Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.life From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: 'Rampage': Punishing look at crime Date: Fri, 30 Oct 92 15:33:28 EST Message-ID: \SE E;LIFE;MOVIES \HD 'Rampage': Punishing look at crime \BY Gary Arnold \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES A polemical suspense thriller that combines the hunt for a mass murderer with courtroom melodrama, "Rampage" has survived in vivid and intriguing form after a period in movie business limbo. The film was shot in Stockton, Calif., in 1987 by William Friedkin, who retains a substantial measure of the ominous, nerve-racking skill that originally made his reputation with "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist." A fictionalized account of a murder case prosecuted in Sacramento, Calif., in the late 1970s, "Rampage" became a hostage to creditors when Dino De Laurentiis' last production company went bankrupt. In certain respects the time lag may enhance the topical aspects of "Rampage," which is ultimately contrived to express the filmmaker's misgivings about the role "expert" psychiatric testimony can play in shielding certain murderers from punishment. Meaning capital punishment. "Rampage" also reflects Mr. Friedkin's change of heart about the merits of society demanding an ultimate sanction against its most lethal and dangerous criminals. In the wake of "The Silence of the Lambs," the mass murderer in "Rampage," Charles Reece (Alex McArthur), seems to have a fashionable dimension that wouldn't have been so exploitable or pertinent five years earlier. Like Hannibal Lecter, Reece brings a cannibalistic appetite to acts of murder. Reece guts his victims and likes to sup on their blood. When finally apprehended, he defends this practice as a satanic imperative. Diabolical voices supposedly command him to do the hideous things he does. The movie begins by keeping close, clinically terrifying company with Reece on a killing mission. Despite this proximity, Mr. Friedkin is discreet enough to leave the goriest details of the slaughter to our instantly apprehensive imaginations. Perhaps every movie that even presumes to deal with butchers as merciless and flamboyant as a Reece or a Lecter is bound to exploit murder as a pictorial spectacle. But Mr. Friedkin seems to resist the temptation to find Reece's warped personality more compelling than the suffering he inflicts. To the extent that depiction of a fundamentally gruesome kind can be minimized, he manages to be incisive about the horrifying aspects. He blunders by allowing Reece to escape and go on a superfluous murder spree after the trial process for his initial set of killings is under way. This reprise turns the plot back into a chase thriller after we've become absorbed in the legal tug-of-war embodied by Michael Biehn as Tony Fraser, the prosecutor seeking the maximum punishment for Reece's crimes, and John Harkins as Dr. Keddie, the defense psychiatrist willing to stretch an insanity plea to the breaking point if it can help persuade a jury that the death penalty is abhorrent. Mr. Friedkin evidently scuttled a major subplot when the opportunity to salvage the movie arose, courtesy of Miramax. The prosecutor's failing marriage, undermined by the recent loss of a young child - a tragedy recalled in flashback soon after Fraser is assigned the Reece case - failed to survive the pressures of the trial. It also appears that the movie leaves an interconnected subplot unresolved: the testimony of a man whose wife and son are killed by Reece, leaving him with another young son - also an eyewitness to the aftermath of the murders - whom he'd prefer to shield from every aspect of the trial. The subject matter is compelling no matter which side of the legal debate one might prefer - and despite the shortcuts and inhibitions that tend to interfere with an adequate dramatization of a case that stirs profoundly frightening and sobering emotions. The crucial shortcoming of "Rampage" is that it condenses a case history that would really profit from an expanded narrative format. In retrospect it appears that the best approach would probably be a cable TV miniseries. The material needs a time frame generous enough to permit the crimes, the arrest and the trial to sink in methodically and gravely. The continuity gets rushed and cluttered in the last 20 minutes or so of the movie. It's as if Mr. Friedkin were rushing to a fadeout, rather than rushing to judgment. ***** TWO AND ONE-HALF STARS TITLE: "Rampage" RATING: R (graphic violence, profanity) CREDITS: Written and directed by William Friedkin, based on a book by William P. Wood RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM