Well hello there my spooky friends.. I’ve been away.  I wish I had a really cool reason for my mini hiatus, like if I owed the loan sharks money and they tried to cut off my thumbs, or if I’d been arraigned in open court for masturbating in a cathedral, but, alas..  The sad sad tale is that I slipped on a wet floor at my work and fractured my wrist like a chump.

Below is a dramatic re-enactment:

I tried to find the clip from Futurama of the penguins falling down set to comical sounds, but I couldn’t so that’s what happened.  Anyways this next review has actually been a long time in coming, mostly because I had to stew a little bit on how to properly articulate my sentiments regarding it – which let me assure you, is rare.  Generally I just let my opinions foam over at my mouth like a rabid raccoon, but this movie required special attention.

Submitted for the approval of the Drunk in a Graveyard society, I present to you, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files:

^^ When I first saw this poster on Netflix, I thought this was a documentary about eating disorders or something..  you know like the empty fridge.. and I guess when you think about it, Jeffrey Dahmer did have something of an eating disorder.  Ahahahaha..  see what I did there.

Okay so real talk – I hate True Crime. The genre, I mean, at least as it pertains to film and other media. Despite my misspent youth growing up wearing all black and being uber spooky, I never got that weird fascination with serial killers and mass murderers that other creepy girls often ended up with. Sure I’ve read a few True Crime books and seen some flicks but it’s not something I ever actively sought out or had much of a vested interest in. My further hatred of True Crime was transmogrified during my tenure of working at a bookstore – the people who came in looking for True Crime books were easily divided into one of two categories – the first being people who want to understand crime either because they “need” to know and are driven fruitlessly to seek knowledge and understanding of what makes a lunatic think or they have some strange obscure interest in crime as social commentary and are generally over the age of 45.

The second category is slightly more disturbing and involves people who either commit crime, would like to commit crime or deeply admire the people who commit crimes – you know those women on the front pages of super market tabloids who write to serial killers in prison and end up marrying them? Yeah. These bitches. I once got cornered in my bookstore by a woman who was telling me all about how she thought Scott Peterson (who murdered his wide Laci and unborn son on Christmas) was just the greatest person and let me tell you I wasn’t so sure that woman wasn’t going to kill and eat me. Allow me to also make it clear that it’s not always women who make up the second category of True Crime fanatics – semi conscious skin heads mumbling incoherent rhetoric about Aryan pride, skinny dudes with cheaply dyed black hair with a black trench coat and eyebrow ring buying books on school shootings, overweight goth girls busting out of their Halloween costume corsets gripping copies of Say You Love Satan, weird potential date rapists buying books on Paul Bernardo..

I’ve actually never seen just a regular non sketchy person buying books about True Crime and really as soon as some boring goth girl starts beaking off to me about Jack the Ripper and that movie From Hell my brain just retreats in horror and I go onto autopilot. I don’t actually have any issue with True Crime, I get why people get obsessed with it, we’re curious. We were made to be and evolved to be curious – as a species we always want to know why – that’s the big one, why are we here, why did he do that, why is my butt infected we all want to know why. Why me, why now. Yeah yeah yeah. FINE. Fact is that most people who commit intensely violent crimes or become serial killers are either having a psychotic episode or are sociopaths and unless you’ve either had a psychotic episode or are a sociopath you won’t ever understand why. Period. There is no understanding. You can’t understand a reality that isn’t your own. You might be aware of the reality but you won’t ever really understand what’s going on in there, you can theorize but really you’re in the dark and always will be, so please fuck off and stop bothering the rest of us with your incoherent ranting about crap you know absolutely fuck all about.

On the subject of creepy goth girls – does anyone else aside from me remember when livejournal was a thing?? Okay so back in the day I had a livejournal and I stumbled upon this creepy goth girls journal one day and she believed that Jeffrey Dahmer was her like soul mate somehow (even though he was gay and enjoyed sodomizing little boys, but hey..  she could CHANGE HIM), and that he was waiting for her on the other side. She would constantly post poems and bad hand drawn facsimiles of his face and would hold seances to try to contact him and I became intensely fascinated by this journal because I wasn’t and still am not sure if she was full of shit or actually believed what she was saying or what. Apparently she had a baby and went on to name it Jeffrey Dahmer and that’s pretty fucked up. Could you imagine being the nurse in the maternity wing filling out the birth certificate?  Man that poor nurse would have had to go home and drink a couple bottles of wine to wash away that little bundle of entropy.

