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Serial Killer haunts 30 years after debut

Michael Rooker stars in his fi rst movie role, as the title antihero in John McNaughton’s unrepentantly violent Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Michael Rooker stars in his fi rst movie role, as the title antihero in John McNaughton’s unrepentantly violent Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

I once saw Henry Lee Lucas eating in one of those bargain chain steakhouses.

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Cover for the 30th-anniversary special edition Blu-ray of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

He was surrounded by law enforcement officers. He was in their custody. And he was -- after he'd had his $6.99 T-bone and his baked potato -- about to take them on a tour of an old crime scene to explain how he might have murdered a woman a few years before.

In those days, Lucas was on tour -- he spent his days being transported between county jails and police lockups. He was in the confession business. He'd confess to a crime in your town, and the police or sheriff's department might get to clear an unsolved (and probably unsolvable) homicide. Part of the deal was that sometimes he'd get a better meal than might otherwise be available at taxpayer expense.

At the time I saw Lucas, I was working on a series of stories about him. And over in Dallas, a reporter named Hugh Aynesworth was also working in a similar vein. Hugh was skeptical of Lucas' claims of having murdered hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of people, all over this country and even (unbelievably, some people believed it) in Europe. Eventually I'd come to believe that probably Lucas was directly responsible for the deaths of only two people -- his mother and a girl named Becky, who was the niece of his traveling companion Ottis Toole (the man who'd become infamous as the murderer of 6-year-old Adam Walsh) -- but at the time I saw him in the steakhouse, I thought he might have killed as many as a dozen people.

I'm telling you this in a column about the movies because that was what I was doing when I first heard about a movie called Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer in 1986. I didn't really write about the movies in those days, not regularly at least. It was a couple of months before I'd see Platoon, the first movie I can remember being assigned to review, and I imagine that if I hadn't been immersed in Lucas' story I might not have noticed that a movie inspired by that story had premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival that September.

I know I wouldn't have tried to get a copy of the film, I probably wouldn't have even imagined that it was possible.

But somehow I did, so I watched a VHS copy of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer not too long after its premiere, maybe courtesy of its director, John McNaughton. (If so, thanks again John. Truth is, I don't remember how I got it. I do remember I had to send the tape back.)

And I remember watching the movie via a suitcase-size videocassette machine and a 200-pound Sony Trinitron I'd borrowed specifically for the purpose. It would be years before it got a theatrical release.

I don't know what I expected. Not much probably. Watching the film was just part of my due diligence. I was determined to keep up with all aspects of Lucas' story, including any pop culture spinoffs. McNaughton's film was only loosely inspired by Lucas' story -- his protagonist, Michael Rooker in his first role, before he played Chick Gandil in Eight Men Out, didn't seem much like the shambling, sly Lucas I knew. He has a fierce, burning but banked intelligence. He is a quiet man who kills.

But he wasn't playing the real Lucas -- he was playing a man who'd really done the sort of things that Lucas had only claimed to. And who was exceptionally good at it.

Meanwhile, the script, by McNaughton and Richard Fire, borrowed from the real case files of the atrocities Lucas claimed to have committed. It never interrogated the murder's mind, it just presented the damage he caused -- the mutilated bodies, the stopped hearts -- in a chillingly matter-of-fact manner.

McNaughton hadn't made a traditional horror movie. Henry dispensed with the rhythms of terror and release, replacing the usual melodrama with an unnerving calm. A kind of acceptance of the horror men commit.

I remember thinking he knew something about the world that most of us are unwilling to countenance.

And that's why so many of us revel in slasher films and torture porn, yet are discomfited by the clinical and detached Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Because it shows us how it must be for the worst of us, because it puts us in their place, watching as passionless bad things happen to people they can't begin to care about.

I didn't watch Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as a film critic the first time I watched it, but I understood that it wasn't a movie like most movies; it wasn't designed to make you jump or cry or to enlist your empathy. It was a play of light and shadow, a critique of the desensitizing aspects of voyeurism. It was a strong film, maybe a great one.

The other day, the obligatory 30th-anniversary special edition Blu-ray arrived in the mail. (The list price is $29.99.)

As usual with these products, it's pretty well done -- with a brand-new 4K scan and restoration from the 16mm original camera negatives, re-mastered sound and a number of special features, as well a booklet with black-and-white photos from behind the scenes and an essay by Stephen Thrower , "Henry: Portrait of a Masterpiece."

It's only 82 minutes long.

And, for what it is, it's nearly perfect. The first time I saw it, I didn't even think about its terrific score or any of its cinematic virtues. It's genuinely disturbing; a remarkably disciplined and tense work. It feels like the real thing.

Whereas the real Henry Lee Lucas turned out to be a pitiable con man.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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MovieStyle on 12/09/2016

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