October True Crime: Judgment Day: The John List Story (dir by Bobby Roth)

Posted on October 26, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1971, a 46 year-old account named John List committed a shocking crime.

To the outside world, John List was a normal suburbanite. He was perhaps a little bit strict but then again, it was 1971 and all of the traditional morals that John List had grown up with were being challenged in the streets and in the movies. Neither he nor his family were particularly sociable but again, it was assumed that they just liked the privacy that was afford to them by the mansion in which they lived. List was married to Helen. They lived with their three teenage children and List’s 84 year-old mother. John List was a hard worker, he taught Sunday School, and, again, he was seen as being perfectly normal.

On November 9th, 1971, John List methodically murdered his wife, his children, and his mother. He left his mother in her upstairs apartment while the rest of his family was laid out, in sleeping bags, in the ballroom. (Detectives later surmised that List stopped in the middle of his murder spree to have lunch and then attended his son’s soccer game before taking him home and killing him.) List left behind several notes, explaining that he was in a bad financial situation and that he feared that his family was heading down an immoral path that would have condemned their souls to Hell if he hadn’t killed them first. And then, John List vanished.

For the rest of the 70s and the 80s, John List was phantom. Some speculated that he had committed suicide while others thought that he had changed his identity and had probably remarried. In 1987, the classic thriller The Stepfather was released in theaters. Inspired by List’s crimes, The Stepfather starred Terry O’Quinn as Jerry Blake, a real estate agent who was obsessed with creating the perfect family. The Stepfather imagined its killer as a friendly but rigid man who snapped whenever his illusion of perfection was threatened. It also imagine him as someone who moved from town to town, searching for a new family that wouldn’t let him down.

As for the real John List, it turned out that those who suspected him of having changed his identity were correct. And, just as The Stepfather suggested, he had remarried and was actually now a real stepfather. List remained free until his story was included in a 1989 episode of America’s Most Wanted. A forensic scientist included a bust of what John List might have looked like in 1989 and a viewer realized that the bust looked a lot like an accountant named Bob Clark. “Bob Clark” was arrested and eventually, he confessed that he was actually John List. Despite his attorney’s attempt to argue that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, John List was eventually convicted of five counts of murder. He spent the rest of this life in prison, dying of natural causes in 2008.

The 1993 film Judgement Day: The Story of John List tells the story of List’s crimes and his subsequent attempt to build a new life for himself. John List is played by Robert Blake, which turns out to be a bit of a problem as Blake gives such a twitchy and obviously unstable performance that it’s hard to believe that he could have successfully gone into hiding for 18 years. Carroll Baker and Beverly D’Angelo are not given much to do as, respectively, List’s mother and List’s first wife while David Caruso appears as the detective who is determined to catch List. Though this film was made long before CSI: Miami, I still found myself expecting Caruso to say something quippy and put on his sunglasses.

Judgment Day doesn’t add much to the story of John List. It certainly doesn’t offer up any new insight into what led to List becoming a murderer, beyond the fact that List himself was just kind of a jerk. It’s pretty much a by-the-numbers production that’s only interesting today because of Blake’s subsequent legal problems. (For the record, I’ve always felt Robert Blake was innocent.) When it comes to John List films, stick with The Stepfather.

Horror Film Review: Empire of the Ants (dir by Bert I. Gordon)

Posted on October 26, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Ants are interesting creatures. On the one hand, they work hard and they can design and build a complex home in just a matter of hours. They’re loyal to the other members of their tribe and they all happily do whatever needs to be done to keep their community healthy and moving forward. They’re family-orientated. They take care of their children. They eat earth worms. They fight other ants. They can carry several pounds over their own weight. They like to move in a single-file line. These are all things that people, in general, admire. If you had to hire someone to do some yardwork, you would want someone who had the attitude of an ant.

At the same time, ants also have no respect for privacy, they tend to get everywhere, and they bite you and leave behind those ugly red marks that take forever to go away and that can itch like heck. I was once outside barefoot, helping someone wash his car, when I suddenly felt a really intense pain in my foot. I looked down and saw that I had stepped straight into an ant hill. It was not only an ant hill but it was a FIRE ANT HILL! I grabbed a hose and I washed all of the ants off my foot but it was still one of the most painful experiences of my life. Ants are hard-working and industrious but they’re also kind of mean and they really don’t like humans. (Maybe they would like us more if people stopped kicking ant hills and using magnifying glasses to set them on fire.) Ants will break into your house and then bite you when you tell them to go away. My point is that you might like ants but ants do not like you and you better remember that!

