SERIAL KILLER (1995)
A Film Review Copyright Dragan Antulov 2003
Last year many critics were puzzled with RED DRAGON, a remake of a RED DRAGON, film being made only sixteen years earlier. However, a sort of similar remake was made even earlier, in 1995 when Pierre David directed B-thriller called SERIAL KILLER. Protagonist of this film is Selby Younger (played by Kim Delaney), FBI agent assigned to Psychological Profiling Unit and specialised for hunting down serial killers. Her latest task - capturing William Lucian Morrano (played by Tobin Bell), particularly vicious but also a very intelligent serial killer - almost becomes her last when the prey turns on his pursuer. Selby survives the attack and Morrano gets captured, but the psychological wounds are so severe that Selby must be transferred to desk job in order to recuperate. Two years later Morrano escapes from prison and Selby must finally face her personal demons.
Although it borrows a lot from Michael Mann's 1986 film, SERIAL KILLER would better be described as "poor man's MANHUNTER" than its remake. The budget is low, and so is the case with the level of originality in Mark Sevi's script. The plot is quite predictable and the viewers are probably going to experience a lot of "deja vu", even during somewhat unconventional finale. The only thing that makes SERIAL KILLER somewhat watchable is quite interesting performance by Tobin Bell, character actor who specialised for the supporting roles of villains in 1990s. Here he obviously enjoyed the opportunity to play lead villain, but those wievers who want decent entertainment would probably do themselves a favour if they skip SERIAL KILLER.
RATING: 3/10 (+)
Review written on January 17th 2003
Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax http://film.purger.com - Filmske recenzije na hrvatskom/Movie Reviews in Croatian http://www.purger.com/users/drax/reviews.htm - Movie Reviews in English http://www.ofcs.org - Online Film Critics Society
========== X-RAMR-ID: 33891 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 834352 X-RT-TitleID: 1064436 X-RT-AuthorID: 1307 X-RT-RatingText: 3/10
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews