Meyers also avoids cutesy attempts to tie the movie into its. The focus is on Dahmer, and the character of Derf nicely avoids becoming a typical passive, observing 'writer' character he's more of a catalyst. But he was certainly starved of the right kind of attention, and this film suggests that his compensation for that had destructive results. Adapted from a graphic novel written by the real-life Derf, the movie doesn't really capitalize on the 'my friend' portion of the story. It’s hard to gauge how much of what goes on here contributed to what later happened, as Dahmer was diagnosed with multiple disorders. Backderf (who, laudably, doesn’t cast himself in a flattering light) has said his story is about how Dahmer was failed by society, pretty confident that the guy was allowed to slip through the cracks via ignorance and negligence. Alex Wolff, as Derf - less a friend than an exploitative cheerleader - is effectively understated, and Anne Heche is entertainingly off-kilter as Dahmer’s unstable mother, Joyce. Ross Lynch is an unnerving Dahmer, sexually frustrated and awkwardly leering, with disconcertingly dead eyes. His home-life doesn’t help: he and his family live in a cabin in the woods, his loveless parents constantly bickering, and he soon begins acting up to get attention, notably faking seizures for laughs. After kicking off with some exposition - within two minutes Dahmer has ogled both a bit of roadkill and a young jogger, and his dad soon tells him he needs to be doing more ‘normal’ things than playing around with dead animals in the shed - it becomes a portrait of a young man fond of animal dismemberment, yes, but also burdened by repressed emotions and barely there social skills. It is resolutely ungrisly - 2002’s so-so Jeremy Renner biopic Dahmer explored all the cruising and killing, and this is a more analytical origin story. Set in smalltown Ohio during the months leading up to Dahmer’s first kill, writer-director Marc Meyers’ adaptation is a quiet study of dysfunction. After hearing of his very public conviction, ex-schoolmate John ‘Derf’ Backderf was suitably shocked, later writing and illustrating a graphic novel about the time they’d spent together in the ’70s: a nuanced portrait of a monster in waiting. “My mind is like a VCR - it pauses and rewinds and it always takes me back to that courtroom.Jeffrey Dahmer drugged, raped and killed 17 men between 19, often indulging in necrophilia and cannibalism along the way. Despite the many years that have passed since her brother’s death, it hasn’t become any easier to cope. That was her baby,” she said at the time. I can only imagine what my mother went through. Janie Hagen, who lost her brother Richard Guerrero to Dahmer, spoke to her local Fox affiliate in 2012 when it was revealed that someone created a Dahmer-inspired walking tour of Milwaukee, retracing the steps where he found and killed his victims. Understandably, introducing the case to a new generation of true crime aficionados has been hard for the people who senselessly lost a loved one all those years ago. 3) as well as the two-part, made-for-TV documentary, Dahmer on Dahmer: A Serial Killer Speaks (which will premiere on Oxygen Nov. Hollywood has taken an interest in Dahmer and his tragic crimes, as his case is the subject of two different films - the upcoming big screen movie My Friend Dahmer (which came to theaters last week, on Nov. Though decades have passed since all of his horrific crimes, for the family of his victims, there are some wounds that time simply won’t heal - especially with all the renewed attention on the case. This month marks 23 years since Jeffrey Dahmer was killed while in prison, where he was serving time for the rape, murder, and dismemberment of 17 young men.
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