Brilliant and touching

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

I grew up in Santa Cruz when Kemper was doing his terrible work, and so I have some familiarity with the gory details of this story. I mean, I never researched it but one picks things up from local news and talk around town. And without giving anything away, you can be sure that NOTHING in this movie is based on anything that happened in real life. In fact, I'm almost certain that they took an existing serial killer screen play and did a search and replace, swapping out "Mike Killington" with "Ed Kemper."The locations don't look like Santa Cruz. The characters don't talk like humans. The cars are incorrect cars. The cel phones are... wait THERE WERE NO CEL PHONES IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES. Seriously, if there was any detail that could have been authentic, they found a way to make the exact opposite choice. It's kind of a marvel to see a movie with literally no correct decisions behind it. How does a thing like that happen? Even if you never heard of Kemper you can appreciate this as a bad movie on its own terms. The acting is wooden and one-dimensional, the music is mostly synths, everyone is too pretty, the plot twists are like straight road through the midwest on a high-visibility day. I guess what I'm saying is, if you have the attention span for stuff like this, it's the best time you'll ever have.

First of all, Ed Kemper was 6'9" tall - the actor playing him was short and way too old for the role. Kemper trolled college campuses for his victims and would not have been able to get to as many young women if he were in his 40's as he was portrayed.Kemper was extremely intelligent and likable, but this merely portrays him as a one-note freak. Which he was not.Dialogue terrible, and cell phones and computers in the 1970's! Who was the production designer? Glad I didn't pay to see this one. I wish a really fine movie would be made about this brilliant killer - too bad he wasn't able to use his smarts for the good of the world.Even Kemper (he is still alive in prison) would roll with laughter at the way he's portrayed here.Boring boring boring and pathetic piece of tripe.

Not only is the use of cell phones and laptops incredible for the early 70s, but the character playing Edmund Kemper is unbelievable--He appears to be in his early 40s. Kemper was only 24 years old when he was caught. In addition, they show scenes of heads in kitchens...one of a girl whose head is in the oven and the other of his mother whose head is attached to his kitchen wall after her death. I don't understand...his mother's head was actually stuffed in a closet and they don't even mention how he killed his mother's friend.As for Harris, he has a very limited vocabulary and rather boring dialog. He puts some emotion into his character, but along with the cheap feeling the camera shots give, there is little to elevate the movie except for the character of Kemper and even that is lacking.It seems as if they wanted to portray Kemper as a sad sort of Norman Bates type person...from what I understand, he was openly friends with several officers due to his gregarious personality. If the writers had made him more multidimensional and younger, more attractive, instead of just pathetic, they could have developed a much more intriguing plot. His mother was actually an attractive person (physically) and his murder of his grandparents is much more complex and interesting than his just having killed them while they were sleeping.In other words, this plot has been so oversimplified as to just be about some sicko who sheds blood. Gone is the intellectual stimulation that the personality of a genius like Kemper's could have given the audience. His mother as well is pathetic and unidimensional. These people are so unlikable that the audience has no way to empathize with them and connect with the characters. Too bad it had to be all in black and white--the real life story has shades of gray and is much more provocative.

Maybe it was my mood, maybe I was drawn in by the "based on a true story" lure, but I found this film peculiarly entertaining. I don't know how accurate it is as to the facts, but we do know there was this strange killer. The problem with the facts has to do with the description of Ed Kemper being a serial killer of the sixties and seventies, yet we're seeing newer cars and cell phones. Maybe I'm just obtuse, but when TV shows like the new "Life On Mars" are more accurately portraying a time period I have to wonder. Still, I was sucked in by the presentation and the story enough to watch it until the end. It's not that gory and it does rely heavily on character, it might be too mild for those seeking a real creep-out.