Henry: Portrait of a
Serial Killer (1986)
John McNaughton
"Anyone can get a gun, Otis."
One of my favorite Blu Ray releases from the great Drafthouse Films is something called Trailer War which is 100 or so minutes of non-stop grindhouse and exploitation movie trailers. This is probably the best way to watch most of these films, because a vast majority of them look abysmally bad. I am not the biggest expert when it comes to weirdo exploitation films of the 70's, but I've seen my fair share of garbage cinema, and the trailers help highlight what directors of these movies were focused on (tits, mostly).
Exploitation films were big in the 60's, 70's and 80's, because they had a home in smaller independent theaters. They were cheap to make, cheap to distribute, and had a reliable audience of horned up teenagers at the drive-in and shiftless insomniacs going to midnight shows. The quality would vary greatly, and a only a few made a sizable splash. Films like I Spit on Your Grave and Cannibal Holocaust were so disgusting and shocking that they blew up on word-of-mouth and feigned indignation from the media. Cannibal Holocaust's filmmakers actually had to prove the actor they used for the infamous "pole scene" was alive and well, and that the whole thing was done with special effects. It was a simpler time.
The driver for these films was shock and titillation. The more blood, tits, and depravity that you could fit into 80+ minutes, the better. Plot and character development weren't important, unless the development was for a character to become a rapist or a murderer. The simpler the story arc, the easier it was to film and release. I Spit on Your Grave is the story of a woman who is brutally raped (for like 20 minutes) and left for dead. She recovers, and sets about getting her revenge, murdering her attackers one-by-one in bloody ways. That's it. That's all you needed for a film. Who cares if it's abhorrent and tasteless?
Exploitation films get their name from exploiting an idea or a subject for cheap thrills. Rape, incest, torture, murder, sex, Nazis, beastiality, bondage, racism, drug use, evil hippies: they're all easy fodder for the writers and directors of these films. Heroes aren't expressly necessary, because they require charisma, and charisma requires actors with talent. Actors with talent cost money to hire; girls who will take off their tops and scream while slathered in fake blood do not.
Rape is one of the more common tropes of these movies. It's one thing to show the brutality of it for a purpose, but a lot of these movies (I'm looking in your direction, Death Wish III) use rape to cram nudity into the plot. And these filmmakers were not woke feminists. I'd wager that a vast majority were on no trifling amount of cocaine, and used their "power" to take advantage of their amateur actresses.
So yeah, pure exploitation is not my style of movie, despite my penchant for gore and disturbed filmmaking. I dig the independent spirit and the desire to expose the world to deep depravity, but a lot of it just seems lazy and pointless.
But then I see a film like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and realize there might be some true art in the exploitation landfill.
I'll say this right away: this is not an easy film to watch. At several points last night, I was watching from in between my fingers. There is a scene of such bold and shocking viciousness, I'm not sure I have the fortitude to watch it again without steeling myself beforehand. The first thing I told Emily when she got home after the movie ended was, "Boy am I glad you didn't have to see this." That's not to say that nobody should see it, just that you need to be ready for it.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer has a couple of things going for it at that most exploitation films did not: competence and luck. The writing isn't brilliant, and there's no real plot arc to speak of, but the slice-of-life study of a serial killer that John McNaughton and Richard Fire created elevates this beyond pointless drivel and into something powerful. The script has an intimate understanding of trauma and the painful reality that millions of people live with every day. There's an honesty to the writing that is refreshing and repulsive.
There's also the element of luck: McNaughton got Michael Rooker to play Henry. This is Rooker's first role ever, and he was working as a janitor when he auditioned for the part. He dedicated himself to the role, and rarely broke character for the month-long shoot. IMDB has a story that Rooker's wife found out that she was pregnant during filming, but did not want to tell him, because she wasn't sure how Henry would take it. That's not the sort of dedication you get with most low-budget pictures.
