Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile

‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’ tells the story of Ted Bundy (Zac Efron), one of America’s most notorious serial killers, from the perspective of his long-time partner Liz Kendall (Lily Collins) with the screenplay taken from her memoir 'The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy'.

The couple met in Seattle in 1969 where she was charmed by Bundy, then a law student. He helped her raise her young daughter, Molly, and things were fine until 1975 when out of the blue Ted was accused of murdering several young women.

He claims to Liz that he is being framed but the evidence appears to say otherwise. He is first found guilty of aggravated kidnapping in Utah but is then moved to Colorado where he is charged with murder.

While on trail there he escapes from the courthouse during a recess by jumping out of a second story window but he is recaptured after six days.

Liz decides to end their relationship but still doesn’t know what to believe. She starts drinking heavily as she attempts to deal with the fact that it her who possibly started all this by being the one who gave Ted's name to the Seattle authorities back in 1975.

Ted then escapes jail by sawing a hole in the ceiling of his cell. He is soon rearrested but only after two more women are murdered in Florida.

Liz is not the only one who doesn’t know what to believe. Bundy has quite a following of young women who are fascinated by him and also can’t believe that such a charming and good looking man could be a murderer. One of them is an old flame, Carole Ann Boone (Kaya Scodelario), who moves to Florida to be closer to him.

A pre-trial plea bargain is negotiated in which Bundy would plead guilty to some of the murders in exchange for begin sent to prison for life rather than receiving the death penalty but that would mean admitting he was guilty and Bundy won’t do it.

At the trial, the first to be televised, Bundy handles his own defence and turns much of the trial into a pantomime. He is found guilty, the crucial evidence being the matching of his teeth to the impressions of bite wounds on one of the girls' buttocks. The judge (John Malkovich) sentences him to the electric chair.

Ten years later, after Bundy runs out of appeals, Liz visits him hoping to finally hear the truth but he continues to protest his innocence to her. That is until she shows him a crime scene photograph of one of his decapitated victims and he finally admits that he sawed the girl’s head off.

Bundy was executed in January 1989, aged 42 years, after belatedly confessing to the murder of thirty women. Although the actual total is thought to be much higher.

As we are supposedly to seeing everything through Liz Kendall’s eyes the film wants us to play along with his many protestations of innocence which doesn’t really work as well as it would have done if we all didn’t already know who Ted Bundy was. This approach also makes the film into a bloodless affair until right near the end, which perhaps is no bad thing but that does leave it rather lacking in dramatic effect.

We also never really get to explore why he did what he did or how he got away with it all for so long.

It’s still a good film though and Efron, who is clearly trying to get into grown up film making, puts in an accomplished performance. His decision to play a notorious serial killer was an interesting gambit and one he manages to pull off.

The Greatest Showman

Today the Greatest Showman or rather PT Barnum reinvented. To cut a not very well explained story short, Barnum (Hugh Jackman) launches a museum of curiosities with the support of his wife and long time sweetheart Charity (Michelle Williams). This is just the latest in a long list of money making schemes he’s tried. It bombs and even their two daughters point out how dull it is.

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Hence he turns it in a circus of ‘freaks’ or rather not so elaborate hoaxes. In which he is aided by the financial clout of Phillip Carlyle (Zac Efron) who invests in Barnum’s venture for reasons that aren’t made very clear.

Their circus causes an uproar but a popular one with it’s dwarves, giants, bearded ladies etc. Barnum though soon moves on as promoter to Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson), a famous Swedish singer, whom he persuades to tour America.

His ‘freaks’ freak out when he sidelines them for Lind, as does his wife, but before long Lind has walked out on him too. At this point, in a decidedly modern day twist, the film turns things on it’s head and Barnum becomes a sort of social justice warrior giving jobs and a voice to the world’s minorities.

Carlyle meanwhile is falling in love with Anne (Zendaya) who is one half of a brother and sister trapeze act who happen, not very sensationally, to be black. For our sins they treat us to a dreadful duet.

Yes, the music isn’t great. It’s like being stuck inside a long pop video of an artist you (possibly) hate.

You do feel, as with most musicals, that there is a coherent plot in there somewhere trying to get out but I couldn’t find it. I do like having to google the facts behind a film after having seen it. Just to clarify a few points you know but to have to find out the whole story, that's stretching it a touch and there does appear to have been a cracking story about Barnum but this isn't it.

Sadly it seems the world has learnt little from the success of La La Land and musicals have returned to square one. So I’m with the films own critic (Paul Sparks), who didn’t like Barnum’s show either.

They do say that musicals are escapism and yes, I wanted to escape.

The Paperboy

The Paperboy is an adaptation of a novel by Peter Dexter which isn’t about a little school kid who delivers newspapers.

Set in the late 1960s, it is about a man called Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) who has been jailed for the murder of a local sheriff. Van Wetter is on death row and awaiting execution.

In prison Van Wetter is penpalled by Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), a woman who has cherry picked him from all the other inmates as her preferred murderer to marry.

Bless enlists the help of two journalists to attempt to get Van Wetter released. These are Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey), a man from the same town where Van Wetter is being held, and his colleague Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo), a black journalist from London. They are assisted by Ward’s younger brother Jack (Zac Efron), a former university swimmer who was expelled for vandalism. He is their driver and ‘paperboy’. Jack’s only real friend is the ex-family maid and narrator of the story, Anita (Macy Gray), who raised him and his brother in the absence of his mother.

Ward and Yardley set about investigating the case, where they find some of the evidence against Van Wetter to be inconsistent and they suspect that he may not have received a fair trial.

Meanwhile, Jack falls heavily for the tarty short skirted Charlotte but she only has eyes for Van Wetter. To the extent that Van Wetter, a man you wouldn’t even want to write a letter to, and Charlotte pleasure themselves at their first meeting rather than discuss the facts of the case.

It all gets even more bizarre when Jack is stung by jellyfish while swimming and Charlotte fights off all the other women on the beach to be the one to urinate on him. Apparently this helps and has nothing to do with Efron being many a young woman’s fantasy.

It is the relationships between the main characters, a generally unpleasant bunch if the truth be told, that keeps us on our toes. Each has sides to their character that they wish to hide and that we probably wished they’d continued to hide.

Ward, for instance, is revealed as a closet homosexual with a fondness for interracial masochism. This puts him in hospital and enables Yardley to print an article on Van Wetter that doesn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Jack, who finds out that Charlotte has slept with Yardley, in order to persuade him to come up with some evidence, tries to stop publication but all he manages to do is to find out that Yardley is actually an American. This is a time when racism was rife in the States and local black men could not attain decent jobs. Even then Yardley had given Ward sexual favours to the get the job.

So it’s all pretty sleazy stuff. All we need now is for Charlotte to offer Jack a sympathy shag, which of course she does and this does nothing to ease his infatuation with her.

As a result of Yardley’s article Van Wetter is released from prison and after taking his fill of Charlotte roughly in every room of her house, he takes her away with him to live out in the swamps.

...and they all lived happily ever after. Err no.  

It’s an interesting film, which you are never totally sure where it’s headed but it all seemed to make sense when it finally got there via a rather ramshackle route. It has to be said that Cusack is terrific and Kidman plays yet another deluded lonely soul but all the cast are good. Recommended.