Nobody had a more overactive imagination than Henry Lee Lucas, and nobody ever took off and ran with pure bullshit better than director John McNaughton when he made Henry, his black, nihilistic masterpiece. Before we get into the movie, let us get to know the man who claimed to have killed 360 people (even George W. Bush needed the entire Texas government to pull off less than half of that) and was, along with lover and fiendish sidekick Ottis Toole, the inspiration for the first song on the first Macabre record, “Serial Killer”.

Lucas, an ass-backwards redneck fresh out of jail after killing his mother and trying to kidnap two little girls, hooked up with serial arsonist and murderer Toole. The two became gay lovers, and soon Lucas took it upon himself to reignite Toole’s passion for killing. The two, along with Toole’s younger niece, Becky, roamed the country killing hitchhikers and robbery victims to kill just for the hell of it. Eventually, the two had a falling-out when Lucas ran off with Becky (only to kill her, have sex with her body and dismember her later), Toole went to jail and Lucas was eventually arrested.

The movie focuses on Henry, Otis (they dropped the second “S” to protect the innocent) and Becky (here Otis’ younger sister) during the period where Henry teaches Otis to awaken the Texas Governor within. What follows is some of the bleakest, most brutal and scary filmmaking I’ve ever experienced. The awesome Michael Rooker (Henry) and the always-entertaining Tom Towles (Otis) form one of the scariest duos in film history. Otis is a worthless scumbag who makes sexual passes at his poor white trash sister, comes on to a high school kid he’s selling drugs to and revels in torturing the innocent to make him feel better about his own pathetic self. Henry, while shown at times in a sympathetic light (Lucas claimed his mother dressed him up as a girl and beat him for not watching her have sex with other men), changes to an unfeeling monster at the flick of a switch. He instantly connects with Becky, who also comes from a rough home life with an abusive husband. The three of them live together in a squalid apartment in a poor part of Chicago. For a lifelong child of Midwest suburbs like me, the poor, wretched life the three of them lead is as scary as the murders at times.

Then there are the murders. Like all the best movies about killers, the murders are brutal and straightforward without all the pageantry of stupid contemporary movies like Saw and Hostel. It starts when the two pick up a pair of hookers (the movie never delves into Henry and Otis’ sexual relationship, nor does it get into their alleged involvement in a Satanic cult), and Henry kills them. Otis likes the idea of killing again, and soon Henry has him shooting an innocent man who offers to help them fix their car. It gets scarier from there. After Otis breaks their TV, he and Henry go to a fence to get a new one. After the fence takes a belligerent attitude with our hero, Henry stabs him to near-death with a soldering iron and finishes the job by breaking a TV set over his head. The two help themselves to a few electronic luxuries, among them an old-school camcorder.

The acquisition of the camcorder sets the stage for the best sequence of the movie, in which Henry and Otis terrorize, rape and murder the members of an innocent family while recording the whole thing to watch later. It looks, sounds and feels like a snuff film, only it’s spiced up when the family’s son comes home in the middle of Otis raping his mother only to be murdered by Henry as the camera, laying on the ground, makes for one fucked-up Kodak moment. Hmm, didn’t I see someone getting killed on-camera after it was dropped on its side somewhere like 20 years later?

Because the real-life breakup between Lucas and Toole didn’t really have a known filmable climax, the movie makes up a fantastically intense ending. Henry leaves the apartment for a walk. When he returns to the apartment, he finds Becky being raped by a drunk Otis. The scene holds nothing back and it’s damn hard to watch. Henry and Otis start to fight, and Otis is about to kill Henry when Becky stabs him in the eyeball with a comb. Henry hacks up Otis, puts him in some suitcases and dumps him in the river before he and Becky ride off into the sunset. That may sound like a happy ending (happy for this fucking movie anyway), but it isn’t long before Henry has murdered, dismembered and dropped pieces of Becky on the side of the road and is off on the road again to a sequel. I’m thinking about seeing it sometime.

Thanks for sticking with me through this review. It’s not really the kind of movie you can write a good, entertaining review to, and I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who have done better reviews of it than I have. I just watched it for the second time ever, and the first time in five years, and I can’t even really describe it. It’s brutal, intense and scary, like similarly awesome movies like Last House on the Left and The Devil’s Rejects. It registers pretty high on the Bullshit-O-Meter, but I’ll issue a pass here because Lucas was a liar himself and the movie is based on his confessions, not proven events. I remember the pace being a little slow, but it sure as fuck didn’t feel that way when I watched it this time. I guess the only bad thing you can say about it is it makes the real Lucas seem sympathetic at times, while I’m pretty sure the real Lucas was just a redneck douche who deserved to get the chair 44 times over. But he did inspire one of the better movies I’ve ever seen, so at least he brought some good to the world, which is more than Ronald Reagan could say about himself even when he remembered who himself was.

BONUS POLITICAL RANT:
Reagan, now there’s one of the true monsters of the 20th century. Even Lucas bows to this guy in terms of overall destruction. All we can hope for is that somewhere in Hell Reagan is serving one eternity of torture for every life he ruined (Where do we start? The Hollywood blacklist years? Funding terrorism? The economy-destroying tax cut?) and is in double agony because he can’t remember what he did wrong. This is one guy who committed enough atrocities to fill an entire Macabre record.