AILEEN WUORNOS: AMERICAN BOOGEYWOMAN (2021)

Studio:     Dark Star Pictures
Director:    Daniel Farrands
Writer:     Daniel Farrands
Producer:  Lucas Jarach, Daniel Farrands, Meadow Williams, Swen Temmel, Luke Daniels, Daniel Davila
Stars:     Peyton List, Lydia Hearst, Nick Vallelonga, Swen Temmel, Andrew Biernat, Ashley Atwood, Hamish Sturgeon, Joseph Schwartz, Meadow Williams, Tobin Bell

Review Score:

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Summary:

On the eve of her execution, Aileen Wuornos recounts an imaginary story of how she became a notorious serial killer.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Florida State Prison – October 8, 2002 – On the eve of her execution, Aileen Wuornos gives a Death Row interview to British documentarian Peter that embellishes her life prior to becoming a serial killer.

DeLand, Florida – July 4, 1976 – Working as a prostitute, Aileen robs and beats a john named Dewey in his pickup truck. While walking on the beach afterward, Aileen meets Jennifer Fell, Jennifer’s boyfriend Mitch Miller, and Mitch’s abusive brother Grady. Jennifer takes a liking to Aileen when Aileen takes a violent stand against Grady’s aggressively insulting behavior.

Jennifer invites Aileen to stay in her wealthy father Lewis Gratz Fell’s mansion. To everyone’s shock, Lewis falls in love with Aileen and they marry two weeks later. Jennifer moves out to the pool house in protest. Aileen gets arrested when she gets in a bar fight with a man who attempts to rape her.

Lewis and Aileen go boating with Jennifer, Mitch, Grady, and the brothers’ father Victor, who is the Fell family attorney. Victor privately tells Lewis he worries about Aileen’s motives for marriage and wants to investigate her past. Aileen and Grady have another physical altercation that ends with Aileen threatening to kill Grady.

In an effort to bond, Jennifer takes Aileen shopping at an upscale clothing store. Perceiving store clerk Courtney as being condescending, Aileen creates a scene. Aileen also accuses Jennifer of setting her up to be belittled.

Jennifer spies Aileen writing checks from her father’s ledger. Jennifer takes her concerns about Aileen to Victor, who explains he can’t legally do anything since Aileen is on Lewis’ bank accounts. However, Victor gives Jennifer a file detailing Aileen’s sordid criminal past and vows to use it against her.

Victor confronts Aileen with the file. Aileen and Victor engage in a violent physical struggle when Victor offers Aileen $10,000 to leave town. Aileen grabs a gun from the desk and shoots Victor. Grady enters the room and Aileen shoots him too.

A mystery stalker sends Aileen incriminating photos of her burying Victor and Grady’s bodies. Aileen meets the blackmailer at a motel and discovers it is her dying brother Keith. Keith tries converting his sister to Jesus, but Aileen smothers Keith with a pillow and shoots him.

Jennifer and Mitch track down Aileen’s mother Diane Pittman at a diner. Diane warns them that her daughter is a dangerous liar.

After taking revenge against store clerk Courtney and draining the bank accounts she has access to, Aileen returns to the mansion. Lewis confronts Aileen about stealing his money. Aileen beats Lewis to the floor with his cane.

Jennifer and Mitch arrive at the house to find Lewis on the floor. Mitch escorts Lewis outside while Jennifer confronts Aileen. Jennifer and Aileen’s physical fight ultimately spills outside to a boat. Aileen almost kills Jennifer, but Lewis returns in time to knock Aileen into the water. Aileen washes up downstream to restart her life.

After returning to sex work, Aileen once again ends up in Dewey’s truck. Taking revenge for losing a tooth the first time they met, Dewey punches Aileen’s mouth and ruins her teeth. Years later, Lewis Fell dies of natural causes.

In her prison interview with Peter, Aileen justifies her fictionalized account of events by pointing out how many other people profited from her story. Aileen dies from lethal injection the next day.

