The best serial killer film ever made. Sure to ruin any party. It’s grimy, desolate and as foul as an uncleaned bus station restroom at 3 AM. It’s loosely based on the real life exploits of Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, two homicidal hayseeds who roamed the South in the late 70s and early 80s. Here, Henry (Michael Rooker) and Otis (sic) (Tom Towles) are ex-cons who live together in a Chicago apartment. Henry’s the reserved, soft-spoken, illiterate brooder; Otis is the loud-mouthed simian dumbfuck in a Jack Daniels trucker cap and who’s a little too touchy-feely with his sad-eyed sister, Becky (Tracy Arnold).
And those are our three characters. We don’t get to know anyone else. Any other human who flits across this clammy character study is either a bit-part player, an extra or a victim. There are no cops, no detectives and no good guys.
Director and co-writer John McNaughton completed this low-budget film in 1986, but it sat unreleased for three years due to a combination of the executive producers not knowing what do with it and the creeps on the MPAA film ratings board HATING it. Its raw moments of violence are no more brutal than the splatter that Arnold Schwarzenegger movies got away with at the time, but the MPAA branded an X-rating on this anyway due to what they called its “disturbing moral tone”. With positive word-of-mouth nonetheless in the film’s favor, the producers released it unrated into arthouse theaters and it became successful.