I guess I can’t really say too much because recently I had a cake made for my friend that said “HAIL SATAN” in icing, but really though, I think that’s different..  it’s not like I went to the bakery and asked for a cake with a picture of Albert Fish on it.  Satan is a fictional character..  it’s like getting Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny on a cake..  Satan is just more awesome.

Anyways the point I’m trying to make with all this ranting is that I just don’t like true crime.  Never have.  Never will.  There’s something about having to testify at the trial of the man who murdered your best friend that really puts it all into perspective, but hey..  what do I know.  I normally wouldn’t have chosen this movie to watch, but like I mentioned above I thought it was about eating disorders, and then when I realized what it was I was like hey why not…  I’m already here.  The movie starts up and gets pretty artsy right from the get go, long shots of goldfish and weird colors and this strange hipstery bleep bloop music that was my first cue that something was all fiddle faddle..  I recall wondering if the whole thing had been scored by Beirut or like MGMT or something.  Seriously though the music sounded like tinker toys and people bashing around jack in the boxes and dropping wrenches on the ground.  Shit that would really go over at Coachella, you know what I mean.

 

When they get to the first shot of Jeffrey Dahmer, he looks like a manager from Urban Outfitters, I swear to god, and I almost lost my goddamn mind. I couldn’t even handle it.  My suspicions about the hipster music were confirmed and The Jeffrey Dahmer Files is actually a series of dramatic reenactments interspersed with interviews and I’m pretty sure they bought some hipster a fixed gear bike and a few cases of PBR and got him to play Jeffrey Dahmer.

Okay.  Okay.  You guys, I’m seriously.  I can’t even stand hipsters..  like can’t even. Next to hippies and feminists, hipsters are my force quit.  Someone with a scrunchy and stirrup leggings drinking PBR talking about art films is enough to make me have a panic attack.  I got lost in an American Apparel once and thought that I’d end up like one of those bodies from the Victorian era where they buried people alive and only found out afterwards when they found the claw marks inside the coffin lid..  That would be me..  dead in a pile of overpriced letterman jackets and keds.

Now the Jeffrey Dahmer Files seeks to kind of shed a little bit of light more so on the people who lived in the apartment building that Jeffrey called home.  As I mentioned before, there are dramatic reenactments of his actions set against a very odd and colorful background of interviews with those who lived around him, and those who worked on the case..  including this dickweed, Pat Kennedy, the lead detective on the Dahmer case who got the confession out of Dahmer slash began the weirdest fucking bromance ever.

Okay so..  fuck this Pat Kennedy guy..  every time he is on screen I wanted to kill myself..  he basically has one claim to any kind of fame and its getting Jeffrey Dahmer to squeal and really..  when the cops raid your house and arrest you and you’ve been using human skulls for potato chip bowls..  what the fuck else are you gonna do?  Let’s be serious now.  Jeffrey Dahmer clearly had daddy issues and this Pat Kennedy dude was all too eager to be this dude’s Daddy.  The interviews with him actually make me sick to my stomach..  he presents the Dahmer case with this weird kind of admiration in his voice, and he keeps underscoring the point that he doesn’t “judge” people and thats why he and “Jeff” (he actually calls him Jeff..  like they’re going steady) were able to talk for so long.  Yeah um, sorrynotsorry, but I would definitely be judging the dude with a human head in his fridge and if you say otherwise you’re a goddamned liar, so go fuck yourself.  This dude waxes idiotic about how his son lent Dahmer a shirt to wear to his arraignment and it ended up being the cover of People magazine and it’s just so sad and desperate and puke inducing, ugh I can’t even.  So you’ve got this asshole going on and on about “Cracking the case” like he’s a goddamn scientist..  like really dude, did you crack a case?  You rolled into the dude’s house and found a human head in the fridge..  is that really cracking a case, adding up all the clues?  You didn’t cure cancer or write a thesis, you went, “hey dudebro, there’s like the head of another dudebro in your fridge” and Dahmer was all, “yeah..  ya got me”…  THATS NOT POLICE WORK.  Like seriously, the parade of verbal diarrhea that flows from this fuckface’s mouth is over set with the hipster bleep bloop music and I almost lost my fucking mind.