The 1977 film, Empire of the Ants, is all about humanity’s mixed feelings towards ants. Joan Collins plays a shady real estate agent who leads a group of potential home buyers into the bayou because she wants to trick them into buying some worthless property on a nearby island. What Collins and her clients don’t know is that a barrel of radioactive waste was recently dumped off of a nearby boat and when the waste washed on shore, a bunch of ants got into it and it caused them to become giant ants! The giant ants are industriously creating their own sugar-based society but they’re also attacking and brainwashing humans!

Needless to say, this is a Bert I. Gordon film. Gordon took his “Mr. Big” nickname quite literally and, as a result, he spent almost his entire career making movies about animals and occasionally humans who were turned into giants by radiation. Apparently, radiation can do anything! Empire of the Ants is a typical Gordon film, in that the special effects are just bad enough to be kind of charming. The ants are either awkwardly super-imposed into the scene or they are clearly made out of plastic. There’s a scene where an ant grabs a man by his neck and it would be really terrifying if not for the fact that the ant’s head appears to have been made from Styrofoam. Unfortunately, even though the special effects are bad in an amusing way, Empire of the Ants is still a pretty boring film. Gordon devotes way too much time to the people heading out to look at Joan Collins’s beachfront property. No one is watching a film like this for human drama.

This movie is based on a short story by H.G. Wells. Wells, reportedly, considered it to be the worst thing he had ever written.

Horror Film Review: Beginning of the End (dir by Bert I. Gordon)

Posted on October 26, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1957 film, Beginning of the End, is perhaps the ultimate horror film for people who dislike Illinois.

Because it’s a Bert I. Gordon film and Gordon took his “Mr. Big” nickname seriously, it deals with giant monsters. In this case, the monsters are a bunch of locust who ate all of this radioactive grain that was being stored in a silo. The locusts grew to giant size and then they went on a rampage.

Fortunately, the rampage appears to be localized to Illinois. Apparently, the locusts have enough respect for state boundaries that they know better than to hop into Indiana, Missouri, or Wisconsin. Instead, the locusts take out the farming community of Ludlow and then start making their way to Chicago, perhaps hoping to battle the Chicago Outfit for control of the city’s politics. Do they seriously think Mayor Daley is just going to sit back while a bunch of locusts overrun his city?

The government wants to cover up the locust rampage because they don’t want to risk a mass panic in the 47 states that they actually care about. (This film came out before Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union.) However, when enterprising reporter Audrey Aimes (Peggie Castle) comes across the remains of Ludlow and discovers that the U.S. military has taken over the area, she is determined to discover what happened. She hooks up with Dr. Ed Wainwright (Peter Graves), whose work in making food bigger led to the giant locust attacks in the first place. In most movies, Ed would shoulder most of the blame for the locust attack but Beginning of the End seems to understand that these things happen when you’re dousing food with radiation and then keeping the food in a poorly secured silo.

Of course, the main reason why it’s not Ed’s fault is that Ed is played by Peter Graves and seriously, who could blame anything on Peter Graves? Graves was one of those actors who could deliver even the silliest of dialogue with a straight face and he certainly gets to do that in Beginning of the End. He seems to be taking the situation seriously, even if no one else is.

One reason why it is a little bit difficult to take the situation seriously is because it’s about giant locusts. Now, make no mistake about it. I’m enough a country girl that I know how destructive locusts can be. The problem is that locusts may be destructive but they don’t look all that menacing. Even giant locusts just look like really ugly grasshoppers. This film uses a lot of rear projection and still photography to create the idea of giant locusts crawling over buildings and threatening the soldiers who have been sent to fight them. As is so often the case with Bert I. Gordon’s film, there’s a definite charm to the cheap special effects. But still, locusts are locusts.

Chicago haters will love the scene where General Hanson (Morris Ankrum) announces that the locusts have only left him with one option, the drop an atomic bomb and wipe the city off the face of the Earth. Fortunately, Ed is there to suggest another solution. Good old Peter Graves. I don’t know what we would have done without him.

As a final note, I’ll just mention that the poster for this film is actually more exciting than the film itself:

Horror on the Lens: Baffled! (dir by Philip Leacock)

Posted on October 26, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Leonard Nimoy is a race car driver who can see into the future and who uses his powers to solve crimes!

