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Released by: Intervision Picture Corp.
Released on: 7/12/2011
Director: David R. Bowen
Cast: Carl Crew, Cassidy Phillips
Year: 1989
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The Movie:
It would be easy to dismiss David R. Bowen's 1989 film The Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer as low budget, straight to video trash. After all, it was made at a time when Dahmer's atrocious murders were still fresh in the minds of many people, and well before Dahmer himself would be murdered in prison. The fact that it was made on a very low budget for the straight to video market instantly puts a stigma on it for a certain segment of the movie watching public, and with so many serial killer films content to wallow in grue and gore rather than try to approach any sort of introspection or maturity, it wouldn't be out of the question to assume that Bowen's film is just another in a seemingly endless line of cinematic garbage meant to cash in, quick and easy, on real life atrocities torn from the headlines of its day.
The film is told as if it were narrated by Dahmer himself, here played remarkably well by Carl Crew of Blood Diner fame, who also wrote the picture. When we meet Jeffrey Dahmer he's living with his grandmother but is eventually forced to leave her house where he takes up residence in an apartment in a heavily black neighborhood. Becoming more comfortable and confident as a homosexual, Dahmer starts bringing back different men, many of them black or Hispanic, and then drugging them, killing them, dismembering them and often times having sex with them after the fact. He also eats parts of their bodies, so that, we're told, he can keep them with him. Of course, eventually he's caught which is where we catch up with him as he narrates the film from the past tense.
The Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer isn't a perfect film. There are spots where the acting is a bit questionable and spots where Crew overdoes it just a bit and where, because of this, it comes dangerously close to high camp - thankfully it never quite crosses that line and as such doesn't take us out of the picture. If not all of the performances are stellar, most of them are at least sufficient and overall Crew does do a very good job in the lead. Through his interpretation of Jeffrey Dahmer we witness not only the side that the media portrayed, that being the monster, but also the more human side, the fairly pathetic side even. He's humanized here, though never glorified or portrayed as someone that we should necessarily have any sympathy for. He's simply portrayed as a real person, something that a lot of low budget serial killer films don't think to do but which is ultimately paramount to the success of a film like this one. Little moments, such as a demonstration of the caring that existed between Jeffrey and his grandmother, help to make Crew's portrayal of him more believable than it might have been otherwise.
As far as the murders themselves are concerned, most of what we see happens off screen, which is probably for the best as the prosthetic effects used to create the various body parts and which show the after effects of Dahmer's atrocities are where the budgetary restraints are the most obvious. The film is set in the eighties when the killings took place and it does a good job of replicating the bad fashion and style of the era rather realistically, though as the film was made rather quickly after the events themselves came to light much of this could be coincidence.
A good score courtesy of the director and solid production values and good editing help us to overlook the fact that the film is shot in California as a poor stand-in for Milwaukee and the film's other shortcomings. This is a film so dependent on Crew's lead performance that a lot of the other details are easy to overlook simply because he does do such a great job in the part. The film manages to be fairly disturbing in spots though it never crosses the line into gratuitous territory. If it doesn't broaden its take on things any further than simply showing us who Dahmer was and what he did (we don't get into the after effects of his crimes or really delve into the psychology behind making Dahmer do what he did) the film does manage to paint a realistic portrait of some of the more heinous crimes of the eighties.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Intervision's fullframe transfer presents the film in its original aspect ratio and in pretty decent shape at that. Some print damage is evident throughout and there are some shots that are grainier than others but for an older low budget movie, this one transfers well to DVD with nice color reproduction and good detail levels.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono track is also fine, it's well balanced and fairly clear for the most part. Once or twice the dialogue is a little bit on the muffled side but generally things sound fine. No alternate language options or subtitles are provided.
The best extra on the disc is a commentary track with director David R. Bowen and leading man Carl Crew. This is a pretty thorough discussion of the track that covers shooting on different locations, camera problems, sound problems that they ran into when some gear was burned in a fire, what it was like shooting the film on 35mm and how each of the two men got involved. Carl did most of the pre-production work before Bowen was onboard to direct, but after investors back out a secondary unit was hired and some 'guerilla' style filmmaking was employed to get the feature finish. The filmmakers ran into some odd problems on this shoot and it's interesting to hear about how they overcame them. Bowen does have a whole lot more to say about things than Crew does, though he chimes in more often after the movies get twenty minutes or so in. Despite a few awkward gaps of silence here and there, the commentary has a lot of great information here, not the least of which is a story about appearing on the Maury Povich show to promote the film.
Aside from that, look for a trailer for the feature and trailers for a few other Intervision DVD releases, including Things, Sledgehammer and A Night To Dismember. Menus and chapter stops are also included.
The Final Word:
Intervision deserves some thanks for rescuing this one from obscurity. While the low budget technique and subject matter might have you thinking this one is a tasteless camp classic, the fact is that it's a surprisingly well made and intelligent take on Dahmer's case, made all the more impressive by Crew's intense performance. A decent presentation and an interesting commentary make this a well rounded package for a movie completely worth seeing for anyone with an interest in the subject matter.
When was this film released in the US, Ian? There's a date of 1993 on the IMDb page, but wasn't it sitting on the shelf for a few years before it came out. I don't think it was released in the UK until the late 1990s.
I always get this film mixed up with the Jeremy Renner-starring movie about Dahmer from the early 2000s, which I saw when it first came out but can no longer remember a thing about.