THE ALPHABET KILLER

A young girl named Carla Castillo is found dead, strangled in Churchville; the autopsy reveals that there was also sexual violence. Police officer Megan Paige investigates the case with her colleague and life partner Kenneth Shine, but the stress from overwork and the obsessive belief of dealing with a serial killer lead Megan to a nervous breakdown of a schizoid nature that even causes her to see the ghosts of the victims demanding revenge. After spending two years in a clinic, Megan is reassigned to the case by her ex-boyfriend who, in the meantime, has made a career. A new young victim is found raped and strangled in Webster and her name is Wendy Walsh. The theory of the serial killer becomes stronger and stronger and a detail previously noted by Megan now appears evident, namely that the victims have the same initial of the first and last name as the place where they are found. Films explicitly inspired by real existing serial killers rarely prove effective. They are mostly TV productions or home videos and increasingly often present a bland finish and poor involvement. In the last ten years, dozens of such products have been released, from Matthew Bright's "Ted Bundy," Chuck Parello's "Ed Gein," David Jacobson's "Dahmer," and Clive Saunders' "Gacy" — just to name a few — of operations ranging from mediocre to poor, we have seen many. Rob Schmidt ("Wrong Turn"; "Masters of Horror: Dal coma con vendetta") inserts himself into the genre by directing a film that seems to be on qualitatively superior lines to the titles mentioned above, seeking a stylistic touch that is as close as possible to David Fincher's "Zodiac" contaminated with a hint of the supernatural, although the result is still far from what could have appeared to be excellent premises. Schmidt tells us the story of the one the media called the Alphabet Killer, a murderer who made three victims between 1971 and 1973 near Rochester (United States), all girls between 10 and 11 years old, with the initial of the first and last name the same as the place where they were found (hence the killer's nickname). The case of the Alphabet Killer was never solved, but Schmidt's film hypothesizes a fanciful solution that distances this product from many others that adhere more strictly to the facts. "The Alphabet Killer," in fact, is not a faithful and documentary transposition of the facts as could have been, for example, Fincher's film, but rather a very free and decidedly novelized version of the events that occurred, to the point that the names of the people involved do not match and no precise temporal location is given to the events. The idea at the base of the film is to tell a real and realistic story under a new aspect, pregnant with horrific suggestions that oscillate between the paranormal and pure madness. The Megan Paige played by a good Eliza Dushku ("Wrong Turn"; "Soul Survivors — Other Lives") is a deeply disturbed woman, immersed in work in such a way as to transform her hunt into an obsession, with destructive effects on her psyche. The collapse that causes her to see the ghosts of the young victims demanding revenge is the explanation of her mental condition, a not very original expedient that however here has some effectiveness. The appearances of the ghosts ensure that touch of horror of which the film is the bearer and generate at least a couple of successful scenes, including the appearance under the bed and the macabre parade of small corpses in the church. What does not work at all in "The Alphabet Killer" is the aspect most closely related to entertainment. The pace, especially in the first part, is too slow and the story seems never to manage to get to the heart of the matter, although there are no preliminaries of any kind. There is created from the beginning a real and proper barrier between the spectator and the film that does not allow oneself to be captured by the story. The fault, mainly, of the characters who, with the exception of the protagonist, prove to be one more monodimensional than the other. And this despite the parade of good character actors who populate the film: Cary Elwes ("Saw — The Puzzle Master"; "The Collector"), Timothy Hutton ("The Dark Half"; "The Good Shepherd"), Michael Ironside ("Atto di forza"; "Starship Troopers"), Bill Moseley ("Non aprite quella porta 2"; "The Devil's Rejects") and Tom Noonan ("Manhunter"; "Last Action Hero"). Even the last part, of a more conventional thriller structure, does not manage to capture more than that, to which is added also a writing that is not very attentive that trivializes the story and shows limits of credibility, given mainly by narrative resolution coincidences a bit easy. In short, "The Alphabet Killer," although being a cut above the majority of "true crime" thrillers that populate the cinematic landscape, proves to be a missed opportunity and certainly the weakest work to date in Rob Schmidt's filmography.