Seriously, if that’s not enough to get you to watch the 1973 made-for-TV movie Baffled!, then I don’t know what is. In the film, Nimoy takes a break from racing so that he and a parapsychologist (played by Susan Hampshire) can solve the mystery of the visions that Nimoy is having of a woman in a mansion. This movie was meant to serve as a pilot and I guess if the series had been picked up, Nimoy would have had weekly visions. Of course, the movie didn’t lead to a series but Baffled! is still fun in a 70s television sort of way. Thanks to use of what I like to call “slow mo of doom,” a few of Nimoy’s visions are creepy and the whole thing ends with the promise of future adventures that were sadly never to be.

Enjoy Baffled! Can you solve the mystery before Leonard?

October Positivity: Image of the Beast (dir by Donald W. Thompson)

Posted on October 25, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1981’s Image of the Beast picks up from where A Distant Thunder ended.

The world is in economic and political chaos, largely as a result of millions of people vanishing a few years before. (The government says the people were abducted by UFOs but everyone left behind knows it was actually the rapture.) Brother Christopher and the United Nations are controlling the world. Order is kept by UNITE. Those who fail to get the Mark on either their palm or their forehead are not allowed to buy food or get healthcare. In fact, Brother Christopher has declared that the mark is no longer optional and anyone who refuses to get it will be executed.

A Distant Thunder ended with Patty Myers (Patty Dunning) facing the guillotine and that’s where Image of the Beast picks up. She is given one final chance to voluntarily take the mark before being put under the blade but, in obvious fear and shock, Patty says nothing. Two UNITE soldiers tie her the ground, with her neck directly under the guillotine’s blade.

Finally, Patty yells, “I want the mark!”

However, at the same time that Patty makes the declaration, an earthquake hits and the skies turn black. The cowardly soldiers run off, leaving Patty under the blade. Realizing that she is witnessing the breaking of one of the apocalyptic seals, Patty attempts to free herself from her bounds. Unfortunately, she moves around so much that the loosened blade comes crashing down and she promptly loses her head.

So much for Patty!

The action then shifts to a new character, a Christian rebel named David Michaels (William Wellman, Jr., who also played a different role in every single Billy Jack movie). David, who has disguised himself as a member of UNITE, is looking for Leslie (Wenda Shereos), another Christian who escaped from execution during the earthquake. David doesn’t find her but he does stumble upon Kathy (Susan Plumb), Kathy’s son (Ben Sampson), and the Rev. Matthew Turner (Russell S. Doughten, JR., who not only produced the Thief In The Night films but who also directed films like Nite Song). Rev. Turner lives in a farmhouse and looks a lot like Santa Claus. He has a helpful graph on his wall that can be used to understand just how far along the world is into the apocalypse.

As Rev. Turner explains it, computers are the new “golden calf.” Why, people believe that computer can do anything better than humans! They’re letting computer run their lives and Brother Christopher is using that to his advantage! (Keep in mind, this film was made in 1981 so the computer that he’s talking about are those big, boxy computers that took hours to do the simplest tasks.) Fortunately, David used to be a computer technician and he thinks that he’s come up with a way to 1) create a counterfeit mark and 2) corrupt Brother Christopher’s precious computer system!

(Calculators, interestingly enough, are referred to as being hand computers. If nothing else, this film proves that paranoia about technology is hardly a new phenomena.)

Much like the previous films in the series, there’s a lot of scenes of the heroes trying to sneak around Des Moines without blowing their cover and revealing themselves to be believers. And like A Distant Thunder, there’s a lot of talk about events that are happening that we never actually see. This one of those films that deals with its low budget by having all of the big events happen off-screen. The characters in this film spend a lot of time listening to breathless news reports on the radio and on television. And while that can feel a bit anti-climatic, it’s also strangely effective in its way. It captures the feeling of finding yourself in a situation where you’re never quite sure if you’re hearing the truth and it also captures the feeling of helplessness that comes from knowing that there are huge things happening that you can’t control. While the film is a bit too talky for its own good, director Donald W. Thompson does a good job of creating an atmosphere of sustained paranoia. Every time that David and Kathy walk around Des Moines, you’re expecting someone to grab them. The fact that Des Moines, itself, is hardly a shadowy metropolis adds to paranoia. “If this could happen in Iowa,” the film seems to be saying, “it could happen anywhere.”

Image of the Beast was a success on the church circuit and it was followed by one final Thief in the Night film, which I will discuss tomorrow.

