Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, based on the book The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy by Elizabeth Kendall - Eight out of 10

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, based on the book The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy by Elizabeth Kendall

Eight out of 10

Although the critics appear to have largely dismissed this film that enjoys only a modest Metascore of 52, this viewer has enjoyed the motion picture, for all its confusing plot and impression that something might be wrong, in the plot, the judgment passed or both.

Ted Bundy was such a notorious monster that his fame has travelled across the border of the United States – look, we know of him even here, in a country that most Americans would gave trouble remembering if they have ever heard about.

He is portrayed with superior talent by a young actor that had not impressed the undersigned before, but after this movie, he will be respected as an accomplished professional, for his performance was restrained, solid, not given to exaggeration, complex- indeed, so sophisticated that it has managed to bring doubt into the picture, even if gradually we learn that this was a devil in action.

The story is told from the perspective of Elizabeth Liz Kendall and the script is based on the book written by the one who has had the ‘chance’ to be close to the enemy, perhaps closer than anyone else, maybe including the mother who would ask for mercy on his behalf – anticipating, since this is such a well-known figure – and state that the death penalty is the most cruel punishment that a human being can pronounce on another, or words to that effect.

Liz Kendall aka the excellent Lily Collins is a single mother who would at one stage become terrified at the idea that she had allowed her daughter to stay alone with the one who is accused of multiple, gruesome murders and his victims are all young women, some are children really.

Nonetheless, the appearance of this young man is a very deceitful one and The Gift of Fear and Blink come to mind, two psychology classics, for the people that encounter Bundy do not feel fear – when the issue of adopting a dog from the shelter is brought up, the selected animal does show a fierce rejection of the man though – and The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is zero in his case.

When Liz spends the night with the antihero, on the following morning he is gone from the bedroom and the daughter is missing, causing her to worry and the public to think that maybe the monster has struck.

However, he is in the kitchen, where he prepares breakfast for the girl and her mother, who would be anesthetized, hypnotized and in love with this rather attractive, intelligent, if Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and vile young man, even beyond the moment when many accusations and evidence pile up, indicating that this individual is not the gentle, Phantom Prince she thought he was.

For a long time, Liz would be feeling remorse and doubt, because she is the one who had called the police when she saw in the newspaper the composite picture of the suspect in murder cases and learned that the model of the car is a Volkswagen Beetle, notwithstanding the fact that the color is ‘wrong’.

When Ted Bundy is first arrested, he does not tell Liz, who is infuriated first, but then soothed by the explanation that he had not wanted her to worry and besides, it is all a fake news story, he has never done anything like that – ‘does she really believe him capable of anything as terrible as that?’.

Indeed, this is both an advantage and a flaw, for on one hand, the story becomes more complex, intriguing if we are not one hundred percent sure that the suspect is the mass killer, but on the other hand, it becomes somewhat confusing and especially given the death sentence passed, it makes the public unhappy at the thought that an innocent man could have been killed.

As if having one woman in love with Beelzebub was not enough, there is another, Joanna, who is inexplicably loyal – although she does become jealous and on the point of distancing herself from her idol when she sees the attention he pays to Liz – to the mass killer, who seems to become the father of her child at one moment, when a guard allows the prisoner to have coitus with her.

In fact, Ted Bundy would escape from supervision, once he pretends to make a call from within the courthouse, only to jump from a window and run away, for a short time though before being apprehended again and finally arrested and put on trial in Florida, where he may ‘fry’.

The Florida trial was so peculiar that the audience may wonder about the artistic license, the freedoms that the filmmakers may have taken, but this is dispelled at the end, when we see real footage from the news and the coverage of the courtroom drama and understand that the characters involved where truly bizarre.

The Florida Prosecutor is played by Jim Parsons and Judge Edward D. Cowart and is portrayed by John Malkovich.

Judge Cowart has a very strange approach, calling the defendant ‘partner’, allowing quite a few of his objections and mannerisms, up to the moment when he starts waiving the finger at his honor, who does not allow that in his court, where peculiarly, Ted Bundy seems to be allowed to marry Joanna.