William Friedkin did not have an easy ’80s. From the giddy heights of The Exorcist, his prestige had fallen with several unsuccessful projects. To Live and Die in L.A. seemed like a rebound. But the follow-up, Rampage, got caught in the production company’s collapse, barely had a release, and only had a perfunctory re-release five years later, re-edited by the director.
Buy RampageThe psycho-killer thriller would have been fresher and more shocking had it come out in wide release when it had meant to, in 1987. In 1992, it followed The Silence of the Lambs and looked like an also-ran. While the violence is grotesque (but not gratuitous) and still disturbing, Rampage has more on its mind than shock. Perhaps too much on its mind, as the story and storytelling careen from different plots and styles until it’s not quite sure what the audience is meant to take from it.
The film opens with Charlie Reece buying a gun. He’s told there’s a waiting period, and that’s just fine with him. He can wait. A few days after he picks up the gun, he sees a woman bringing groceries into her home. He follows her, knocks on the door, and shoots dead everyone inside. The women, he drags upstairs and closes the blinds. He doesn’t want anyone to see what he does to them.
A few days later, a family buries their dog. Two kids, dad and mom. The dad says, “We know Charlie Reece did this. That’s why I called the police.” He leaves to take one kid to the dentist. Minutes later, Charlie Reece shows up at their door.
The kid, fresh home from the dentist, is the one to discover her body.
Charlie Reece is not the focus of the film. That is self-proclaimed liberal prosecutor Anthony Fraser (Michael Biehn, the biggest name in the cast). He doesn’t believe in the death penalty, but his boss does.
Charlie Reece is caught fairly quickly and tries to establish that he’s insane. He only needed to kill those people for their blood. Anthony must determine if Reece is sane enough to be tried, and to face the death penalty. And the deeper he gets into the case, the more he begins to consider, whatever the case, Charlie Reece needs to die.
Anthony has his own baggage. His daughter was braindead from complications with pneumonia. He pulled the plug on her. He can see his wife easily becoming one of Charlie’s victims. He’s principally opposed to putting the man to death, but he has a job to do. He’s part of the system.
A system that Friedkin’s film partially exposes. A part of what makes this film not tonally successful is that it is neither fish nor fowl. Part of it is a cold, disturbing thriller. Then part of it is a procedural that shows how the sausage is made. Cops fudge probable cause instead of getting a warrant. Psychiatrists pretend they’ve diagnosed ailments they never saw, if it keeps a man from the death penalty.
It moves from mode to mode, and not often smoothly. There’s a middle section with an attempted escape from prison that looks histrionic in the context of this film. It also pales in comparison to Hannibal Lecter’s bravura, operatic escape in The Silence of the Lambs. Not a problem in a cold police procedural, but disappointing in a hyperbolic thriller. Rampage tries to be both, which is why it only partially succeeds.
But it does succeed in being constantly interesting. The scenes don’t always hang together cohesively, but Friedkin is still in control of his powers, so the movie is never rote, and never boring. The courtroom drama that occupies much of the movie might seem to be from a different film, but it’s still good.
I try not to read other reviews before I write my own of a film but skimming the Wikipedia entry for this, I saw some contemporary critic refer to this as styled like a TV-movie. This proves to me most newspaper critics aren’t worth listening to – they don’t understand cinematic language, or the power of framing and composition. When Rampage looks bland, it’s because it’s meant to look bland. No episode of Law & Order has the powerful dynamic compositions, framing and camera movements this movie does in its court scenes.
And as a social argument, it’s fair. It lets different points of view have their say. Even the psychiatrist who argues in private that they should lie to keep Reece off death row in court makes an impassioned argument for why men like this should be locked up and studied. The original edit was longer and was much more ambivalent about the death penalty. The re-edit is difficult to read as anything but a full-throated endorsement of it.
Rampage has great scenes but sadly doesn’t cohere into a great film. It’s frightening, disturbing, and touching. But it’s not focused. Rampage is three movies in one. It’s a serial-killer thriller, a procedural drama, and a courtroom drama. They don’t sit together as easily as one would hope. There’s not a poor performance in the film. There aren’t any bad scenes. They just happen to be from a bunch of different movies.
Rampage has been released on UHD and Blu-ray by Kino Lorber. As far as I can tell, this is the first-post-VHS release of Rampage of any kind in the U.S. Both UHD and Blu-ray have both versions of the film, the original release and the re-cut. Both discs and both cuts of the film also include a commentary track by film historians Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson.
The Blu-ray includes some video extras: “Where’s The Blood?” (16 min), an interview with Alex McArthur, who portrayed Charlie Reece; “Psychotic Vampire” (19 min), an interview with true crime writer Harold Schechter; and several trailers for William Friedkin films.
