Verdict
Summary
The film is at its best when focusing on Reece’s unhinged character, but it’s at its worst when focusing on Biehn’s. The film’s crux and entire theme hangs in the balance of Biehn’s moral dilemma for pursuing the death penalty, but the script (by Friedkin) is too weak to sustain that conundrum. Whenever McArthur is on screen, the film becomes electric and essential, too intense to gaze away, and so the film has a struggling, uneven quality that makes it one of Friedkin’s misfires.
Plot:
A prosecuting district attorney goes for the death penalty in a trial involving a cannibalistic serial killer.
Review:
A handsome man named Charles Reece (Alex McArthur, extremely well cast) in sunglasses and a red windbreaker randomly strolls into a Los Angeles home at Christmas time and calmly slaughters an entire family, and then mutilates them in a meticulous way. Police detectives have never seen anything like it, and the new prosecuting district attorney Anthony Fraser (Michael Biehn) is tasked with this case as his first one to make a mark. Having only just suffered a tragedy six months previously when his young daughter died, Fraser and his wife (played by Deborah Van Valkenburgh) need to turn over a new leaf in their marriage, and when Reece goes on another rampage just a day later, brutally murdering a mother and her young son, he’s caught and Fraser has a chance to build his case against him. Due to the severity and outrageous way Reece committed his crimes, he decides to pursue the death penalty (this is set in California), but the defense pursues a case of not guilty by reason of insanity, setting the stage for a complicated trial that has Reece becoming a lab rat as his brain is scanned for abnormalities and multiple psychiatrists are brought in to testify on his level of sanity. But things get even worse when Reece escapes incarceration and goes on another rampage, killing three more people, but his current trial won’t allow those murders to be added to the crimes he’s on trial for. Ultimately, Fraser wins the case, but at a great cost to his own sense of morality and concept of justice … and his fragile marriage.
From filmmaker William Friedkin at a time in his career where his films were failing at the box office, Rampage is a grim and incredibly heavy-handed docudrama with a chilling view of the mind of a serial killer. The film is at its best when focusing on Reece’s unhinged character, but it’s at its worst when focusing on Biehn’s. The film’s crux and entire theme hangs in the balance of Biehn’s moral dilemma for pursuing the death penalty, but the script (by Friedkin) is too weak to sustain that conundrum. Whenever McArthur is on screen, the film becomes electric and essential, too intense to gaze away, and so the film has a struggling, uneven quality that makes it one of Friedkin’s misfires. Ennio Morricone’s somber score elevates the proceedings only so much. Two versions of the film exist; a longer, 1987, theatrically released European cut (which is what I watched for this review), and a shorter USA cut that Friedkin edited for release in 1992 when the film was officially released in North America after being shelved in a bankruptcy. The versions end differently and have slightly different structures.
Kino Lorber has just released a two-disc 4K Ultra HD / Blu-ray edition of Rampage, bringing the film to disc for the first time in a vivid new 4K scan that makes the film look better than it ever has before. A sidelined film for decades, the film can finally be viewed and studied by newcomers and fans, and I can finally retire my VHS copy of the movie. It comes with a new audio commentary by film historians, a new video interview with star McArthur who has some very choice words to say about Friedkin, and there is another featurette with a true crime writer, who discusses the true case that this movie was inspired by. There’s also a trailer and a slipcover.
