A gory misfire
Night Stalker too often revels in worst of true-crime genre
Night Stalker Netflix
Richard Ramirez's spree of terror through the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas in 1984 and 1985 made for a psyche-shredding media fixation: The so-called Night Stalker's rapaciousness — targeting people seemingly at random and with an appetite for violence that set him apart even among the history of psychopaths — provided insatiable fodder for media reports, a side-effect that both burnished Ramirez's legend and increased the effects of his reign of terror.
Over and above his grievous crimes, Ramirez was creating an atmosphere of fear and mistrust that overlay an unhappy period for California.
This, at least, is the case made by Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, a four-episode documentary series on Netflix.
As an analysis of social madness, directed by Tiller Russell and James Carroll, it makes some interesting points.
Those, though, tend to be studded within a project that gives itself away to mania more frequently.
Clogged with high-gloss but somewhat ludicrous footage, Night Stalker knows it's about the deaths of innocents only inasmuch as that makes for a riveting story, but it lacks the seriousness of purpose to tell its story well.
Mostly, the story follows Gil Carrillo and Frank Salerno, the investigators tracking Ramirez. They're interviewed in the present day with every cliché about investigators in the unfeeling city in evidence: forebodingly darkly lit interviews, a re-enacted shot of a lonesome cop car accelerating down a lonely street, lit by street lights.
It can be boring to constantly write about true crime that lacks intentions deeply enough thought through to match its grave subject matter — in part because it happens so frequently.
While Ramirez's victims, including a kidnap victim he let go, as well as families of the slain,
get the chance to speak, here, the show's pleasurable embrace of violence seems, in its effort to attract, tonally repulsive.
Consider, say, a Los Angeles news reporter speaking to camera in the final episode and musing about “what it would be like to be attacked by him, to have him on top, to have him with a gun at your throat, knife” with a sort of kitschy fascination at her own revulsion.
Why did this make the cut? We know by this point that Ramirez was dangerous.
Or the fact that the first episode, for instance, ends with Carrillo restaging his epiphany that the crimes were linked, saying “We got us a serial killer” — followed by amped-up rock music kicking in and the show's title in pink graffiti font.
It's not that the thrill of the chase isn't a real human emotion, however worthy.
Night Stalker, though, tends to tip its hand in moments like these to reveal that the hunt for a serial murderer is, in its own sick way, kind of fun.
The series seeks to re-create a climate of nasty fear for no ultimate higher purpose than four hours of thrills and chills.