MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Rampage’ Straddles Death Penalty Issue

A new movie about a bloodthirsty serial killer who ritually removes his victims’ innards could reasonably be accused of piggybacking Hollywood’s current vogue for liver-chomping wackos. William Friedkin’s “Rampage,” however, was completed more than five years ago. (It was held up in legal entanglements its distributor, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, shut down.) It has the dubious distinction of being ahead of the curve--the deadman’s curve.

Not that “Rampage” (at the Hillcrest Cinemas) presents itself as a schlock thriller. Despite the raw, tabloid sensationalism of its violent passages, most of the film is about the consequences of the slaughter we are made to witness. It’s a brief both for and against capital punishment, with the pro side getting the edge.

Anthony Fraser (Michael Biehn) is an assistant DA whose distaste for capital punishment is compromised when he is required to press for the death penalty in the trial of Charles Reece (Alex McArthur), a local boy who wipes out four victims in a week.

It doesn’t take very long for the police to track him down; breaking into the cellar of the ramshackle house Reece shares with his mother (Grace Zabriskie), the police find a veritable museum of gore and splatter. Reece doesn’t put up much resistance because he answers to a higher cause: He believes his mayhem is divinely inspired. (The film is rated R and contains explicit violence and strong language.)

Is Reece legally insane? This is what Fraser has to disprove in order to get his death rap, and Friedkin takes us through all the legal hula-hoops that the defense throws in his way, including the every-which-way arguments of the usual shrinks. The psychiatrists are presented as oily dissemblers--co-conspirators in Reece’s cycle of murder and mayhem. Reece’s multicolored brain scans are exhibited like giant Pop-art posters; his embattled childhood is mined for Freudian ore.

Friedkin loads up both sides of the capital punishment argument. Reece is shown purchasing a gun from his local gun shop; the required waiting period is presented as a joke. His derangement is made to seem both organic (his brain scans are eventually shown to be abnormal) and a result of his upbringing (his father, who died when he was 6, brutalized the family). The film doesn’t get inside Reece’s mind set--which may be impossible anyway--but it doesn’t get inside Fraser’s either. His belated embrace of capital punishment doesn’t sink in because his crises of conscience aren’t dramatized.

“Rampage” has the outsize luridness and almost sadistic tension that one has come to expect from Friedkin. (This is not intended as a recommendation.) But it also has something that most of these stalk-and-kill movies lack: A feeling for the killer’s victims. Friedkin keeps tossing in pastoral flashbacks involving Fraser and his wife (Deborah Van Valkenburgh) and daughter, who died in childhood. Even though these flashbacks are more confusing than revelatory, they’re in the movie to show us how Fraser is sensitized to the agony of a man (Royce Applegate) whose family, except for his youngest son, has been butchered by Reece. There’s a moment when the man’s son is comforted by Fraser’s wife, while the two men are in another room talking over the murder, that is almost unbearably sad. It’s a moment that practically redeems the entire movie. The little boy has his whole life ahead of him and we wonder if the vacancy will ever leave his eyes.

‘Rampage’

Michael Biehn: Anthony Fraser

Alex McArthur: Charles Reece

Nicholas Campbell: Albert Morse

Deborah Van Valkenburgh: Kate Fraser

A Miramax presentation. Director William Friedkin. Producer David Salven. Screenplay by William Friedkin, based on the novel by William P. Wood. Cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman. Editor Jere Huggins. Costumes Barbara Siebert Bolticoff. Music Ennio Morricone. Production design Buddy Cone. Art director Carol Clements. Set decorator Nancy Nye. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (contains explicit violence and strong language.)