You can consider this a coincidence, or you can look for a pattern, but now there are two dramas on the big screens about the most famous criminals of the last century: Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. Both are worth watching not only to tickle your nerves, but also to understand the psychology, not of the criminal and the victims, but of women who for years preferred not to notice that a monster lives nearby.
1969 Seattle, 24-year-old Elizabeth Klepfer meets a perfect stranger in a bar. His name is Ted, he is charming, damn good-looking, he is not afraid of the fact that Liz has a little daughter. Everything goes even too smoothly: he is caring, gets along well with the child, bakes pancakes in the morning and listens to opera. Soon he will finish his studies, and he and Liz will have a real family. And also a house and a dog, definitely a dog. True, the dogs in the animal shelter react strangely to him, but these are small things, right?
“Soon” stretches for six years, during which “Prince Charming” Ted Bundy, either visiting Liz with her daughter and celebrating family holidays with them, or leaving “to study”, commits dozens of murders, one description of which makes the blood run cold. This will be followed by a search, indictment, arrest, escape, arrest again and escape and courtrooms full of enthusiastic admirers. Bundy will become the first maniac in history, a “TV star” and a conqueror of women’s hearts. What draws them to a monster in human form is a question no less interesting than what makes a monster a monster.
The fantastic portrait resemblance of the actor Zac Efron with Theodore Bundy and the almost verbatim reproduction of the dialogues make the film “Beautiful, Bad, Evil” (in the Russian translation a reference to the legendary western Sergio Leone is read) especially convincing. One of the most terrifying chapters of the US crime story is told with the utmost delicacy, a warm palette and a nostalgic soundtrack help to get aesthetic pleasure from viewing.
What can not be said about the film about Charles Manson, more physiological, balancing on the upper limit of the age limit. The figure of Manson is shown through the fates of three followers, bright-eyed girls who fell under the absolute influence of a psychopath (he possessed the gift of persuasion to perfection) and did terrible things that none of them seem to be able to fully comprehend.
Manson is a frequent guest on the screens, only in the last few years he has appeared in the series “Aquarius” and in one of the seasons of “American Horror Story”, in the new Tarantino film “Once Upon a Time in America” and the grotesque thriller “Bad Times at the El Royale” . Filmmakers, it seems, are still wrestling with the mystery: how he, a mediocre musician, a self-named Messiah, turned on the idea of a coming interracial war, and a not very attractive man, managed to control women like puppets and mold them into assassins obeying orders.
The answer is as banal and simple as possible: love. The ability to put others on the hook of your love, from which it is excruciatingly painful to jump off. “When he loves me, I feel on top of the world. And without him, I am nobody … ”Elizabeth Klepfer admits to her alarmed friend. “All because of such a simple desire to be loved,” a girl from the Manson “family” echoes her from behind prison bars.
And yet, is it possible not to notice that there is a monster next to you? Or it’s too hard to realize this, which means that the only way is to escape the fantasy world that one day you will have a family, your own home and a dog, definitely a dog.