October Hacks: Valentine (dir by Jamie Blanks)

Posted on October 25, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

A holiday slasher, 2001’s Valentine tells the story of five girls and the nosebleed-prone incel who has never forgiven them for not dancing with him in high school….

Well, no, actually, it’s a bit more serious than that. In high school, dorky Jeremy Melton asked four popular girls to dance with him at the Valentine’s Day dance. Shelley, Lilly, and Paige rejected him and were rather rude about it. Kate was polite and promised that maybe she would dance with him later. Only Dorothy agreed to dance with him but when Dorothy and Jeremy were subsequently discovered making out underneath the bleachers, Dorothy falsely claimed that Jeremy forced himself on her. School jock Joe beat up Jeremy and humiliated him in front of the entire school. Jeremy ended up in a reform school and was eventually sent to a mental institution.

Years later, everyone has grown up. Shelley (Katherine Heigl) is a medical student. Lily (Jessica Caufiel) is dating an artist named Max (Johnny Whitworth) and having to deal with Max’s angry ex, Ruthie (Heddy Burress). Dorothy (Jessica Capshaw) is insecure and dating the caddish Campbell (Daniel Cosgrove). Paige (Denise Richards) is still living her life as if she’s everyone’s favorite mean girl. And Kate (Marley Shelton) is in an on-and-off again relationship with Adam (David Boreanaz), a recovering alcoholic and writer. No one is really sure what has happened to Jeremy but when someone starts picking off the members of their group and they start to get morbid Valentines in the mail, everyone starts to wonder if maybe Jeremy has returned.

Of course, this group isn’t going to let the fact that a murderer is stalking them keep them from throwing a big Valentine’s party as Dorothy’s house. These are extremely stupid people, as you may have guessed. It’s a bit of an awkward party, largely because everyone is having relationship issues and Ruthie Walker shows up and yells at everyone. Things get even more awkward when the a killer wearing a cupid’s mask shows up and starts killing everyone at the party.

I always remember Valentine as being a really big deal when it was first released but, when I was doing a little research for this review, I discovered that Valentine was actually considered to be a flop at the box office. Maybe I just got in into my head that it was some sort of huge success because Valentine was one of those films that used to show up on Showtime constantly. I think I’ve seen the film’s ending over a hundred times, just while waiting for the next movie to start.

As far as slasher films go, it’s adequate without being particularly memorable. The killer is creepy but the victims are all so shallow that it’s difficult to have much sympathy for them. Probably the most interesting thing about this film is that all of the supporting characters are so strange and perverse that it almost feels as if they’ve wondered over from an old giallo film. This the type of film where everyone’s either an ex-addict or a notorious con artist or an underwear thief. Undoubtedly, the best supporting character is Ruthie Walker, if just because she’s the only character in the film who is willing to call out everyone on their shallowness. Unfortunately, Ruthie doesn’t come to a good end but she does get the best death scene in the film and, when it comes to something like Valentine, that has to be considered a triumph.

Anyway, Valentine ends with the set up for a sequel but it never happened. Valentine’s Day remains an awesome holiday! Don’t let any killer cupids ruin it for you.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Blood Sucking Freaks (dir by Joel M. Reed)

Posted on October 25, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Well, with a title like Blood Sucking Freaks, it has to be good!

Right?

First released in 1976, Blood Sucking Freaks is one of those not particularly good films that every horror fan has to sit through at least once. Historically, it’s important as an example of a film that generated a thoroughly unnecessary moral panic, largely amongst people who had never actually seen the stupid thing. It tells the story of Master Sardu (Seamus O’Brien), who runs a Grand Guignol-style theater in SoHo. Wealthy New Yorkers flock to the theater on a nightly basis, to watch as Sardu and his dwarf assistant, Ralphus (Luis de Jesus), torture women on stage. The crowd thinks that it’s all fake but what they don’t know is that Sardu and Ralphus are abducting real women and forced them to live in a cage underneath the theater, where they are occasionally brought out to be abused by high-paying patrons. All of the torture and death that takes place on stage is real.

Most members of the audience enjoy the show and consider Sardu to be a master of transgressive art. However, critic Creasy Silo (Alan Dellay) doesn’t think much of Sardu or his show and he writes a review in which he refers to whole thing as being pretentious. Sardu apparently considers “pretentious” to be the worst insult that can be uttered against his production of pain and murder so he orders his followers to abduct Silo. Held prisoner in the theater, Silo is told the truth about the show and then brainwashed to become a part of the show himself.

