© 2008 William Ahearn
Sometimes I wonder whether Harold Becker’s 1989 film “Sea of Love” was an experiment to see if a smoldering Ellen Barkin could set fire to the scenery before Al Pacino could chew it. As in “Cruising,” Al Pacino’s character is undercover trying to catch a serial killer who is killing men who write their personal ads in poetry. Surprisingly, he falls in love with the main suspect, a hot woman who responds to all of the ads.
There are at least four other serial killer films that fall into this kind of silliness. Jon Amiel’s 1995 “Copycat” is about an agoraphobic profiler who can’t leave the house for god knows what reason and the drama builds until she’s out of the house and shooting at a killer who recreates famous crime scenes of other serial killers.
Lincoln Rhyme also can’t leave the house and that’s because he’s a quadriplegic former police detective in Phillip Noyce’s 1999 “The Bone Collector.” Fortunately, he has a total babe uniformed patrolwoman to be his eyes and ears and do the legwork. Even Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie couldn’t save this implausible film. Jolie did another serial killer film in D.J. Caruso’s 2004 “Taking Lives.” In this film, Jolie plays an FBI profiler who has to go to Canada because those folks up north couldn’t catch a cold. The killer takes the identity of his victims and guess whom he gets romantically involved with?
And then there’s Phillip Kaufman’s 2004 “Twisted.” In this film, the daughter of a serial killer is now a police detective and all her one-night stands are being murdered. It’s a totally silly and unbelievable film. If only the real FBI profilers would watch these films, maybe they’d catch these crazy killers much sooner.
The most ridiculous serial killer film yet – that wasn’t intended as a comedy – is Ringo Lam’s 2004 film “Replicant.” In this film, a retired detective who never did catch the serial killer “The Torch” before retiring gets back in the action thanks to government scientists. The government scientists were trying to clone terrorists so that they could be questioned – in this parallel universe, clones are born at whatever age the DNA donor is and will remember everything the donor did. For some reason the terrorist clones didn’t work out so one day at lunch they whipped up a clone of “The Torch.” So the clone and the retired detective team up to get the serial killer while trying to keep the government scientists from getting in the way. No, really. I swear. That is what the film is about. It beats “Virtuosity” by nose for being totally off the wall.