© 2008 William Ahearn
There’s several things that we know about Henry Lee Lucas – the inspiration of John McNaughton’s 1986 film, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” – he did kill his mother and at least two other women, he admitted to necrophilia, bestiality, and cannibalism, he was the only person on death row to have his execution commuted by then Texas governor George Bush, and he died in prison.
Everything else comes down to mercury on a mirror. The number of victims attributed to Lucas range from 30 to 40 or 360 or 3,000. It all depends on who is asked. If it is part of the serial killer pathology to humiliate the police, no serial killer in history succeeded as Lucas did. Henry Lee Lucas was actually named as a participant on the Henry Lee Lucas Task Force, a multi-jurisdictional investigation involving numerous police officers from across the United States trying to close unsolved murders. Lucas was given case files to “refresh” his memory. The more case files he got, the higher his kill numbers climbed.
For more on Henry Lee Lucas, go here and here and his killing partner, Ottis Toole, go here.
If scriptwriters Richard Fire and John McNaughton took liberties with the facts of the story, they were still far from the manipulations and fantasies of their subjects. What they produced is a low-budget, brutal, totally unsympathetic portrait and it is, frame for frame, the best serial killer movie to date. This is the real deal: It is disturbing and completely credible. The Henry of the film isn’t someone who is going to discuss Renaissance frescoes with a young FBI agent and the story doesn’t elicit the sympathies that someone such as Aileen Wuornos might play with.
It’s a down and dirty movie about totally unredeemable sociopaths and there is nothing in the film that makes a case for anything else. Michael Rooker, as Henry, turns in an excellent and underplayed performance. (Rooker will show up in three other serial killer films, “Sea of Love,” “The Bone Collector,” and “Replicant.”)
This is an explicit and violent film.