Meanwhile, Sardu’s followers have also kidnapped a ballerina named Natasha (Viju Krem). Sardu feels that, if Natasha can be brainwashed to perform in the show, it’ll lead to greater things. The show might move to Broadway and then someone might make a movie about Master Sardu! Natasha’s lunkhead boyfriend, Tom (Niles McMaster), is not happy about Natasha being kidnapped. He teams up with a sleazy cop (Dan Fauci) and they head down to the theater.

Much as with Snuff, Blood-Sucking Freaks generated a lot of controversy when it was first released, with some speculating that the murders in Blood-Sucking Freaks may have actually been real murders. It was originally released in grindhouse theaters with an R-rating. That R-rating might take some people by surprise when you consider how graphic the film supposedly was but it must be understood that the R-rating was self-imposed. The filmmakers refused to submit the film to the MPAA and just rated it themselves. When Troma acquired the film and submitted an edited version of the film to the MPAA, the organization refused to even watch the film. That’s how controversial Blood-Sucking Freaks is! The MPAA won’t even watch it long enough to tell other not to!

Also, much like Snuff, Blood-Sucking Freaks is actually a pretty boring movie. Blood-Sucking Friends does deserve some credit for satirizing the pretentions of the underground arts scene but, for the most part, it’s a slow-moving and terribly acted film and the gore, while plentiful, is not particularly convincing. Seamus O’Brien, who was murdered in an unrelated incident shortly after the film’s release, gives an absolutely lousy performance as Sardu. Controversy aside, it’s a dumb movie and the only thing that really redeems it is that it knows it’s a dumb movie and doesn’t pretend otherwise.

The main lesson of Blood-Sucking Freaks is that it’s the type of movie that probably would have vanished into obscurity if not for the controversy that it has generated over the years. Outrage sells.

A Horror Blast From The Past: The Wave (dir by Alexander Grasshoff)

Posted on October 25, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First broadcast in 1981, The Wave stars Bruce Davison as Ben Ross, a high school social studies teacher who conducts a social experiment.

Frustrated by the fact that he can’t answer his students questions of how the German people could have allowed the Holocaust to occur, Ben decides to teach his students a lesson. He starts by introducing a bunch of seemingly arbitrary rules to his classroom, concerning the proper way for students to sit at their desks and to address the teacher. Ben is somewhat surprised to see how quickly his students adapt to the new rules, even taking pleasure in showing how quickly and efficiently they can follow orders. The next day, Ben tells his students that they are now members of The Wave, a national youth organization with membership cards and a secret salute.

And that is when all Hell breaks loose. Ben only meant to show his students what it’s like to be a member of a mass movement but the students take The Wave far more seriously than Ben was expecting. Soon, other students are joining The Wave. When the popular football players announce that they are a part of The Wave, others are quick to flock to the organization. The formerly likable David turns into a fanatic about bringing people into the organization. Robert, a formerly unpopular student, revels in his new job of reporting anyone who deviates from the rules of The Wave. When a student reporter writes an article that is critical of the organization, she and the school paper are targeted. Has Ben’s social experiment spiraled out of control?

42 years after it was originally produced, The Wave remains a powerful and sobering look at how people can be manipulated into doing things as a mob that they would never do as an individual. If anything, the film feels more relevant today than it probably did in 1981. The character of Robert, in particular, is a familiar one. He’s someone with no self-esteem who latches onto a movement and finds his identity by taking down others and accusing them of failing to follow the rules. One can find people like Robert all over social media, searching through old posts for any example of wrongthink that they can broadcast all through their social world. It’s tempting to smirk at how quickly the members of The Wave sacrificed their freedom and their ability to think for themselves but it’s no different from what we see happening in the real world every day. (Indeed, if the film had been made just two or three years ago, The Wave would probably be the people policing whether or not the rest of us were observing quarantine and wearing our facemasks correctly.) People like to feel that they belong to something, even if that means sacrificing their humanity in the process.

Featuring a good performance from Bruce Davison as the well-meaning teacher who is both fascinated and terrified by the experiment that he’s set in motion, The Wave can be viewed below:

Bunni (2013, directed by Daniel Benedict)

Posted on October 25, 2023 by Jedadiah Leland

On Halloween night, two couples leave a Halloween party and, while walking down the street, discover a deserted building. One of them recognizes the building as being a former sex shop and he insists that he and his friends break in. Unfortunately, for them, the sex shop is not actually deserted. Bunni (Cat Geary), a woman who was raped 18 years previously and got a gruesome revenge on her attacker, is also in the building and she’s looking for more victims.

