Here we have what is, at first glance, a good serial killer movie. What we really have is an extremely good serial killer movie. This is probably the fifth or sixth time I’ve watched The Ugly, and I never really thought about it. I just watched it and let the great performances and snappy style roll over me, enjoying the ride. For some reason, this time around, the movie really clicked for me. What was before simply a bunch of interesting characters interacting with each other in a morbid situation became a deep and multifaceted study of Simon the killer’s psychosis, and in the end, more questions are raised than are answered. We’re not even sure if he is psychotic (a sociopath, certainly, as he kills randomly and totally without remorse, but there’s a very good chance he’s totally in control of his mind).
Karen Schumaker is summoned to a very creepy and definitely not-up-to-code psychiatric hospital to analyze Simon Cartwright, a formerly vicious serial killer who has been incarcerated for several years. Simon has requested her especially because she was part of a controversial trial where her expert witnessing released a man convicted of brutal murders. He believes she’s his only hope to rejoin the world.
Escorted to an interview room by Dr. Marlowe, who runs the hospital (and looks like an even more weasely version of Warden Ackerman from season 8 of Red Dwarf), and two patient-torturing orderlies who I can’t look at without being reminded of Rocksteady and Bebop, she meets Simon for the first time. During their initial session, he tells her he kills because he’s “The Ugly”. He kills without pattern, and his victims have nothing in common. He never really tells her what “The Ugly” is supposed to be, but every time he looks in a mirror, he sees his face as a hideous mask of scars.
As a child, Simon drew disturbing pictures of dead people, and had an overbearing beast of a mother much like Lionel’s mom from Dead-Alive. One day, being chased and tortured by the school bullies because he was a bit of a dimwit (still struggling to read “The Ugly Duckling” well into gradeschool), he fell on the pavement and messed up his face. A girl named Julie helped him home, and his mother went ballistic. Mom won’t let him interact with anyone, and tells him his father left because he hated them and thought Simon was stupid and ugly. In actuality, his father was trying to gain custody of him and take him away from his alcoholic bi-polar mom. Seeing a page of “The Ugly Duckling”, torn to reveal only the words “The Ugly”, and taking his bandage off to see the scrapes and scabs on his face, he decided to do something about his situation…slash his mother’s throat.
The time between killing his mother as an adolescent and his becoming a homicidal maniac at the age we see him at now is never covered. I’d guess either in and out of orphanages and foster homes, or kept in a juvenile facility until he was 18.
Late into his killing years, he finds a hurt dog on the side of the road and takes it to a vet clinic (even sociopaths recognize that puppies deserve love and attention greater than their human victims). The vet tech turns out to be his childhood sweetheart, Julie. They start dating after he murders her brother, whom he’d mistaken for her boyfriend and slaughtered in jealousy. Even sweet Julie isn’t safe, however, and winds up in a pool of her own blood like everyone else.
Back in the interrogation room, Dr. Schumaker is convinced Simon is rehabilitated and takes his restraints off so as to have a more civilized conversation. Probably not the wisest of ideas. He tells her about the Visitors, the voices of his old victims in his head that tell him he’s The Ugly and make him kill to silence their screams. Problem with that is, what made him kill his mom? He had no victims to pester him into slicing her throat. But there were those creepy pictures. Simon had the makings of a serial killer before dear ol’ mum pushed him over the edge.
Or did he? Are the visitors even real? The first time we hear mention of them is when Simon sees the word “Visitor” on Dr. Schumaker’s ID tag on her lapel. Before that, he was just The Ugly and that was that. Schumaker is just as frustrated by this conundrum, and calls him out on it, pushing him and pushing him until Simon snaps and attacks her. In the moments before Bebop and Rocksteady haul Simon off to his cell, Schumaker actually sees the Visitors standing around them, egging Simon on. Returning home, understandably shaken by the experience, she tries to sleep. Meanwhile, Simon has dispatched the two orderlies and heads to Schumaker’s house to show her just how rehabilitated he is. Dr. Marlowe watches him walk out of the hospital with an “I told you so” look on his face.
If you take the movie at face value, Simon is just your run-of-the-mill killer who hears voices and had a fucked up childhood. But none of that may be real at all. At one point, Marlowe tells Schumaker that Simon was convinced that several Olympic athletes were trying to assassinate him. He convinced the doctor to give him a television so he could watch the games and identify his stalkers. When the Olympics were over, he admitted that there was no plot to kill him, and he wasn’t paranoid, he just wanted to watch the diving.
Simon is a consummate bullshit artist, and everything he tells Schumaker is most likely a lie. Even the stuff about his childhood may be a lie. Julie might never have existed. He may have even invented a whole new life just to mess with Schumaker (who, considering she’s basically the female Kiwi version of Dr. Phil, would be fairly easy to dupe). Much of his tormenting as a boy resulted from his stupidity, yet he’s obviously intelligent and incredibly devious as an adult. Admittedly those qualities could be developed through necessity later in life, but still. His motivation for killing, the mysterious Visitors, are never mentioned until he sees the word on Schumaker’s tag, and yet he convinces her so thoroughly of their existence that she actually sees them when he attacks her after his restraints are removed. If Simon is not, in fact, The Ugly, and the Visitors are just a figment of his imagination, causing someone else to see them through sheer force of will makes Hannibal Lecter’s convincing his fellow inmate to swallow his tongue seem like a cheap parlor trick by comparison.
The one strong supporting case for Simon’s killing motivation being at least somewhat honest, is his mercy for one person. A kid witnesses him killing a man in an alley, but after he chases the witness down, he lets him live because the kid is deaf. Sympathy for a fellow defective, perhaps? Unless, of course, he made up the whole story for Schumaker’s benefit.
There are two songs that always put me in mind of this movie. The first one is “Ronnie” by Metallica. It’s on the “Load” album, which is one of my favorites of theirs. If you think that makes me less metal, then you can fuck right off -- I guarantee I’m more metal than you, wuss. And if you listen to Black Label Society or Corrosion of Conformity or Down and think that “Load” and “Reload” suck, you’re a damn hypocrite, because it’s the same damn thing. And let’s be honest, Metallica were never very good at thrash metal. “Master of Puppets” and “Ride the Lightning” are fantastic records, but how many balls-out fast songs are on either? About two apiece. Not so good for a thrash band. The guitar work was always good, but Lars Ulrich is a suck-ass drummer and Metallica was constantly being shown up by Destruction, Exodus, Slayer, Heathen, Kreator, Annihilator, and a million other thrash bands from the same era who could play a hundred times faster and meaner.
Anyway, I’m getting off track. The reason I connect this song and The Ugly is because I was listening to it at about 1:30 in the morning on my way home from my girlfriend’s house in a thunderstorm after we’d watched this movie for the first time. Something about the atmosphere of the storm, the disturbing quality of the movie, and the dark subject matter of the song gelled and cemented a sort of uneasy feeling into my head that I get whenever I watch this movie or listen to that song.
The other song is “Room 429”, as covered by Strapping Young Lad. It’s originally by a band called Cop Shoot Cop, but I’ve never heard the original version. Considering who covers it, I can’t imagine the original stands up to the cover in this case. Anyway, the whole song seems to be about an insane asylum, and the line “standing in the rain outside your door, hand on my knife”, recalls the final scenes of the movie with Simon in Schumaker’s house.
Peter Jackson’s not the only Kiwi who can make a kickass movie. Check out The Ugly if you’re on a serial killer kick. You won’t be disappointed.
The Moral of the Story: If your ward once put an orderly in a wheelchair for stubbing out a cigarette on his arm, it’s probably unwise to spit in his food and punch him repeatedly in the head.
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