The 1985 film, Confessions of a Serial Killer, is based on the confessions of Henry Lee Lucas.  Lucas was a one-eyed Michigan-born drifter who was arrested for murder in Texas in 1983.  Once in custody, Lucas started confessing to murder after murder.  At one point, it was estimated that Lucas had claimed to have killed around 600 people, sometimes by himself and other times with the help of his friend and sometimes lover, Ottis Toole.  (Lucas “married” Toole’s 12 year-old niece, Becky, and then later chopped her up in a field.)

Of course, eventually, someone actually looked at Lucas’s confessions and came to realize that they didn’t really add up.  Lucas had confessed to so many murders that, in order to believe him, you would have to be willing to accept that he could commit a murder in Florida in the afternoon and then somehow commit a second murder in upstate New York that night.  (And that’s not even getting into the fact that Lucas confessed to killing Jimmy Hoffa and claimed that the CIA sent him to Cuba to take out Fidel Castro.)  In the end, it was determined that Lucas was simply telling the police what they wanted to hear and that, sometimes deliberately and sometimes accidentally, the police were feeding him information about unsolved crimes in order to make his confessions more credible.  Today, it’s generally agreed that Lucas may have killed 11 people.  It’s also possible that he only killed two.  (On the other hand, Ottis Toole really was the degenerate serial killer that Lucas claimed her was.)

Still, the national coverage of Lucas’s confessions inspired two independent films that were made in the mid-80s.  One of those two films (and the better known of the two) was John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, in which Lucas was played by Michael Rooker and most of the action took place in Chicago.  The other film was Confessions of a Serial Killer, which was filmed in Texas.

In Confessions of a Serial Killer, Henry Lee Lucas is re-imagined as Daniel Ray Hawkins (Robert A. Burns), a polite and mild-mannered redneck whose short stature, glasses, and somewhat quizzical expression all hide the fact that he is actually a vicious serial killer.  Having recently been arrested, Hawkins nonchalantly confesses his crimes to Sheriff Will Gaines (Berkeley Garrett).  Hawkins obviously enjoys telling his stories and he also appreciates that, whenever he and the sheriff go out to a crime scene together, he gets a hamburger and a chocolate milkshake.  (“If these policemen weren’t here,” Hawkins tells one waitress, “you’d be mine.”)  Hawkins talks about his childhood, growing up as the son of the town prostitute and a shellshocked father.  He claims that his first victim was a sex worker in Scranton.  Though flashbacks, we see Hawkins’s friendship with the moronic and equally bloodthirsty Moon Lewton (Dennis Hill).  Hawkins eventually marries Moon’s sister, Molly (Sidney Brammer), who turns out to be just as sociopathic as her brother and her new husband.

Though it never escapes from Henry’s shadow, Confessions of a Serial Killer is an effective and disquieting film.  The low budget works to the film’s advantage, especially in the scenes in which Hawkins wanders across the Texas countryside.  Watching these grainy, documentary-style scenes, the viewer can literally feel the humidity and see the bugs buzzing around the tall grass.  Though the cast is made up of unknowns, they all bring an authenticity to their roles.  Anyone who has ever spent any time in small town Texas will automatically recognize the stoic but fair-minded sheriff played by Berkeley Garrett and the humble and religious doctor played by Ollie Handley.  That said, the film is dominated by Robert A. Burns and his effectively low-key performance as Daniel Ray Hawkins.  Burns himself was a set designer who got his start designing the house of horrors from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Burns plays Hawkins as being someone who has figured out how to come across as harmless but who also can’t help but seem off-center.  His flat delivery of Hawkins’s lines captures the fact that, on the inside, Hawkins is empty.  Even when he kills someone to whom he was close, he can only blandly say, “I was sorry about that.”  True feelings are unknown to him.

Confessions of a Serial Killer is a film that stick with you.  It’s a film that reminds you that you never know who might be watching you.  Is that polite man just looking to be helpful or is he another Daniel Ray Hawkins?