The film begins with death and violence. The opening scene is a long and deliberate shot of a naked woman lying dead in a field. This cuts away to Henry, our titular killer, at a diner paying for his lunch. He calls the waitress sweetheart, and tells her that she is attractive. This sort of sexualization happens to every female character in the film (although at other times it is far more vile and overt).
The following scenes are of more death. First we see the waitress lying dead across the diner counter. Then a woman floating face down in a river, while an empty milk carton drifts by; she has been discarded like garbage. Finally, a bloody and partially undressed woman is seen propped up on a toilet. These scenes are gruesome and presented without comment.
The way Henry looks at women is the way a wolf looks at a fawn. He has a quiet, steady gaze that never breaks. We see him follow a woman in a car, patiently waiting for her to give him an opening to strike. Instead, he finds a young hitchhiker on the highway, and like any true predator, goes after the easiest prey.
It almost feels like an experimental film up to this point. There's been very little dialogue, and the shots are long, with jarring cuts that jump forward in time. When we meet Becky, one of our three main characters, it's a shock that there are still women alive in this world the film has created.
Becky is the sister of Otis, the man with whom Henry is living. Otis is a complete lout. He's on parole, works at a gas station, and deals drugs to high schoolers on the side. He's also a pedophile who repeatedly makes sexual advances to a boy who buys marijuana from him. Otis picks up Becky from the airport, because she decided to leave her abusive husband and wants to establish a life in another city. On the car ride home from the airport, Otis asks a disturbing number of questions about Becky's husband (his whereabouts, if he knows she's here, what he's doing). Becky seems justifiably uncomfortable with her brother's incessant questioning, but Otis just laughs at her. To double-down on how uncomfortable she is, Otis tells her that Henry, man she's about to be living with, killed his mother with a baseball bat years ago.
When Henry meets Becky later that night, he's disarmingly charming, kind, and appropriate with her. She and Henry have a conversation after dinner, and Henry admits he stabbed his mother to death, and explains why. His father got his legs cut off in an accident, and his brother was "deformed." To earn money, his mother became a prostitute, but would torture Henry by making him wear girl's clothes and watch while she had sex with her customers. If he'd try to look away, she'd beat him. At age 14, Henry says he snapped and shot his mother and one of her Johns.
The story of Henry's first kill changes three times, and Becky points out the discrepancy. Henry stares into the distance and says something vague and noncommittal. The truth is either that Henry didn't really kill his mother, but has had numerous fantasies about it. Or more likely, every woman he's killed since then has been his mother in his eyes, and they've each been killed in a different manner.
Becky doesn't seem terribly taken aback by Henry's story, and her history explains why. She was a victim of extensive physical and sexual abuse by her father for years. She admits with a cold bluntness that she was worried about having a deformed baby, but never ended up getting pregnant. Her mother ignored the problem and would belittle her when she'd ask for help.
This is what I mean about the honesty of the writing. Most of the time in movies, you hear these stories through a veil of tears and anguish. They're treated with reverence and gravity, deeply affecting the plot and the characters. But here, the characters are blunt and emotionless. Becky sighs through her story like she's bored, never once getting close to cracking or crying.
I've been through hundreds of psychosocial assessments, and am always struck by how flatly people can recount horrific trauma. I once had a mother tell me, with the same amount of emotion that someone might describe a meal at Applebee's, that her 5-year-old was conceived because her own father raped her. It is this reality that the film so ably captures, and why it's so uncomfortable to look at. We find it difficult to process the horrible things that other people consider just another part of life.
When Otis returns home, he asks Becky to get him a beer, which she says was her job when their father was alive. Otis acts piteous and sweetly kind, and she relents. When she returns with the beer, Otis grabs her and tries to kiss her on the lips. This upsets Henry who forcibly makes Otis stop. Becky's reaction here is to try and keep the peace. She suggests that the two boys go out and grab a beer while she cleans up the dishes. She's reverting to her survival mechanism that she developed in her marriage. Send him away, clean the house, hope he comes home happy or at least distracted.