The dramatic reenactments are actually too much..  the dude playing Dahmer is barely acting and there’s a lot of artsy shots of him sipping beers that try to masquerade as anything with content.

It looks like a goddamn Mumford and Sons music video.  I actually can’t stand media like this..  I just can’t.  I would actually rather have several complicated dental procedures than ever have to watch this fucking piece of shit again, and I watched it twice because part way through the first time my brain actually started blocking it out..  right about the time that they interview Jeffrey Dahmer’s neighbor who tearfully tells the camera that she and most everyone else in the apartment building where Dahmer lived were crack cocaine users and at the time of the murders she was using a lot of crack cocaine.

She then goes into pretty great detail telling the viewer about how she helped Dahmer move a huge trunk that was very heavy and suspiciously body sized and didn’t think twice about it, because she was using crack cocaine.  She also didn’t think anything of the horrible fetid scent of rotting flesh that emanated from the whole apartment building and seemed to be coming from Dahmer’s apartment.

…

…….

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THIS WOMAN THOUGHT NOTHING OF BODY SIZED BOXES AND THE SCENT OF ROTTING MEAT.

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This woman is like a less funny Tyrone Biggums…  Even if that was the case and you were so blotto during some very horrific murders, why would you ever go on national television and state that..  fuck that’s crazy embarassing.  “Oh what was that screaming and chainsaw noise I heard earlier..  oh must be the wind..  pass the crack please..”

There’s a few other interviews, but none are as striking as the two weird folks I mentioned above..  really though that Pat Kennedy guy sums up his time on screen by saying that his obsession with Jeffrey Dahmer caused the dissolution of his marriage..  man how awkward was that..  “REASON FOR DIVORCE:  MY HUSBAND CALLED ME BY A SERIAL KILLERS NAME DURING SEX”..  Yeah no wonder your wife told you to take a fucking hike, probably because you couldn’t stop jerking off to crime scene photos and witness testimony..  Ugh.  This dude then goes on to say that when the whole thing was all said and done and he was living in a motel, obviously because his wife kicked him out, he sat down and cried..  Nevermind the woman who ignored murders going on next door because she was taking apart the radio for the fifth time, this dude actually cried like a jilted girlfriend when he couldn’t talk to Dahmer anymore.  THAT IS FUCKED.  There is a point in life where you think you can’t be surprised anymore.  Roughly the time I saw a dude in a chicken costume covered in puke dancing and singing “Oh Baybay I like it raw” in a full baritone at 4am, is about the time I thought I’d seen it all..  yeah no..  these interviews made me feel things..  and those things made me want to pray or perform an exorcism or burn my house down and hit the road, because there really was nothing left in this sick and depraved fucking world.

In short, this movie was awful, these people were fucked and as the credits rolled I saw that the film was scored by Fever Ray, which for those not cool enough to know is a very very hipstery band..  I actually really like Fever Ray, but that doesn’t save them from being very very hipster.  They perform in gorilla suits and make really freaky videos that try to be very artsy but were likely achieved by handing a badly dressed employee of Urban Outfitters a few tabs of LSD and putting them on a diving board and filming the results.

Anyways, this movie was utter trash and I highly recommend avoiding it..  Some suggested alternatives would be getting really fucking baked and watching Barney, or you know..  watching really anything else.  You could watch old episodes of Hard Copy and it would probably be more spiritually fufilling and even though there was a lot of fake fern action in Hard Copy, you could at least leave that viewing experience without absolutely hating humanity.

So on that note, don’t smoke crack and move suspicious boxes and when your serial killer man crush doesn’t work out, remember to drink PBR, listen only to bands that no one else has heard of and always always ALWAYS stay spooky..  Like us here at Drunk in a Graveyard..  we were spooky, before it was cool.  Until next time, fuckrags.