GACY (2003) What a jackoff! John Wayne Gacy was a real asshole son of a bitch, even by serial killer standards. It shouldn't be too surprising that a man of this level of vileness had to keep up a façade of respectability beyond that required by other serial killers. When everybody in the neighborhood can smell the corpses rotting under your house, you have to really be on their good side to keep them from getting city hall involved. Gacy opens with a nauseatingly wholesome father-son fishing trip with a teenaged JWG and his dad...at least until dad snaps. Then we zip forward to his adulthood. We are informed via title cards that he was convicted of sodomizing a youngster, and after his release from prison, moved with his family to another town to "put his life back together". Was that sarcasm? I'm imagining the guys putting up that title card making little quote marks in the air with their fingers in exactly the places I just did. There's a foul, unavoidable smell coming out of the crawlspace beneath the house - Gacy (played by Mark Holton) offers excuses nobody thinks twice about, since he works hard at upholding a certain respectability in the community. For example, he hosts a barbecue and a local official makes a windy speech about how proud he is to have a pillar-of-the-community friend like John Wayne Gacy. But between the smell, what we later learn is the sound of millions of maggots squirming against each other (eeeeeew), and, of course, that whole sodomizing thing, it's not too long before the wife packs up the kids and gets the hell out of Dodge. Which is great news for guys like this - three less people he has to bullshit around. What Gacy was doing, of course, was killing young men and burying them in his crawlspace. He met them by hiring them as workers, or earning their trust (and fear...tricky combination) by conning them into thinking he was a policeman. He had a room set up to look like a policeman's office, in which he'd con his victims. Contrast this with the tricks used to get girls into the car in Ted Bundy - Gacy's cop routine is elaborate, well thought out and convincing. Not too much time is spent focusing on anyone beyond Gacy; of his victims, there's mostly Charlie Weber as a young man rooming with Gacy (the IMDb says he's a composite of two) and someone else whose name escapes me as a painter who demands his payment a little more forcefully than he should have. Larry Hankin shows up as an exterminator called in to take care of the bug problem. I also liked the two cops who start catching on that something's up, but they're not quite sure what, and since they can't get a warrant, they just sit in front of the guy's house, day in, day out, pissing him off like only John Wayne Gacy could get pissed off. I think this is one of the stronger releases from this clump of movies - it didn't ask me to identify with its subject, but it did present a monster I had no trouble believing actually existed. There were a few details I could've done without (the word "jackoff" has the same effect as "chicken" did on Marty McFly), but Holton's performance is excellent throughout, his bullshit act flawless, the complete asshole nature of the character beneath it well realized. This man had a superb fake personality for the public, but it couldn't hold up after he was caught, and afterward, John Wayne Gacy played true to his total-prick nature. At least Jeffrey Dahmer had the good sense to 'fess up to his crimes when it was clear he'd been caught. Despite his obvious-to-everyone guilt (taking an active role in helping the police find the bodies of his victims, pleading multiple personalities at his trial), Gacy tirelessly worked with his lawyers after his conviction, claiming he was shafted by The Man, right up until the needle went into his arm when his last words were "Kiss my ass." I don't think he's missed by very many people. BACK TO THE G's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE