![]() ![]() ![]() Those that are around him soon feel his madness and it's brutal and fatal consequences. The film follows the murderous trail of Henry who's pent of rage and sexual frustrations fuel the madness that's locked deep within his psyche. She decides to head out to the big city to find a new life. Otis' kid sister Becky (loosely based upon the very young sister of Ottis) comes to live with her older brother after a falling out back home. Michael Rooker stars as Henry, a demented man living in a twisted world who lives with a scummy roommate Otis (based also on Henry Lee Lucas' running buddy/lover Ottis Toole). But the director takes us down the path of a man who is in many ways similar to the real deal. This man claimed to have killed hundreds of people, mostly women. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) is a film that is loosely based upon the exploits of notorious white trash serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. It has events, key moments in the lives of guys who like to drink beer, smoke weed, hang out with Otis' sister and kill random strangers. Explanations are just a fiction to make us feel safe. The killer was humiliated by his quarries in high school, or has split personality disorder. What explanation could there be for slaughtering an entire random family, while recording the whole incident on a camcorder to then watch it later with the blank beer-chugging catatonia of watching an inning of baseball? Horror films, though designed to scare us, are also designed to make us feel safe. As Nick Nolte says as a homicide detective in Ole Bornedal's 1997 thriller, "Even when we catch the killer, they wanna know the how and why." That character would agree with McNaughton and Fire that people like Henry and Otis, are well beyond the need to justify what they do. When most human beings see the things that Henry and Otis actually go through with-feeling no other rationale, it would seem, than that it's simply something for them to do-our immediate reaction is to ask how someone could do such things, and why. Without a frame of compromise, McNaughton defies the hankering to pump up the volume, to frame Henry in chiaroscuro or Otis with Dutch angles. John McNaughton and his late collaborator Richard Fire do not feel the need to pigeonhole or explain them, not just as movie characters but as people. Even after this definitive film on the subject, it is not often that a movie dares to portray the real ones, unmitigated by thriller tropes. They have become mythology for us to use in order to take our morbid curiosities and sadistic fantasies out for a safe spin. We fear them, so we turn them into our own bloodthirsty entertainment. It is a permanent fixture in the Middle American zeitgeist. There are innumerable films about serial killers. Portrait is not about the thin line between good and evil. And he is he just goes a few steps further than most. He does many unforgivably monstrous things here, but he still manages to go about his business without remorse or fear of getting caught, so we presume he's just a good ol' boy with a short fuse. That's why he truly brings out the things about individuals we never see. That's Otis's problem kind of, only he's not just the one pack a day, he's about five and the tobacco is laced with children's tears. Think of the discipline and organization inherent in the latter. As for Otis, played by the imposing Tom Towles, think of when you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, versus one after your morning coffee and one after dinner. We get the sense that he hardly ever thinks about murder, except for when he does it. Played by gravelly character actor Michael Rooker, Henry never appears or behaves like anyone out of the ordinary. Itinerant Henry and his prison buddy Otis are cold-blooded and chillingly casual murderers. Two naked women are shown dead, having already been brutally murdered, one in a field and the other in a bedroom, while a troubled man named Henry drives around Chicago. It is, from any and every angle, an omniscient portrait. It does not contain buckets of blood, nor is it particularly explicit sexually. ![]() It did not premiere until 1990, and became one of a handful of international independent films to instigate the NC-17 rating. The film was shot on 16mm film in one month's time for $110,000 in 1985. What makes Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer so harrowing, so numbing, is the absence of any judgment of the characters. ![]()
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