Dahmer 2002 Horror Movie Review

Yes, I found this movie horrible. It was dark, dreary, dull, and boring. Very boring because of repetitious killing scenes, all of whose endings were totally predictable. Dahmer was obnoxious and despicable in the manipulative way he operated. The violence and the sex WAS gratuitous and disgusting.


The story had a beginning without a middle or an end. It just meanders from one killing to another. Dahmer’s psycho babbling was pointless as he attempts to analyze one of his potential victims. I saw nothing about his childhood that may have contributed to his madness. The scenes with his father when he was a teen were not credible because the father was a one-dimensional bad dad who, we’re supposed to believe, created this Frankenstein son by dominating him and invading his privacy. Nonsense. This is a superficial conclusion and surely an oversimplification of a highly complex problem. We never find out the many causes that effected such inner hatred and vengeance that it erupted into such canabilistic violence. So many guys have had overbearing dads—but how many turned out to be a Dahmer?


This movie is just another sensationalistic attempt to exploit a killer who committed a series of ghastly, gruesome murders and offers neither understanding nor insight into his true motives. Dahmer is unclear and thus unsympathetic. Furthermore, the movie gave no information on how Dahmer was caught, tried, convicted, and imprisoned, and the circumstances leading to his murder in prison.


I wasted my money buying this. I threw my copy in the trash can—I wouldn’t even donate it to Good Will (because that would be bad will) or to the Public Library.


The actor playing Dahmer was just FAIR, showing a limited range of understanding and expression of the depth of the character’s internal dissension. It was all so perfunctural and matter-of-fact—just another ho-hum day of killing! And dismembering!