Review – Rampage

William Friedkin serves up a highly unpleasant meditation on crime, mental illness and the courts. The whole thing is set up to make us loathe the villain and long to see him sent to the gas chamber. His crimes are shown – or at least described – in bloody detail. Alex McArthur does a solid job of playing the psychotic killer as an unredeemable monster. Michael Biehn is his usual workmanlike self as the anti-death-penalty prosecutor slowly won over to the notion of seeking execution and fighting hard against the defendant’s attempt to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Even the defense psychiatrists are shown as unscrupulous. And yet the actual story upon which this is based – the crimes of Richard “The Vampire of Sacramento” Chase – had a much happier ending. Mildly amusing