Henry - Portrait of a Serial Killer (20th Anniversary)

John Mac Naughton's cult low-budget film is beyond any fictional story about murder and sociopaths. Beyond any logic explanation about the behaviour or consequences of brutal, cruel and random violence. Beyond the self awareness of one-self in front of a mirror, beholding the remaining pieces of a shattered human soul and a deep buried self-estime.

This provoking and disturbing raw true-crime drama was based loosely on the story of the serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, portrayed with devastatingly insightful talent by Michael Rooker in a career performance, and considered back in 1986 as a response to the slasher genre ruling at the time, based on horror fantasy supernatural characters and socking gory visuals. I can affirm with fair arguments, this film is the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" of the 80's, because leaving beside the obvious astethics, style or generic differences between both masterpieces, they share the monumental task of disturbing the very essence of primal fear, the very core of insecurity and peace of mind, in the most macabre possible way: The de-humanization of the murderer who shows no passion, no reasons and no existential issues except for the haunting of the past that made him a monster.

Henry and his roommate Otis (Tom Towles) selects their innocent victims and torture them till the most brutal and violent deaths ever portrayed on film. The videotaping of the killings represented extreme sadism inside a crude sadistic story. The graphic violence of the film prevented the theatrical release untill 1990. By that time it was compared to masterpieces like "silence of the lambs" because of its lurid, grim and creepy atmosphere and a menacing but downbeat humor.

This movie was the first film that made me feel safe behind the screen and grateful for the life i had, after the first and almost unbearable viewing. Such crudety and menacing tension attacks with relentless strenght the very foundations of the meaning of life in this cruel world. The devastating effects of a traumatized life in the confessions of the killer don't mean nothing compared to his brutal actions. There's no possible sympathy for this human shell covering a rotten heart, hell awaits this inhuman tormentor.

My fair recomendation for fans of disturbing and violent crime-drama, who will found in "Henry: Portrait of a serial killer" a cult masterpiece with no paralel or possible accurate reference in film history because of the harsh atmosphere capted in this low-budget passionate work.

This 20th aniversary DVD edition is a must-have, i own a previous one but i look forward to watch the flawless remasterization and extras, including the interviews with John Mc Naughton, who owes me a couple of good night sleep and long hours trying to recover myself.

It is no surprise that Stephen "Who Hasn't Written A Decent Book 2 Decades" King would find this scary.

Personally, I kept waiting for the scary parts. And waiting. And... They never happened.

My cat is scarier than this miserable flick--my cat that died 3 years ago, that is, which, well... This flick just isn't scary. AT ALL.

It would have been nice had the movie at least conformed to the facts about Henry Lee Lucas. It doesn't, though.

I would recommend this flick to anyone that seeks to pay to be bored.

Too bad I don't have my $$ and amazon doesn't have the flick I wasted my money on.

SIMPLY...THIS HORROR FILM IS ONE OF THE MOST DISTURBING AND REAL-TIME FRIGHTENING MOVIES EVER MADE...EVER! THIS MOVIE WILL MAKE YOU LOOK AT YOUR NEIGHBORS IN A WHOLE NEW WORRISOME WAY. IF YOU WANT TO BE SCARED, THIS IS THE FILM FOR YOU!!!

I am the type of guy who enjoys watching the movie monster win. Whether it's Jason killing stupid teenagers for the millionth time, or watching Captain Rhodes in Day of the Dead get torn in half by zombies to the delight of audience, I never get a feeling of unease, nor do I ever wonder why am I watching this. But Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer was the first horror film that really made me uncomfortable to watch but in a good way. This is a horror film where the monster is not a creature from the pits of hell, but actually the guy who lives down the block from us.
The plot is so simple: Henry, played to perfection by Michael Rooker, is a nomadic serial killer going from place to place taking his anger on random victims while at the same time, just seen as the guy next door. He shacks up with his ex con buddy Ottis and his sister and is seen as a man with a haunted past. When Ottis sees Henry kill two hookers for almost no reason, Ottis gets drawn into his world and the viewer is along for the ride. Henry even explains to Ottis and the viewer the do's and don'ts of killing people
One of the most disturbing scenes is where the two men go to a guys garage to buy a tv. The fat guy selling the stolen sets is seen as so disgusting that I wanted something bad to happen to him. When they do kill him, it is done in such a realistic way that it made me feel like I was witnessing an actual murder that happened at some point in time. Even when Henry and Ottis use a video camera to record the brutal (key word) murder of a mother father and son, it made me feel like I wanted to take a shower and not even think about it again.
This movie is an amazing example of low budget film-making that puts the audience right into the mind of a serial killer who is just as realistic as modern monsters like Gary Heidnik, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng and more. The one thing you could say about this movie is that the film never comments on the after effects of murder or even about why Henry is committing these horrible acts. Great Movie

A lot of things were going through my mind after I watched this film. I wondered why I was drawn to it; I suppose it's because the movie was highly rated. There is no ambiguity about the type of film it is, based on the title. You pretty much know that you are going to see some brutality and blood. It's an example of the kind of thing I would never watch when my wife or kids were present. That concerned me a bit: why would I not want THEM to watch it, but think that it's OK for me to watch it myself? To be perfectly honest, I probably waited so long to see it because I would have been ashamed to select it at Blockbuster and take it to the counter to rent it. What would that have said about me?
Surprisingly, there is not huge amount of violence. More often, we see the aftermath of Henry's handiwork: corpses of women stabbed, raped, strangled, etc.. Even though we do not see the actual killings in many cases, these scenes are still very disturbing for many reasons, among them the fact that the accompanying soundtrack lets us hear the events, the screams, the actual sounds of murder and violence, muffled and distorted and thus made all the more savage. We wonder what it is that makes these killers do the things they do. These guys do not fit in; they are typically not churchgoers, they don't hold steady jobs, they don't play by the rules, they don't have nice wives and children. All of this in itself makes them different from most of us. This can result in a kind of weird fascination, like the compulsion we have to watch the auto wreck or the house fire. Also, we feel glad that it's not us.
The underrated actor Michael Rooker gives a very chilling performance as the title character. We do get a glimpse of why he turned out the way he did when he explains how as a boy he was mistreated by his mother. Other than that, we get no analysis, no explanations, no justifications for his monstrous behavior. He really comes across as more animalistic than human, or actually, more robotic than human; he is hard-wired for death and destruction, torture and pain. The blonde sister of his murderous acolyte Otis reaches out to him, but he cannot respond in kind; he is too damaged to feel love or compassion for anyone. I've seen pictures of the real Henry and Otis, and they were two of the scariest-looking individuals I've ever seen; you could actually see and feel the presence and influence of Satan in their ravaged faces.
Warning: the videotaped assault on the family, which we see, Blair Witch-style, is one of the few actual "live" killings in the movie, and it remains the single most disturbing and horrible sequence I've seen in my entire film-watching life (58 years).
So it all begs the question: why watch a movie like this? I have no answer. We don't really have anything to gain. We would be much better off watching a comedy or life-affirming film, going for a walk, playing with our dog or our kids, praying, doing something good for someone, loving our wives. By doing any of those things, we are doing precisely the things which guys like Henry could not or would not do.