Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
None (it's a straight-to-DVD movie)
Directed By:
Clive Saunders
There are two kinds of fucked up movies. The first kind makes you yell "OH MY GOD, I AM LOSING MY HUMANITY BY EVEN WATCHING THIS". And it's either good or bad. And there are the movies that make you go: "Huh...is that even a movie?" Gacy belongs to this category. And it's not in a good way, like a David Lynch movie for example. By watching this movie, I wanted to know a little more about John Wayne Gacy, but I have the feeling that Clive Saunders knew even less than me about the prolific killer.
There only one short scene about Gacy's youth and it's the most ridiculous of the movie. His father John Sr. is at first nice to him, then slaps him and makes fun of his son for no reason. Then it cuts to different scenes of John Wayne Gacy's life as a serial killer. Gacy is a series of non-sequitur scenes about how shitty of a human being he was. There's no attempt whatsoever made to understand the madness or the characters, just one fat & evil homo with handcuffs and a garrote, living in a house crawling with bugs.
Yep, that's the artsy part of Gacy, the house. I think it's supposed to reflect his inner decay or something. I don't doubt that a house where twenty-nine bodies are buried is crawling with maggots and roaches, but to the point of crawling vertically in the plumbing pipes from the basement? I mean c'mon. It's visually and artistically interesting for about fifteen minutes, then the director seem to forget that Gacy eventually did something about the problem. The whole decaying-inside,-inside-his-decaying house trick comes off as a petulant filmmaking trick, lost inside a bad movie.
The acting is terrible, but I'm blaming the director for this. The cops look like outcast from a zombie movie, Gacy's wife is barely talking, the lead investigator is barely on screen and overall, Gacy seems to be rooted for. There's no story arc whatsoever, just a collection of scenes that get gradually more gruesome, but which are overall very mild if you consider where horror movies go these days. The last scene in the house with Tommy is the only one I would qualify of "twisted". I'm no gorehound, but I expected a serial killer movie to challenge me a little more than Gacy did.
There is a it's-so-bad-that-it's-good redeeming factor to Gacy, if you have notions of filmmaking. It's filmed in a drug fueled desperate frenzy that will make you want to throw pop-corn at the screen, while watching with your buddies. Gacy is perfect for a thematic bad movie evening, but avoid it anywhere else.
SCORE: 27%
