William Friedkin's RAMPAGE (1987)

 

(Special screening in 35mm at IFC Center for Friedkin retrospective)

Whoa. Talk about an underrated (or mostly underseen and under-distributed) gem of ambivalent subject matter directed with the eye of someone who tells is as straight as he (mostly) did with The Exorcist; a Documentarian turned "Professional" filmmaker with collaborators like (a young) Robert Yeoman and composer Ennio Morricone (relying a bit more on electronic synth-scoring that I can't recall he did outside of the Thing). This is often jaw-droppingly effective and scary when it shows this killer on the run, and is quite good (if a little less than great) as courtroom drama.

Rampage is kind of like William Friedkin's "Joker," or at least that's what it seems like it could be leaning towards except with more legitimately on its mind and less bullshit about its craft. But it may also help to see this now as one of a piece with Friedkin's (now final) film of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which is also about the question of "knowledge" of a crime and sane vs insane.

Maybe he wanted to revisit the sort of ideas he had explored in Rampage in a setting that is more, what's the word, Officious where the ideals of what it means to be a commander become clouded by ego and instability. Charles Reece is like the bastard child of a Captain Queeg, no less prone to and somewhat a captive to the fucked up dimensions of his mind, only with Reece there is the far more insidious and less comparable element of... Nazism and Satanism and drinking blood because that might do something to make the DRINK THE BLOOD NOW NOW NOW voices go away. Yikes.

This is all to say this is a satisfying and disturbing "ripped from the headlines" crime drama that features one of Michael Biehn's greatest turns in front of the camera as the prosecuting attorney and still-grieving father, though due to slightly less dramatic circumstances if no less tragic (I have to wonder if it was somewhat disorienting post Terminator to have another character named 'Reece' to contend with, but that's just conjecture to use this film's legal-speak), a somewhat forgotten-today character actor Alex McArthur delivering the kind of Ted Bundy performance that no other actor has achieved without actually portraying Bundy (as in he is more "attractive" conventionally as an average white male while containing that *look* of a serial killer that is equally calm and menacing), and Grace Zabriskie showing why she's one of the greats in just a few scenes as the killer's long abused mother (by the dead dad, and it's a flaw she doesn't have more screen time or development considering especially what happens near the end).

Why is it disturbing is not only for the depictions of the crimes, which is so devastating and revolting for how equally much and little Friedkin shows - we see not so much the full acts themselves but the aftermath, the kind of blood-splattered crime scenes that make Kill Bill look tame - but for the questions it raises that it cant possibly answer.

I mention Joker earlier, maybe an easy reference, but the other film I couldn't help but think of was Dirty Harry; this is almost like the "well, OKAY, let's see what happens if we actually try this sick motherfucker in court" scenario, and you almost wonder (what, me worry) at first if Friedkin will argue via the Biehn character that, well, Callahan might have had a point in just blowing Scorpio away (!) But that is still, as meaningful as that film is, Hollywood Escapism compared to the moral quandaries here, and it's all down to the question of "legal" insanity, and it's good that Friedkin features a scene, albeit brief, of the jury deliberating over the case. I'm not sure where I would lean either, albeit I too am staunchly anti-death penalty, and yet as the film goes on what's absorbing about it is the film doesn't even quite know where to stand.

(there is also a point to be made, which I wish the filmmakers grappled with a little, looking beyond the lines so to speak about what kind of whack mental health system we have that someone could be conceivably let out "free" if found not guilty by reason of insanity, like why not just commit for life if that's the case, but I don't know California law in the 80s and don't feel like looking it up)

This is all to say Friedkin, via his characters speaking with conviction about both sides (and Biehn is a bit more moving in his turn than the other fine-but-standard character actor players so that could color it a bit for some watching), but especially in the final ten minutes or so after the verdict coming to some last-minute findings that turn things back into the apprehension that was founded earlier in the story, makes Rampage so memorable because I get the sense he isn't sure where to come down by the end on the questions he's posing.

He did this too in Caine Mutiny, and while I don't think I'll be having to grapple with this film as much morally as I did that one, the faith in letting an audience come to terms with everything so diabolical and horrible and yet still, at the end of it all, human (even in his mania), is fascinating - and it comes with added weight after recent years of, of your know, mass murderers fuelled by Nazism and Fascism and so on.