AGDeac
"Henry: Portrait of a serial killer" belongs to a certain type of films which are not wanted but needed.
The film raised many controversies ever since it's initial release, and nobody who already watched it wonders why. It's disgusting, violent, raw, but most of all it is honest. Imagine a combination of "Peeping Tom" and "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and now amplify the final result.
The media and the society itself has always been fascinated about killers for several reasons: why they do it, how they get away with it, but most of all how they do it. The final question never got a fair answer in cinematography until Henry came along.
An extremly low-budget film, "Henry" manages to create reactions only because of it's honesty, showing explicit scenes of violence through the eyes of a tormented man. The characters are unhappy and live in a grey world where boredom is a routine and it destroys people from the inside.
Infamous scenes like the one when Henry (Micharl Rooker) and Otis (Tom Towells) watch a tape of their own murderous acts ruin society's fascination about serial killers. Most people will not want to watch this movie a second time, but everyone should watch it at least once. It may lack the vegetarian message of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" or the love story of "Peeping Tom", but it shows us how reality is like and it doesn't lie to us about serial killers and violence. Henry is the " Unforgiven" of horror film.
meathookcinema
This film was actually made in 1986 (although I've read it was actually shot in 1985) but not released until 1990 as there were censorship problems as to the graphic nature of the film's proceedings.The film is loosely based on the lives of real life serial killers Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole.Henry lives with Otis. They both met in prison when Henry was serving a sentence for murdering his mother. Otis' sister comes to stay with them and instantly falls for Henry. Peppered throughout the film are random victims of Henry shown in differing locales and killed using differing methods. Henry continues to kill but we start to see the involvement of Otis. There is even a scene in which Henry passes down his wisdom regarding serial murder to Otis. Henry now has a new partner in crime. Or does he?The first time I heard about this film was on a TV review show which had celebrities talking about new media. Malcolm McLaren was chosen to watch and talk about Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and had said that it was so shocking that he hadn't slept since seeing it! The ultimate recommendation for a horror movie.The first time I actually got to see the film was when it was released on video in 1990 in the UK. However Henry's butchery wasn't the only I was to witness but also that of the BBFC. They had a massive issue with the scene in which one of the random victims is shown to be a dead naked woman sat on the toilet with a broken bottle in her mouth and the home invasion that Henry and Otis not only commit but also film on a camcorder. The film is now uncut in the UK and common sense has prevailed.Henry feels more like a grimy, gritty documentary which was shot by a silent conspirator rather than a glossy, polished Hollywood film in which the police arrest the assailants at the end. There are no police in Henry as the transient main character moves on and the killings seemingly continue.The arrival of this film signified a major new hallmark in the horror genre as this film was so brilliant executed (pun not intended), directed and acted. I can't imagine anyone else inhabiting the role of Henry other than Michael Rooker. He performs the central character with a very strange, very unsettling disconnect and utter lack of emotion, almost like he has a force-field around him. Tom Towles needs mentioning also as the sleazy, rat-like Otis. Try and watch his performance without your skin crawling.A perfect film that was in fact lauded by critics including Siskel and Ebert (yes you read that right! They praised the film whilst taking the opportunity to further criticise the Friday the 13th films. Bore off!) I remember at the time of GoodFellas reading a Martin Scorsese interview in which he said that the film had seriously disturbed him too and that it thought it was amazing. The film was so loved by critics that it was a film which helped with the introduction of a new classification for the MPAA. That classification was NC-17 (it had been suggested that the new certification would be A for Art-house- films that were felt to be of artistic merit but somewhat violent and/or sexual). However NC-17 replaced the old X rating and the stigma remained. Some cinemas still won't show NC-17 films, some newspapers won't advertise these films either.The film has now been restored with the gorgeous looking and sounding 4K print being released on Blu ray. Now thats karma. Lets hope there's a similar karma when it comes to the MPAA's ratings system.
Lechuguilla
The real life evil of convicted killer Henry Lee Lucas has been well documented elsewhere. This film is a semi-fictional account, based on Lucas' "confessions" ... for what they're worth. In the film, Henry lives with his ex-prison buddy Otis, and Otis' sister Becky, played well by Tracy Arnold. The setting is Chicago. The historical time period is unclear.Most, though not all, of the murders take place off screen, mercifully. It's still, at times, a grizzly affair. Much of the film is like a diary, in that we see Henry, Otis, and Becky engaged in slow, lengthy, pointless conversations, amid drab surroundings. Oh it's grim.This is supposed to be a character study. But there is no arc. Henry's robotic life is so monomaniacal as to preclude dramatic variation or change. What little substantive material there is could have been presented in thirty minutes.The film's pace is slow. Scenes are very, very drawn-out. Screen time is consumed with characters eating grim meals, playing cheap cards, and driving around in a rundown old car. It's as if the scene on page 62 of the script could have been switched with the scene on page 16, and viewers would never know the difference. It's all just an unending grim ... sameness.The film's images are grainy. Lighting is subdued. Music is appropriately eerie and creepy, but manipulative.Real-life serial killers are too diverse in backgrounds and personalities for this film to offer any generalized insight. And the film conveys little understanding of Lucas himself. Sometimes a film that is grim can be entertaining or insightful. This one isn't. It's just pointless.
