Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ted Bundy: American Boogeyman’ on Hulu, Utterly Derivative Serial Killer Schlock

Now on Hulu, Ted Bundy: American Boogeyman casts Mr. One Tree Hill himself, Chad Michael Murray, as the notorious real-life serial killer, and surely hopes that’ll be enough to draw us in for yet another chunk of content on this well-trod topic. Most recently we got No Man of God, starring Elijah Wood as the FBI agent on Ted’s case; before that, Zac Efron played Bundy in Netflix’s halfway-decent 2019 movie Extremely Evil, Shockingly Wicked and Vile; and just in the last couple years, the killer was the topic of not one, but two true-crime documentary series, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes and Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer. (All we’re missing is a Bundy drama taking the perspective of his father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate.) But American Boogeyman may have more in common with the made-for-TV movies that came and went without much fanfare. Here’s why.

TED BUNDY: AMERICAN BOOGEYMAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A young woman in extreme close-up opens the film: “MEN ARE PIGS,” she says, slam, right into the cam. We don’t disagree! She’s comforting a girlfriend who’s just been dumped by a jerk, but please note, this is as subtle as the movie gets. We get the feeling one of them is about to be Ted Bundy’s next victim. Then, the first of too many wearying subtitles declares the time and place, and all of them land with a nefarious THRUMM on the soundtrack: I’m so over it. Aren’t you? I’ll just say this scene takes place in Utah in 1974, and the rest of the film stretches to 1978 and jumps among Seattle, Colorado and Florida.

Anyway, one of the women goes outside to smoke, which is highly improbable – I’m pretty sure nobody smoked outside in 1974, and in fact, they most likely purposely went inside to fire one up. ANYway anyway, she sees Bundy (Murray) in his signature guise: phony cast on his leg, crutches, dropping his keys and “needing help.” When the inevitable horrifying abduction occurs, the soundtrack informs us it’s a dark and scary moment by unleashing the drones and punctuating them with what I presume is the sound of a lead pipe slamming into an oil drum inside a tanker inside an echo chamber.

Elsewhere, Det. Kathleen McChesney (Holland Roden) briefs a roomful of jackass male cops on a pile of evidence pointing at one probable person in the murders of several young women. Afterward, McChesney is smack in the middle of brushing off the condescension and sexism of her chief and his cop failson when FBI Agent Ressler (Jake Hays) walks into the room and – gasp – shows her respect, a real rarity for 1974. He’s a psychologist and profiler, and he knows good work when he sees it, so he partners up with McChesney. More bodies keep turning up, and this killer must be stopped.

The film then cycles through police-procedural blahblah, stalker-killer scenes and ominous subtitles with woofer-testing music. There’s a scene with Bundy’s mom (Lin Shaye), and a helluva speech by a police psychologist (Asante Jones), and moments where we get to “enjoy” Bundy’s psychosis up close and personal, via an S&M fantasy sequence and a rampage through a sorority house. Does he get away with it? NO SPOILERS, unless you’ve read an article or seen one of the far too many movies about this exact same guy!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I’ve already listed the many Bundy movies that already exist, so I’ll say American Boogeyman outright rips off John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween wholesale a few times, which is problematic, since that was wholesale fiction and Bundy truly existed, and drawing parallels between the two is distasteful. (Also notable: Director Daniel Farrands specializes in this quasi-docudrama stuff – his other recent efforts are Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman, The Haunting of Sharon Tate and The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson. Collect ’em all, trade ’em with your friends, stick ’em in your bike spokes to make that brrrrttttttttttzz sound!)

Performance Worth Watching: McChesney is a real-life figure who made some progress for women in the realm of law enforcement. Roden may be game for bringing her to life on screen, but the American Boogeyman screenplay is so flimsy, we’ll never know – McChesney surely deserves more than just a go-nowhere Clarice Starling-type arc that’s so poorly considered, it’s not half-assed, or even quarter-assed, but more like 10 percent -assed.

Memorable Dialogue: “Not sequence killers. Serial killers. That’s what they should be called.” – McChesney coins the ever-living shit out of a phrase

Sex and Skin: A little bit of exploitative down-blouse cheesecake for Bundy to leer at.

Our Take: American Boogeyman is the kind of movie that gives dreck a good name. Its CPM (cliches per minute) rate buries the needle in the red. It would boast all the class and style of a TV-movie cautionary-tale creepathon if it wasn’t zero-insight exploitation. It never settles on a point-of-view, jumping from the bland coptalk between McChesney and Ressler, to Bundy lurking in the bushes or backseat, to the inane back-and-forth of his victims, none of whom enjoys a single consideration as a character. They’re just meat for Bundy to butcher.

Any moments that attempt to stir up drama – say, the mother of a victim expressing some grief or rage – has all the tension and emotional currency of a waterlogged soap opera. The dialogue is horrid, half-written crud rendering the actors’ jobs thankless paycheckery. Not a single scene here is convincing. It plays fast and loose with the true events of Bundy’s nasty rampage, which might be forgivable if the movie had a single thing to say about any of it, a single idea in a single brain cell, but alas.

Our Call: Ted Bundy: American Boogeyman aims for chilling and lands on boring, and fails mightily to justify its existence. SKIP IT TWICE.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Watch Ted Bundy: American Boogeyman on Hulu