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Review:

Filmmakers who base movies on true stories have to be careful when it comes to depicting real people who were actually involved as well as how those events played out. Take too many liberties with the facts and you could wind up sued for defamation by anyone still alive to say you did disparaging damage to their name. “Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman” fortunately has no such worry because the movie is made up almost entirely of imaginary bullsh*t.

For starters, dates don’t line up, although anybody could argue that only matters to someone who has Wikipedia open at the same time as watching the movie. They could be considered the same kind of anal-retentive sticklers who notice Wuornos eating from a bucket of Dinah’s Chicken, a Los Angeles restaurant, even though the film takes place in Florida.

“American Boogeywoman,” a weird title that sounds like a reference to a roller disco queen rather than a notorious serial killer, “sort of” chronicles a nine-week period in 1976 when Wuornos was wedded to yacht club commodore Lewis Gratz Fell, 13 years before committing her first murder. The only differences between the movie and what really happened are that Fell’s fictional daughter Jennifer plays a key role in how everything unfolds (Fell did have a daughter named Katherine, although she had no impact in reality), Wuornos murders Fell’s attorney Victor and his son Grady (no such men existed), Wuornos executes her brother Keith in a Florida motel room (Keith died of cancer in Michigan four days before the Fell marriage was annulled), Wuornos kills a condescending clothing store clerk offscreen (nope), and the whole shebang culminates in a knock-down, drag-out fight involving four people, with Fell himself delivering the decisive blow that sends Wuornos into the water and out of his life for good (also nope). So yeah, basically every major moment in the movie is a completely fantastical fabrication.

What I’m saying is, “Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman” can best be summed up with that “Beyond Belief” meme of Jonathan Frakes smiling. “Never happened.”

“American Boogeywoman” tries justifying its egregious embellishment by framing the film as a Death Row recollection from a purposefully unreliable narrator: Wuornos herself. Looking to get a piece of the profitability pie others have enjoyed by exploiting her story, Wuornos intentionally trumps up the tale told to a documentarian so she can concoct something more likely to make money. Kind of like PR people pitching “American Boogeywoman” as a prequel to “Monster” when no one involved with Charlize Theron’s Academy Award-winning film had a single thing to do with this. Or maybe Wuornos is merely bored, like any average audience member will be with this movie, and has nothing better to do while awaiting execution, which is what some viewers may wish for if they endure all 85 minutes.

Something worth mentioning about these wraparound segments however, is that actress Ashley Atwood looks absolutely incredible as the older Aileen. Atwood cuts into the crazy with a wild chainsaw instead of a subtle scalpel, but the makeup molds her as a dead ringer for Wuornos, right down to the crooked teeth. For a horrifying person, she looks truly terrific.

For the rest of the film, “Cobra Kai’s” Peyton List plays 20-year-old Wuornos. She’s fine. Problems with Wuornos’ portrayal may have more to do with direction and staging than with List’s performance. Every scene where Wuornos’ rage gets triggered essentially plays the same way. List curls her lips back from her teeth, leans forward at the waist, and growls in the face of anyone who dares to confront her. Rinse, repeat.

“American Boogeywoman” comes from writer/director Daniel Farrands. Farrands previously made “The Amityville Murders” (review here), “The Haunting of Sharon Tate” (review here), “The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson” (review here), and “Ted Bundy: American Boogeyman” (review here). If you’re familiar with any of those films, then I don’t need to tell you what kind of ghoulishly revisionist, cheap claptrap we’re dealing with here. If you haven’t seen any of those films, oh how I envy you for dodging their bullets of B-movie badness.

Actually, B is too high of a letter for where this Lifetime-level “true” crime biopic lands on the salacious soap opera scale. Production wise, this is the most technically polished of those five films in terms of visual value, thanks in part to attractive locations. Too bad the film has zero informative value related to Wuornos’ real life, and only minimally more worth as trashy tabloid entertainment.

Review Score: 40

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