Interview With A Serial Killer (White Angel) -- 1993 -- NR

I ended up with this one because while I was perusing the titles on Netflix, the synopsis listed there sounded interesting to me. Like so many titles I watch, that's all the info I had to go on. What I got was a film with some very interesting points to it, along with some really weird stuff to make it work.

Basically, we have a woman who is a writer who kills her husband one dark and stormy night, and ever since she has been unable to turn out another novel. Meanwhile, London is besieged with a serial killer the papers are calling the White Angel, due to his/her Modus Operandi of killing only blonde women dressed in white. It turns out that this writer had killed her husband and bricked him up in the wall of her house and this fact is discovered by the White Angel killer, who threatens to turn the writer in for murder unless she writes a book about the White Angel's life. It was a very nice spin for twenty minutes.

A fair job is done from there to keep the plot going, but it can hardly be said to be running at full tilt. In fact, several very strange things happen in the course of the plot that make you question its validity. The weirdest of them all is the computer that matches fingerprints. They find fingerprints of the White Angel on a weapon used in one of its murders, and this is what prompts the Angel to ask our writer girl to write the biography. This is placed into a database that checked about a print per second in a database of 100,000. So they have this computer working day and night for a month to match this print. Seriously? So no other cases come up that would require the use of this computer. Very weird.

In addition, either this killer is really dumb (which most serial killers aren't) or just blind as the writer got away with a whole lot of stuff that I doubt anyone would get away with in the presence of any other human being, especially one whose moves are being watched. A particular oddity was this safety deposit box key. It looks like the writer made an impression of this key early on, but she seemed to have to do the same thing later as well. She acquired the second impression in a really weird way and had to return it to its place is a highly unlikely fashion as well, It didn't make a lot of sense that she'd even remotely get away with that.

Anyway, our leads were fine character-wise as the writer and the killer engaged in diatribes related to their individual issues of knocking people off. It served to get insight into who they were, and the interview setting of several of these scenes served to make what would normally be blatant exposition fit into the fabric of the storyline.

In the end, it wasn't a bad film at all. It had some fairly tense moments, but these were balanced by the occasional bit of weirdness of plot or action that continued to knock the film down from good to just ok.