SPECK (2002) No man-boobs? I'm disappointed. This movie is easily the nastiest, most enthusiastically tasteless of the recent spate of serial-killer biopics. Richard Speck liked to hurt people, and he made a whole night of it by breaking into a sorority house and doing all he could to everyone he could find inside. The film focuses most of its actions on that one night of terror, torture, rape, murder, and degradation - which is fine, if you're willing to stomach a re-enactment of such real-life depravity as exploitative entertainment, and if you're anything like me, then of course you are. But there was more to this guy's story than this, and this isn't even one of the parts that made me say "What the FUCK?" when I learned of them. This movie ends up as a well-made, more "psychological" than most sorority-massacre movie - not bad, but not as nasty as it seems to want to be, and nowhere near as insightful as it might hope. Doug Cole plays Speck, who we get to know through his actions and a LOT of voice-over. There are more voice-overs than actual dialogue in this movie, which is just as well because the dialogue is mostly variants of "On your knees, bitch!" and "(scream)". Two words basically sum this guy up: macho asshole. He's a skilled predator and bully, and he knows it, and spends the bulk of the movie demonstrating it. There isn't much most to say plot- and writing-wise - it's one of those "one night of terror!" movies where nobody stays alive long enough to become two-dimensional characters. Speck's brainfarts don't really say much we can't figure out on our own, but I liked the muttered, bitter-for-no-reason delivery from Cole, which helps give the film a bit of a noirish touch. Speck has more of a rock-video look than the other movies, which sometimes works (the first rape/murder scene is almost as good as the necrophilia scene in Dahmer), sometimes doesn't - the color palette looks like varyingly bloody shades of urine, a for-once tolerable riff on the "everything looks like piss" school of cinematography we've seen entirely too much of in the last several years. This movie does stick pretty close to the known facts of that terrible night, but that was probably the easy part when Don Adams and Aaron Pope were writing the script. Broadening the movie's scope would have taken away from its "one night of terror!" appeal, but it would've shown its subject in a less easy, less simply psychopathic/misanthropic light. Strangely enough, this macho asshole, after his imprisonment, went damn near all the way in making himself the queen of the cell block, short of getting a full-on sex change. He had (reportedly hormone-induced) man-boobs for everyone else's, uh, usage. This is not mentioned in the movie, which I think limits itself by focusing so single-mindedly on the sorority house massacre. We also don't hear in this movie that before that night, he raped and murdered a 65-year-old woman (!), and was later freed in a beaurocratic pooch-screw worthy of the laziest Hollywood hack. Trying to incorporate that into a movie in a way the audiences wouldn't reject as too silly to believe would be, I think, a challenge any screenwriter would have my respect for surmounting. Speck is a not-bad massacre movie, a not-bad character study of a mean, vicious person, and a not-bad true-crime flick. It wants to be a lot of things, which is fine, but it settles at being not bad at any of them, when I would've liked it to be really good at even just one. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE