Movie Reviews : Powerful Story Gives Life to Formula ‘Murder One’

Life is usually a richer source for movie stories than market research. Take “Murder One” (citywide). Here’s a film that is erratically directed, variably acted, cheaply shot and has major script problems.

Yet it holds your interest anyway, just by the power of its story. It’s a true-life American Lower Depths tale: a Gothically botched crime spree in which two hellacious poor white Southerners, one poor black and one confused kid kill an entire trailer camp family in grisly, senseless fashion.

Here is evil in a raw, perplexing form. The movie is based on the slaughter of the Alday family in 1973 by a gang of fugitives that included three escaped convicts and one 15-year-old. This quartet, brothers Carl (James Wilder) and Billy Isaacs (Henry Thomas, of “E.T.”), half brother Wayne Coleman (Stephen Shellen) and Wayne’s prison buddy George Dungee (Errol Slue), are shown here as a bent, fouled-up gang.

Screenwriter Tex Fuller told this story once before, in a 1977 documentary, also called “Murder One”, in which he interviewed the Isaacs brothers. But he doesn’t really develop a philosophical stance here, and the movie’s neutral tone is scarred by sentimentalities, like Billy’s narration. Director Graeme Campbell, even allowing for a low budget, has a flat, unexciting visual style. But the four leads interact well. Wilder’s Carl is magnetic, if a touch narcissistic. And Stephen Shellen’s Wayne comes across as the truest killer: conscienceless, unempathetic, murdering by reflex.

If “Murder One” (MPAA rated R, for sex, violence, nudity and language) isn’t a good movie, it still springs from a disturbing insight. It’s about the crazy reasons people cross what should be impassable moral lines.