cracked it last time, and now I'm standing here looking at an open safe, pushing the door back and forth to see if maybe I missed a dollar stuck in one of the hinges. I imagine this will happen more than once as I go through the collection and glance off films I've seen and have written about previously (lord, am I not looking forward to a third jaunt through Arang). It's okay. Not everything can be a puzzle box. Some things just are what they plainly are.
Well. Except maybe there's one thing I can use to squeeze a touch more juice out of this pulped blood orange. This time around, the parallels to Deranged struck me as absolutely intentional and resonant in more than just the true-crime-story frame; as such, the frame becomes less a mere homage and more a covert manual on how to read the lead. Both films are about maladjusted men, abused in their youth, whose resultant stunted emotional growth leads them to express their sexual desires in increasingly violent ways after the deaths of their mothers. The abuse visited upon young Joel in Addicted to Murder is sexual in nature, at the hands his mother and a babysitter and a childhood friend. The complicating part is that the childhood friend is Rachel, an older female who also happens to be a vampire with a fetish for being "killed." We and Joel meet her in the opening scene, shot from the POV of an adolescent Joel as he stumbles upon her feeding on a victim in the woods; rather than attack him, she recognizes the recessive, weird Joel as a victim she can mold into her plaything, building off his natural curiosity about death and his already-extant emotional scarring. ("You're a curious little one, aren't you?" is her introduction, which led me to write in my notes, "He's bite-curious.")
Joel's life, then, and the film that contains it becomes a back-and-forth between a series of domineering women-monsters from whom he can't break away and less forceful, friendlier women to whom he can't relate and thus pushes towards bad ends - usually by his psychotic hand, but in at least one case an innocent is slain by one of the monstrous women in his life to get to him. That two of the monstrous-feminine forces in his life are actual monsters is icing and the grand joke of the film. On the one side you have his mother, the babysitter, Rachel the vampire whose repeated demands of violence inextricably joined Joel's sex and death impulses together, and Angie, another vampire who lures him to a bloodsucker's club and tries to harness the pathetic nature of his murderous impulses for her own ends; on the other side, you have a series of hitch-hikers, coworkers, neighbors and random NYC citizens who end up on the wrong side of his frustrated lashings-out, victims of the boiling rage of a beaten-down piece of damaged goods who aims everywhere except the sources of his pain (plus an ex-wife who narrowly escapes such a fate). To break the cycle, Joel has to go back to the source of his pain and find an acceptable outlet for the cruelty and violence bred within him. Which, as a ten-years-later flash-forward reveals at the end, he does. Lindenmuth is mostly a klutz as a filmmaker, and he lets this go on too long, but he's put thought into this.
If only it had a more charismatic lead than Mick McCleery, or at least one who could make the enormous appeal Joel has to women both predatory and otherwise explicable. But no-budget takes what no-budget can get.
No comments:
Post a Comment