Portrait in Black
HENRY, PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER — finally available uncut in the UK — is reviewed here, at Electric Sheep. By me.
Recommended to any fans of TV’s The Walking Dead who may have been asking themselves, “Where did they FIND that guy???” and to anybody who saw MAD DOG AND GLORY and wondered how that director managed to get work. Because he showed startling early promise, it seems. I’m not 100% convinced about HENRY, but is IS an ambitious departure from the kind of cheapjack exploiter the production company was asking for. On the other hand, Victor Erice was asked for a cheap Frankenstein knock-off and he gave them SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE. Now that’s ambition.
October 31, 2011 at 2:00 pm
Henry is quite an interesting film, dealing with “True Crime” in a mode not unlike that of The Honeymoon Killers. But in a way it’s a kind of cinematic dead end. There’s no way to go from a film like this save a completely different direction. He tried in Mad Dog and Glory but that didn’t really work.
October 31, 2011 at 2:38 pm
He also tried WILD THINGS, which REALLY didn’t work!
October 31, 2011 at 4:16 pm
Oh jeez, like all of those films – and NORMAL LIFE, too! And GIRLS IN PRISON, from a Sam Fuller script, ain’t chopped liver, either.
October 31, 2011 at 6:53 pm
I recall The Borrower being cheesy low-budge fun.
November 1, 2011 at 12:54 pm
Yay, Rae Dawn Chong!
I haven’t seen his Masters of Horror episode, I imagine it could be good if he returned to his roots…
November 1, 2011 at 5:48 pm
The most perfectly realized experiment in challenging cinematic conventions of audience identification with characters. That’s why it’s so affectless and “bleak.” And ultimately horrifying in a way that even the most gory slasher/gross-out flims are not.
November 1, 2011 at 6:34 pm
I wasn’t sure what the film was up to with the two unsympathetic victims, but I guess it was trying lull us into seeing Henry’s murderous afflictions as in some way forgivable, before it hits us with that whammy of an ending. I’m always dubious about making the victims unsympathetic (as in the odious Hannibal) but it does seem to be part of a cunning game plan here.
November 6, 2011 at 8:20 pm
Optimum actually released Henry uncut in the UK in the early 2000s, with a feature through the BBFC reordering of the massacre of the family to make it ‘palatable’, though this is Henry’s Blu debut.
Amazing to think that Michael Rooker was able to parlay the notoriety from this film into a successful Hollywood character actor career, albeit often playing the bad guy (as in Slither, say). I think the best, most knowing use of his previous role is in Philip Noyce’s paralysed cop vs serial killer film The Bone Collector, in which Rooker’s police captain gets heavily implied to be the potential murderer, before being revealed as the film’s red herring.
November 6, 2011 at 8:22 pm
Sorry, the first paragraph should read:
“Optimum actually released Henry uncut in the UK in the early 2000s, with a featurette about the BBFC reordering of the massacre of the family to make it ‘palatable’, although this is Henry’s Blu debut”
November 6, 2011 at 10:48 pm
Rooker has such a great mug, it’d be extraordinary if Hollywood couldn’t find a use for him. He’s the most striking presence in The Walking Dead. Of course, it’d be nice to see him in a non-bad-guy role more often, but what are you going to do?