After watching Zodiac, I really wanted to watch another movie about a guilty person (in this case again a serial killer) getting investigated and caught. I watched Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile which is about Ted Bundy. I really liked the movie and it had some differences from Zodiac which I want to mention.
The movie starts with Liz Kendall meeting Ted in a bar. She is a single mom and was his longtime boyfriend, unknown to her was that he was an evil person. They’ve been partners for 5 years around 1974-1975. Bundy was killing women at this time and he made a mistake: a woman survived her attack and saw his face (Carol DaRonch). She went to the police and identified him a year later after the attack when Bundy was put to the suspect list for his suspicious acts. After that, Bundy got arrested and escaped prison a few times and went for other women. At the same time, newspapers were writing about Ted and Liz finished his relationship with him. After a lot of trials, he was electrocuted.
This movie was different from Zodiac in the way that we only got to see Ted Bundy’s guilty side at the end of the movie for a brief moment. We first saw him as a good boyfriend to Liz, a good dad to her daughter and hardworking law student. We never saw him do any of those things which he was accused of. He always defended himself to the press, to the public, to Liz and to his other friends until the last minute of the movie when he confessed to Liz before his execution (and we saw him killing a woman with a hacksaw). In Zodiac, we always saw Zodiac’s guilty side. We only saw the way he killed his victims and his threatening, scary letters. We never saw him with his family or his friends. He was only shown guilty. I think this situation had its’ advantages and disadvantages. The advantage was that it showed us, the audience, that serial killers or bad people does not act or seem too bad in their personal relationships such as with family or friends. They may seem like us yet they may be very different from us. The disadvantage was that maybe it humanizes Ted Bundy. He shouldn’t be that humanized, he was way too humanized with the way he treated Liz or her daughter in the movie. The way he killed a woman was only shown at the end of the movie, until that point he seemed completely innocent in the movie even though the audience knows that he is guilty from prior knowledge. He was shown too humanly, I think the way he kills those women should’ve been shown throughout the movie because the audience can perhaps forget that he is a serial killer.
Zac Efron played the role of Ted Bund really good, it was almost chilling. The scene where they went to look for a dog was really scary: when a dog started to bark at Bundy very violently, Bundy’s eyes turned from normal eyes to very scary, serial killer type eyes. I was really afraid at that point.
To sum it up, you should definitely watch Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile if you like movies about investigations and like the adrenaline movies about murders give to you. The acting is really good and the perspective to portray a serial killer is interesting.