The Alphabet Killer (2008)

What potentially was a good story line which i can only assume is loosely based on true events was absolutely annihilated by the god awful acting of the lead actress. What the director was thinking when he thought of making her go crazy i'll never know.Thank god that is over!!Please don't waste your time on this

With no originality at all and plenty of bad things in its core, "The Alphabet Killer" comes to ruin what could be a good story about the real events surrounding the alphabet killer, a psychopath that kidnapped and killed several girls whose initial letters were the same and he never got caught by the police. Eliza Dushku plays an detective working on the case, trying to discover who this guy is and trying to recover her own sanity after seeing strange hallucinations and visions of the victims while investigating the case. She gets some help from Timothy Hutton's character, a paraplegic psychologist and from another detective; and doesn't get along with her ex-boyfriend (Cary Elwes) who also covers the case. So, the movie is more about her traumatic and ridiculous moments than to save lives or catch a killer. The director and writers didn't know how to built a suspense and sustain a mystery, everything is so slow and they didn't know how to scare the audience (although the final revelation of who the killer was is so predictable that you might laugh or say that is unbelievably bad). It's not just that that ruins the film, it is also the twisted moments that Dushku has and we're forced to watch being the worst the scene where she escapes from the hospital where she was held, breaking the arm of a nurse even though she already dominated him, and he couldn't do anything with her. That scene is pathetic, also the scenes with her delusions and the "music in her ears" in the church scene."The Alphabet Killer" is filled with bad acting, a story with no involvement, no thrill, nothing. Dushku and Elwes are terrible, what a bomb! What happened to Elwes eyebrow? He looked like a old female witch; and Dushku had the guts to produce something like this. The surprising good acting in this thing comes from Melissa Leo and Martin Donovan playing the parents of the Walsh girl, one of the victims; Jack McGee has some good moments and Timothy Hutton is there for reasons of embarrassment and those things can happen with a previous Oscar winner.Movies inspired in real events usually are good and I enjoy it, but this one is a almost supernatural dramatic flick who has nothing good in it, a waste of time. Pathetic! 2/10

Pretty good portrayal. Slow but effective. The horror of knowing something imposing and being unable to communicate it must be the deepest pain, deeper than dental nerves, than bones. This moves slowly, and it is a bit too obvious in the showing of the victim's ghosts. But there is a certain beauty in working with an insane narrator — especially if you know that the actress here commissioned the thing for herself. The story here is of three deceptions. The first is the ordinary detective form: a murderer kills innocent girls and is intent on obfuscating the narrative. This is always present. We have a second baffle; the local police kill an innocent fellow and frame him for the murders simply because they need to make progress. This is an American story, this justice. It appears less frequently in detective films as a genuine blind instead of a simple obstacle. But here it is a full on crime. But there is a third element, a third deception at work: the narrator/ detective is schizophrenic. She makes the normal number (using the Poirot metric) of mistakes. We have several suspects, including the insider cop/lover. She ends up fooling her listeners: us and her police peers, into believing that she did not solved the case.The end is satisfying, and is worth the grind if you have the time to invest. These things rarely end competently, and this one does.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

to act like it deals with the supernatural when it really doesn't. Detective Megan Paige becomes obsessed with a child murder. The girl's initials are the same letter and her body is left in a town that starts with the same letter. During investigations, she sees the dead girl, sees hands appear, hears whispers. She is diagnosed as schizo and is relegated to a desk job. The movie says it is based on a true story. The movie tries to depict Megan was haunted by ghosts. So, was this detective really schizo in real life? A couple of years go by, and a couple more murders take place. She is allowed to tag alone but not interfere due to her mental state. Wouldn't want evidence thrown out. That part was ridiculous to me. There is no way the police would allow a mental case who was obsessed with this killer interview witnesses. She starts seeing the dead girls and hears things again. Another silly moment is when the police don't stop her from entering this house during a hostage situation. All they do is yell don't go in there, she just walks right in. Simply not believable.Then according to the film, she finds out who the killer was but gets sent back to the psych ward and medicated so she can't tell anyone. Now, you know that never happened. The worst part about this movie is it trying to claim it's based on true events.FINAL VERDICT: This would have been better as a ghost story and not played as based on actual events.