On D List of Movie Reviews

(For optimum viewing, adjust the zoom level of your browser to 125%.)


The Deliberate Stranger (1986)

Rate: 7
Viewed: 1/25

DelibS
1/25: I saw The Deliberate Stranger back then, and it's a highly fascinating story about Ted Bundy.

Several actors may be famously associated with a character in spite of giving an okay/fair performance, and that's what happened to Mark Harmon here. Hence, it's difficult to separate these two. Remember the movie came out in 1986 and Ted Bundy was still alive. By all accounts, he refused to see it. Just right before he was electrocuted in 1989, a lot of new information came out which explained how he killed, his modus operandi, and what he did afterwards.

To this day, nobody knows how many women Ted Bundy murdered, if the discovered bodies were in fact attributed to him, or how far back he went when he started killing. Officially, he covered seven states (California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and Washington), but there's a suspicion of more.

Ted Bundy certainly ranks at the top when it comes to "serial killers." But the term wasn't in vogue at the time until he and others came along during the 70's and he wasn't the first, either (think of Jack the Ripper). What made Ted Bundy stand apart from pretty much everybody is he had high IQ, wasn't ugly, behaved normally in public, blended in well with connected people, targeted middle class women, and committed his crimes brazenly in broad daylight.

Not having an organized task force contributed to the elusiveness of Ted Bundy for years. There were thousands pieces of leads which resulted in hundreds of thousands of hours in manpower across many states. And they still couldn't figure out who did it. That's why, in the film, the detectives talked about the need for a computer to put everything together and then sort them out. But it only took a speeding incident, a needle in a haystack, to apprehend Ted Bundy who was staking out the neighborhood for burglary very early in the morning.

Speaking of high IQ, Ted Bundy was actually a failure in life. You may hear him going to law school and all that, but he never did well. Almost everything he owned, he stole which explains his philosophy about life. Another thing that the movie conveniently leaves out is after Ted Bundy murdered women he had sex with them and came back to their bodies days or weeks later in the woods for some more, even if they were still decomposing. He also severed their heads and kept them in his apartment.

Ted Bundy would've been free in a year or two after he was found guilty of kidnapping in Utah. It's because the woods, along with nature, provided a perfect means to eliminate any trace. However, he made the mistake of escaping twice, and when he committed mass murder at Florida State University, that became enough evidence to sent him away for good without being tried for any previous murder, hence the numerous unsolved cases. He attempted to trade information with the police for closure in exchange of staying his execution date, but it didn't ultimately work in his favor because they wanted none of his mind games.

All right, back to the film...it's quite accurate in just about everything (and yep, he flew to Chicago from Denver), as confirmed by one of Ted Bundy's defense lawyers Polly Nelson, despite not telling enough with many names changed. The first part starts off slowly and then picks up the pace while the second part gets to the point and stays with it throughout. One nice job the filmmakers have done is making sure that grief was felt and shown by the victims' loved ones. Even the investigators were impacted by the work.

All in all, no study of Ted Bundy can be complete without seeing The Deliberate Stranger.