ferbs54
Loosely based on the real-life exploits of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to the slayings of over 600 people but who was ultimately convicted in the homicide of a "mere" 11, "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" changes some of the established facts around yet remains a very strong experience for the viewer. As revealed on a certain Wiki site, the film was shot in just four weeks in 1986, at a cost of around $110,000, but was not released until four years later. Despite its great reputation, it is a film that I had long put off watching, having a suspicion that it would be a rather unpleasant experience for me over all. But lately, I have been exposing myself to a bunch of previously dreaded films (such as "Blood Sucking Freaks" and 1978's "I Spit on Your Grave," with "Audition" and "Cannibal Holocaust" soon to come), and find that "Henry" is actually quite excellent; unpleasant, of course, but nevertheless featuring a winning script and three dynamite performances that elevate it to the ranks of first-rate independent filmmaking.In the picture, the viewer makes the acquaintance of Henry (Michael Rooker, in his first screen role), a polite, soft-spoken, illiterate young man who looks a tad like a less muscular Arnold Schwarzenegger crossed with Grand Funk Railroad's Mark Farner...and who also happens to be a quite casual serial killer. Before we even get to hear him speak, we see a trail of Henry's victims on screen: a beautiful brunette lying in the grass with a gashed abdomen, a pair of liquor store owners with gunshot wounds to the head, a bloodied hooker with a glass bottle stuffed in her mouth (!), a dead woman lying face down in a stream. When we first meet Henry, he is doing work as an exterminator, appropriately enough, living in Chicago with an ex-jailmate named Otis (very loosely based on the real-life Ottis Toole, and played here by Tom Towles), a parolee who makes a living as an auto mechanic and pot dealer. Otis' sister Becky (Tracy Arnold) soon comes to stay, and learns that Henry had done his time in jail for the killing of his own mother. And it would seem that old habits do die hard, as Henry's propensity toward homicide for kicks remains undiminished, and when the bored and frustrated Otis becomes a willing student in the art of casual killing, the pair enters into a series of slayings that achieve a whole new realm of fun and games....Featuring expert direction from John McNaughton and those three finely crafted performances, "Henry" truly is a powerful experience. The film is often quite suspenseful, and much of that suspense derives from the viewer's never knowing which of Henry's encounters will turn lethal. Anyone who Henry sees, be it a waitress in a diner or a woman walking her dog, becomes a potential victim, and it is the lighthearted, blithe casualness with which Henry dispatches these victims that makes the picture so horrific. Operating under his philosophy of "It's either you or them," Henry is as dispassionate a killer as Schwarzenegger's Terminator, calmly eating a burger and fries, for example, after breaking the necks of two prostitutes. Several of the picture's slayings are merely suggested (for example, that guitar-toting female hitchhiker who gets into Henry's car; Henry later offers the guitar to Otis as a present) and some seen, as mentioned earlier, only as bloodied aftermath, but still, the film DOES give the viewer ample evidence of Henry and Otis in action. Thus, the repeated stabbing and head bashing of a TV-dealing fence; the oh-so casual murder of a driver in an underpass; the pair videotaping their rape/murder of an entire nuclear family (arguably, the most disturbing sequence in the film), and the final 15 minutes of the picture, which I won't go into but do guarantee will long linger in the memory. The film gives us an explanation for Henry's psychosis that at first seems only barely plausible (his mother had been a hooker who had forced Henry to wear dresses and watch her have sex with the customers)...until one learns that such had been the case with Henry Lee Lucas himself in the 1940s. "My mama was a whore," Henry tells Becky with a sneer on his face, and the moment is an icy one. All told, "Henry" may be unpleasant, detailing as it does the lives of three very damaged and disturbed people (Becky had been repeatedly raped by her father as a girl and beaten by her present husband), but remains a very fine film. Its violence is clinical but hardly exploitative, and in its understated way, leaves a residual chill that a less artfully composed picture could never achieve. It was followed by a sequel six years after its release, but with a different director at the helm and another actor portraying Henry, this follow-up is a product that this viewer is in no great rush to see. Further good news regarding "Henry" is that the film is available to us today on a great-looking DVD from the always dependable Dark Sky outfit; "Henry," originally shot in 16mm, may never look better for home viewing. It took me 24 years to catch up with this one, but I am so glad that I finally did. Pretty potent stuff, indeed!
