On May 3. the Ted Bundy movie "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile" that caused such an uproar finally came out on Netflix, and I will say that it wasn't what I expected it would be. As a person who watches many documentaries and movies about serial killers, I was thinking that it was just going to be another one of those following his life along with the crimes committed. But the production and writing of this movies took it a different type of way.
They seem to focus a lot on the women Bundy had a true relationship with and how this whole process affected his ex, Elizabeth Kendall, with him getting arrested in Utah and trial, the murder charges in Colorado, the escapes and then finally Florida. In most documentaries, this woman just get bypassed by them just saying she was someone he had a relationship with and that's the end of her. With this documentary however, I like how they continue to bring her back into the picture, since we never have really seen her side of it all. We don't know if everything from her point of view if true or if it is all false, maybe we will know within the coming weeks of this movies being out is she will come out and talk about her experience.
About half of this movie is majority about his actual true love (not to get her confused with the actual women he married while on trial — his true love lived in Seattle), but once the big trial that happened in Florida it does have more time on Bundy, because this part is the big moment of his story really. The one thing this doesn't do is go into the detail of the crimes like other shows have done, which is good for people who can't handle that kind of detail. But even during all of this we still see bits of this woman, how she deals with the trail, and what she does once she finds out what he really did.
Let's talks about Efron for a second, and why this movie had so much controversy when people found out about it. I understand how people got worried because they felt that a serial killer was being romanticized and that Efron was playing him was going to make girls who grown up watching him come obsessed with this person he played. But the person who played him had to look charming because that was Bundy's thing, he got his victims based on his looks and charm. Personally I feel this character was good for Efron since we have never seen him as a character like this before, he is always the boy next door love story. Many of the lines Efron uses in the trial in Florida are actual lines Bundy used himself, at the end they play those parts during the credits and it is very interesting in how he was able to get across the same affect that Bundy shown. This change in character really shows his acting ability.
At the end of the movie, they show this list of the known victims of Bundy, and the crimes that did happen to them are terrible and should have never happened.
As person who probably knows way to much about way to many serial killers I find this movie a very interesting and different way of telling a story that many people know. Even though it was different than what I am used to I like how it was from a different point of view not fully focusing on Bundy but on one of the main people he affected during his life.
This movie was based of the book "The Phantom Price: My Life With Ted Bundy" by Elizabeth Kendall.