While the boys are out, they take a couple of women (possibly prostitutes) into an alley and have sex with them in Henry's car. During the act, Henry gets violent with his girl, and then snaps her neck. The girl's friend in the front seat screams, and Henry kills her too. He drags their bodies out of the car and unemotionally throws them on a pile of garbage. This initially panics Otis, but knowing what we do about his mother and father, he is well accustomed to traumatic events and begins to process this in his own way.
There's only one scene in the movie that I'd consider amusing, and it's when Henry and Otis go out to buy a new television set from a black market dealer. But it naturally ends in horror:
This is where Henry and Otis obtain their VHS camera, which helps make the film somehow grimier. There's a seediness to early videotape, like no matter what's being shot, a snuff film is going to break out. The videotaped scenes in this movie remind me of the unpleasant awfulness of the Rollergirl limo assault scene in Boogie Nights:
An already uncomfortable situation is made more visceral by the poor quality of the visuals and the garish way that lights leave a little trail on the screen. The world in the film is a dirtier, scummier, but more realistic place through videotape.
Henry and Otis use their videotape to record themselves killing a random family in their own home. The whole scene plays out in poor VHS quality, lending a found-footage element that I was not prepared for. I don't even really want to recount what happens, because it still makes me uncomfortable to think about. Like I said earlier, this is not an easy film to watch. Suffice to say, it's impeccably acted and truly chilling.
When we transition back to 16mm film, we see that the two men are watching the tape on their couch at home. Otis rewinds it to watch it again, this time in slow motion. It's like they're watching baseball highlights.
Becky, still unaware of what Henry and Otis are up to (or willfully ignorant), makes her feelings about Henry known, and tries to initiate sex with him, but Otis interrupts. Henry becomes visibly uncomfortable with what Becky wanted and leaves the apartment to buy some cigarettes:
This is a good example of what benign, everyday small talk is like with a sociopath.
When Henry returns to the apartment, he finds Otis raping Becky, and fights him. As they struggle on the ground, Becky grabs a metal hairbrush with a pointed end, and jabs out one of Otis' eyes. Henry then stabs Otis repeatedly with the brush, and watches him slowly bleed out and gurgle to death. There's nothing quick and easy about it.
Becky doesn't know what to do, but Henry is an expert at this sort of thing. He hacks apart Otis' body in the bathtub (the foley work here is disgusting) and they carry him out to the car in several suitcases. They dump his body unceremoniously in a river.
Throughout all of this, Becky is not frightened by Henry; in fact this seems to draw her closer to him. She's had such an awful life, she interprets all of this as kindness and looks at Henry like a savior and protector. She's choosing not to see how ably he dismembered her brother's corpse or how little emotion he's showing.
As they drive down a highway at night, she reaches out to Henry and says that she loves him.
He responds flatly, "I guess I love you too."
That night they stay at a small roadside motel. As dawn breaks, we see Henry leave the motel alone. He stops on the shoulder of a lonely highway, removes a bloody and heavy-looking suitcase from the trunk of his car, and dumps into a ditch before driving off again. Whatever connection Becky felt, Henry was not capable of reciprocating.
I think it's completely fair to classify Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as exploitation. All of the elements are there, right down to the extremely low budget. But all of this works to develop the character of Henry, and to give us an 86 minute look at a part of his life. A bigger budget film with more traditional filmmaking talent would give us something like Buffalo Bill or Hannibal Lecter: great characters, but ones that feel like they designed in a lab to be interesting or creepy. Henry seems real due to the honesty of the writing, the creative choices McNaughton made as director, and because Michael Rooker transforms himself into a sociopathic murderer.
Summary:
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is the most difficult film I've watched since starting this project, and I'm not sure it even belongs. It's certainly scary, and with less talent behind it, could have become a goofy low budget hack-and-slash. But instead, all of the important notes are hit, leaving a staccato and ugly symphony that drags you in and rips at your psyche.
It's streaming on Amazon if you're feeling strong enough to handle it.
No comments:
Post a Comment