Bunni is full of gore, much of it shown in closeup. Things that other films would cut away from, Bunni zooms in on. If you want to see a man get his dick chopped off and then have the severed member stuffed down his throat in close-up, this is your movie. If you want to see guts literally pour out of a body, this is your movie. If the main reason you’re watching this movie is for the gore and the sense of transgression, more power to you. You will like this film. But me, I would have traded the gore for a compelling plot or at least one interesting character or maybe just one scene that, visually, reached above the level of a youtube video. Some people will find what they’re looking for with this movie. I did not.

October True Crime: The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story (dir by Roger Young)

Posted on October 25, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In December of 2002, most likely on Christmas Eve, Laci Peterson was murdered in Modesto, California. At the time, she was eight months pregnant and, by all account, looking forward to the birth of her first child, Connor. Suspicion immediately fell on her husband Scott Peterson, who seemed reluctant to contact police when Laci first disappeared and who was later revealed to be cheating on his wife, both before and after his disappearance. Though Scott and Laci’s friends and family may have thought of Scott Peterson as being the perfect husband, the truth was far different.

After the bodies of both Laci and unborn Connor were discovered, Scott was arrested and charged with murder. Scott insisted that his wife had been kidnapped and murdered by a gang of meth-dealing Satanists. The jury disagreed and Scott was found guilty. Originally sentenced to death, Scott is now serving a life sentence.

The disappearance and subsequent murder of Laci Peterson was national news and Scott Peterson, with his cold demeanor and his history of infidelity, was a perfect villain. (The case would serve as one of the inspiration for the novel and film, Gone Girl.) Today, unfortunately, the case has received renewed attention due to a docuseries called The Murder of Laci Peterson. Though the documentary may have Laci’s name in the title, she’s treated largely as an afterthought. Instead, the documentary focuses on making excuses for all of Scott’s incriminating behavior and, in the final episode, it goes as far as to include cheesy reenactments of Satanists stalking the streets of Modesto. This heavy-handed work of propaganda, which was produced by a friend of Scott Peterson’s family, can be found on Hulu and is regularly re-aired on stations like A&E. Whenever it airs, one can be sure that the dumbest people on twitter will start tweeting stuff like, “I lowkey think Scott Peterson might be innocent!” The documentary ends with Scott’s creepy sister-in-law delivering an unconvincing monologue about how she often goes to the beach where Laci was found and thinks about her and Connor. It’s one of the few times that anyone in the documentary mentions anything about Laci.

The 2004 made-for-TV movie, The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story, also keeps Laci off-screen but it still feels like a more honest look at the Peterson case than the documentary. Because the movie was put into production before Scott’s trial had actually begun, the film does maintain a sense of ambiguity as to whether or not Scott is actually guilty but, unlike the docuseries, it also doesn’t deny just how suspicious Scott’s behavior was in the days following Laci’s disappearance. While his friends and his family frantically look for Laci, Scott calls his mistress and flirts over the phone. (As shown in the film, Scott’s girlfriend did not know that Scott was married and was shocked to see Scott on television, talking about his missing wife.) When his friends and family beg Scott to help get the word out about his missing wife, Scott retreats into his own shell. And when Laci’s body is discovered, Scott puts on a fake beard, dyes his hair, and heads to San Diego with a bag full of money. In the docuseries, Scott’s condescending father claimed that Scott was just trying to get away from the media. The film leaves little doubt that he was trying to get away from his crimes.

Dean Cain does a good job in the role of Scott Peterson. Because Scott’s trial had yet to begin, Cain couldn’t play him as being an outright murderer so, instead, he focused on playing Scott as being petulant, insecure, and self-centered, the type of guy who seems to be annoyed that Laci’s disappearance is inconveniencing him. Dee Wallace and G.W. Bailey have a few good scenes as, respectively, Laci’s mother and the detective investigating the case. David Denman (who is probably best-known for playing Roy, Pam’s lunkhead fiancé on The Office) gives the film’s strongest performance as a friend of Scott’s who desperately wants to believe that he’s innocent even though the evidence keeps piling up against him.

The Perfect Husband probably gets closer to the truth of the case than any of the documentaries that have followed. Scott’s a killer. RIP, Laci and Connor.