Dahmer (2002

This particular take on the exceedingly grim life of notorious gay serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer comes almost ten years after fellow prison inmates brutally murdered him. Because of this long-time factor, one can at least hope that it isn’t just a cheap cash-in job like a previous film, The Secret Life of Jeffrey Dahmer was and perhaps more of a study of what motivated this man to turn into the monster that he was.

The new film by David Jacobson begins with an incident during Dahmer’s killing spree, which could have saved several lives. Still, due to the police’s racist and careless attitude, Dahmer was allowed to continue to kill. The titles roll while we are shown Dahmer at his job at the chocolate factory – a position that provided him with the means to his ghastly ends.

Dahmer smooth-talks a young Vietnamese lad into posing for some pictures.  Picking up young wastrels hanging around the cities bus terminals was his Modus Opendi. He would then offer them money, drugs, and “a party”. Later, he would bring them home to apartment # 213 where he would drug them by mixing tranquillisers in their drinks.

After the victims fell asleep, Dahmer would carry out his very sick sexual fantasies, which involved not allowing his friend to leave him. More rationally, he feared the consequences once his friend awoke, none too delighted at having been drugged and used for some demented sexual fantasy. Thus, Dahmer chose the only other way to turn his friends into mannequin-like creatures who would still keep him company but not answer back and, most importantly, not go away and leave him alone. Dahmer craved his friends to stay with him, and he found that by making them into zombies, he could do precisely that. However, he discovered that the bodies would start rotting after a few days, and so he would reluctantly chop the body up, keeping some body parts as souvenirs.

This film attempts to shed some light on Dahmer’s background and his very frail relationship with his father, whom he resented and felt rejected by. There are other small but important instances that the film manages to touch upon, such as when Dahmer was fascinated by finding a spike in the field that had the skull of a dog impaled on it. It also shows us his fascination for feeling the naked torso of a man’s body next to him and how he used to get off by lying in this manner fascinated by his victim’s heartbeat. The film also contains the incident when Dahmer was caught at a gay bar spiking drinks with his drugs – huge pity that he had just been roughed up and thrown out of the club rather than being thrown to the police.

Fortunately, this film is a considerable improvement on the previously mentioned film on Dahmer by Carl Crew. The film switches back and forth from the past to the present. The second half is mainly focused on the last person Dahmer was trying to kill before he was captured, a lively, colourful character.  The man managed to keep Dahmer at arm’s length for a surprisingly long time before finally finding out the truth behind his acquaintance’s strange behaviour and fleeing for his life. While that smacked on cheap sensationalism, this one at least attempts to create some pattern, some twisted logic to the killer’s motives. It doesn’t succeed in actually shedding any light on what made Dahmer tick, and how some kid from some “average” home from middle America could turn into the thing that Dahmer became is hardly something that can be easily fathomed.

The acting in this film is far superior to the previous Dahmer film, though this is also a cheap little production that doesn’t have any big-name stars at all. Jeremy Renner does a decent job in the title role and sometimes looks chillingly like what Dahmer used to look. Artel Kayaru is the fateful victim who got away, and Bruce Davison is relatively good as Dahmer’s father. The film is a reasonable effort at disentangling the thinking processes of a mind that can nurture such incredible amounts of hate and rage. Yet, it fails in achieving any real insight into the sick mechanism of Dahmer’ brain. Maybe there are no logical or recognisable symptoms or signs in a case like that of Jeffrey Dahmer.

This movie is far from being a classic study of the mind of a deranged serial killer. Yet, it is a noble, fairly non-sensationalist effort and a vast improvement on the last film on the same subject (which isn’t a remarkable achievement considering just what a stinker the Carl Crew production was). This film isn’t worth much of a recommendation. However, if given a choice between the two films, Secret Life of Jeffrey Dahmer and this one, clearly, this one would be the one to watch.