Addicted to Murder (1995)

addictedtomurder

Produced and directed by Kevin J. Lindenmuth
Written by Kevin J. Lindenmuth and Tom Piccirilli
Starring
- Mick McCleery
- Laura McLauchlin
- Sasha Graham
- Bernadette Pauley

Intellectually, I admire Kevin Lindenmuth’s work. He manages to work with budgets that are laughable and turn out feature-length videos. And not content to do exploitation-style ripoffs, he writes scripts that are ambitious, complex, and intelligent, and attempts challenging storytelling techniques.

But I’ve never seen one of his movies that I really, you know, liked.

It’s the same old story: Pretty girl, goofy teeth.

In the present offering, we have the tale of Joel Winter (Mick McCleery), a man with whom many readers may identify: He was a high-school geek, a beset-upon fellow with a premature paunch and bad hair and not much personality. He did have one notable feature at the time, though; he had a vampire, Rachel (Laura McLauchlin), for a friend. He met her as a young child, and she was his “imaginary friend” as he grew up.

His relationship with her took on bizarre overtones, as she loved to be “killed” repeatedly, and trained Joel to do it (in a sequence that unintentionally calls Groundhog Day to mind), making an unwilling killer out of him. Then she finally disappeared; now, he’s a thirtyish handyman living a lonely life in New York, searching for Rachel or someone like her, while trying to come to terms with his incredibly messed-up psyche.

Dang! Ain’t seen something that hairy since Steve Austin fought the Sasquatch.

What I’ve told you so far, by the way, is spread out all over the video, as we’re not dealing with linear storytelling here. We leap from Joel’s pointless job and sterile apartment, to flashbacks of his teen years (hey, same haircut!), to flashbacks of his shortlived marriage. Interspersed with all of this are film clips from television interviews, after the fact: psychologists and commentators and his ex-wife weighing in on what made Joel Winter such a proficient serial killer. The irony, I suppose, is that not a one of them knows what it was that warped him: His juvenile companionship with an emotionally needy vampire, who killed her rival for his affections — his mother.

Eventually, as our present-day plot goes, Joel is divided and conflicted. On the one hand, he wants to break out of his shell and feel again, and to that end he starts a casual relationship with Kathy (Bernadette Pauley), a tenant in his building who relies on his mechanical acumen. On another hand, he seems to focus his left-over-from-high-school rage on Sabrina (Candice Meade), the haughty receptionist at his work. And on a third hand, he starts getting mysterious flyers in the mail which invite him by name to a new club called “The Hungry,” where he meets Angie (Sasha Graham), a playfully seductive thing who reminds him of Rachel in more ways than one.

It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for. Especially when they’re lousy dressers.

All of this is very interesting, but I’ll be honest: For at least the last half hour, I didn’t care. Not a bit. Reasons for such apathy are numerous, and as is my habit I’ll delineate them here.

First of all, our “protagonist” is a wishy-washy, reactive lump without a backbone. I can understand the idea of a beset-upon high school nerd with oodles of rage beneath his socially inept exterior, but it just doesn’t work here. McCleery’s performance captures perfectly the somnambulant resignation of the self-aware loser, but nowhere does he manage to convince us of the fires that ostensibly rage within.

Yeah, I could eat.

Compounding the problem is the herky-jerky storytelling. While I can and do appreciate non-linear storytelling, in this case it caused far more problems than it solved. We spend so much time changing timeframes that the narrative thread of any one of them is easily lost, and by the end what happened when has blurred together and we can’t tell when the events in front of us are supposed to have taken place. Causality, the essence of story, is completely destroyed. The fact that “helpful” captions are shown only sporadically doesn’t help things; at best, it seems an after-the-fact admission that yes, the edited movie really doesn’t flow.

Unfortunately, the obvious “cut himself shaving” joke won’t work for both of them.

Which is really a shame, because buried in here is at least one really neat idea: an exploration of the psychological dissociation in a youth who has killed repeatedly to no ill effect of the victim. It’s a sensation that Joel keeps trying to reclaim by killing women and imagining they’re Rachel, and it could have really been a dominant theme, but because of the problems above it never gets any impetus.

There’s such a thing as being too clever, and I think that’s what we’re seeing here, some cinematic analogue to the Chinese acrobat who spins those plates on the tops of pool cues. There are only so many plates that he can keep spinning; after a certain threshold, it’s no longer entertainment — it’s just one frantic guy running back and forth in the middle of a growing pile of smashed crockery.