Routine of a serial killer

As the prison warders make sure he's sitting comfortably in the electric chair, the eponymous real-life killer Ted Bundy (Michael Reilly Burke) whines, "There's so much more to me than the guy who does these crazy things". Not in Matthew Bright's repellent little B-picture, there isn't. Bundy reputedly gave the term "serial killer" to the dictionary. But numbers - well into three figures for his victims, it was said - are his only claim to distinction. And it pays diminishing returns on screen: as the body count mounts, the interest decreases.

Bundy's modus operandi resembled an animated cartoon character. He would sneak up on one woman (or child) after another and bludgeon her to death or insensibility. The dead were the lucky ones. The living folk (or thereabouts) who'll be drawn to this squalid story for disreputable reasons of their own will not get off so lightly. It is dreadful - but dreadfully boring.

The victims have next to no interest. Most of them are brainless enough to follow Bundy into the woods or up back alleys on the most transparently dubious excuses. When he'd finished with them, they had even fewer brains left.

If you tell me it is not pornographic to sit and watch anonymous female bodies being lethally assaulted, for reasons that have everything to do with box-office and next to nothing with forensic understanding, I shall turn a deaf ear to you in utter contempt. Lacking words to probe Bundy's mental history, Bright sometimes attempts a comic-ironic musical counterpoint: ricky-ticky country music a la Bonnie and Clyde as the wretched victim has her skull bashed in (or her severed head lipsticked into a simulacrum of life) and Jingle Bells plonking away on the soundtrack as one more woman falls seasonable victim to his cosh.

Predictably, a transgressive film-maker like Bright tilts the balance of sympathy in favour of Bundy by highlighting the process of readying him to fry, shaving his abundant hair off, bunging up his butt and fastening on incontinence pants to stop him soiling himself in the hot seat.

Why make such a film if it's not to service prurient curiosity? It certainly doesn't serve deeper understanding.

Though Bundy's perverted sexuality is kept off screen, the violence he repetitively inflicts with the finesse of someone stunning beef cattle in an abattoir becomes pornographic: the spectacle is degrading. It's virtually all there is to look at. People's perception of society as a violence-based experience is exploited by such a film. Their daily expectation of life (or, rather, random death) is re-shaped by the assault and battery of forceful images of once unimaginable (and certainly unshowable) sex and violence.

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has a duty to consider not only explicit imagery and imitative incident, but also the cumulative damage that films like Bundy do the fabric of society. Licensing a reel of trash that mimics helpless women being beaten to death suggests that the BBFC is continuing to lose touch with reality and responsibility.

I wish this tainted institution, set up by the film industry to protect itself, could have some of its decisions tested in the courts. Why should we take the word of the nameless barristers or psychologists it applies to periodically to back up a controversial film and allow it to give market forces free play to the benefit of a dubious distributing company?

Bundy's co-producer is Hamish McAlpine, the rebarbative London film distributor whose planned releases next year include Irreversible, a French film showcasing a rape of a woman that lasts nine minutes. McAlpine recently had his nose put literally out of joint by Larry Clark, director of Ken Park, a pornographic film about degenerate California kids that up to the point of contact also figured on the distributor's 2003 release schedule. It will be a merciful irony if it will not now be seen in Britain due to its principal promoters coming to violent blows among themselves.

Bundy
Cert: cert18