Some Kind of Monster

Film: Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.

Based on the films on The List, it would be easy to decide that documentarian Nick Broomfield is something of a vulture. Both of his List films deal with the capture, trial, and execution of American serial killer Aileen Wuornos. This film, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, picks up 10 years after his first Wuornos documentary, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Where the first film covered her bizarre trial, the latter film concerns the 18 months or so before her eventual execution, including the last of her appeals. While there is some crossover from the first film, almost all of this is new material.

There’s not a lot to talk about here in terms of story, because this is not a scripted story. Or is it? This is a concept that is touched on in the middle of the film when Broomfield himself takes the stand in a case. This legal case concerned Wuornos’s first trial, which her new lawyer wanted thrown out. Part of the testimony included admissions from her first lawyer that he smoked a vast amount of marijuana before meetings with her. The opposing lawyer brings up footage from the first film, showing that the lawyer in question was wearing two different shirts, indicating an edit and the possibility that the two clips were from different days.

One After Another

Film: Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer; Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on rockin’ flatscreen (Aileen); streaming video from NetFlix on laptop (Henry).

I’ve known for a couple of years that when I got to either of today’s films I’d watch them on the same day; they’re a natural double feature based on the titles if nothing else. I’ve put them off until now mostly because I was nervous about one of them and didn’t have a great deal of interest in the other. Still, I’m running out of films, and with February being a down month for me in general, it was time to knock them out. While both films (obviously) deal with serial killers, they couldn’t be more different.

Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer is a documentary about the title character, the first convicted female serial killer in American jurisprudence history. It is one of the oddest documentaries I’ve ever seen in that it would seem to be tailor-made to be a lurid story, but it’s not. Rather than focusing on the seven murders Wuornos was accused of (she was ultimately convicted of six), it instead focuses on the people around her, many of whom decided to associate with her specifically to make money from her crimes.