When Ted Bundy died in the electric chair 30 years ago in Florida, a witness to the execution – a prosecutor in the case of a 12-year-old girl Bundy murdered – told the New York Times: “He probably could have done anything he set his mind to do, but something happened to him and we still don’t know what it was.”
Three decades later, we still don’t, and the aptly named “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile” doesn’t provide any new answers.
Instead, Joe Berlinger’s film, starring an impressively scary Zac Efron, tries with mixed success to address a different issue, namely how Bundy not only used his good looks and boyish demeanor to fool those closest to him, especially his longtime girlfriend, but how he managed to seduce some in the media and public – to the point where, revoltingly, he had actual groupies at his murder trial.
Berlinger’s film, based on Liz Kloepfer’s memoir “The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy,” happens to have coincided this year with his own docuseries on Bundy, also on Netflix. It’s clear that the feature film benefits from a documentarian’s eye; in fact it’s the frequent snippets of real-life footage that give the movie some of its most interesting moments, and make for a chilling credits sequence in which we see Bundy in real-life scenes that we’ve just watched Efron perform.
By telling the story from the perspective of Kloepfer, who for years refused to believe that her handsome, law-student boyfriend could be a savage killer, Berlinger necessarily has to refrain from depicting Bundy’s crimes, so that perhaps we can fall under the same spell she does. We don’t witness his sickening violence until the film is nearly over.