Word: psychopaths
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...laughing nervously along, alienated from Shelley Duvall's goofy Wendy, eager to see what new twitch he will add to his repertoire. His eyebrows flap like crazy crows and his mouth and eyes twist into an astounding collection of evil leers. Even his voice changes frequency. This brilliantly amusing psychopath is a stylized mixture of madman and dramatic artist, one glazed eye directed at himself, the other on Danny, who is played to terrified perfection by little Danny Lloyd...
...pushes an aunt down a flight of stairs. As James Cagney in White Heat!, he machine-guns a Hollywood producer. Then comes the grand finale atop Graumann's Chinese Theater, but that's another story. Says Christopher of his role reversal from All-American boy to cinema psychopath: "I don't intend to make a career of playing villains...
...many gay lives." Adds Anthropologist Edgar Gregersen of Queens (N.Y.) College, who studies sexual mores: "If you make your first sexual contact in a public toilet or in the back of a truck where the guy next to you may be a cop ready to arrest you or a psychopath waiting to hack off your genitals, Leather Gulch is an ideal ambience...
...Parnell kidnap the boy? Digging into his record, police found an unsavory history. At 19, after a trial in which a court-appointed psychiatrist called him a "sexual psychopath," Parnell was convicted of sexually abusing an eight-year-old boy and sentenced to three years in San Quentin. Only four days before the trial, Parnell's wife-who later left him-had given birth to a girl. A court order prohibited Parnell from ever having any contact with her, a fact that Mendocino County District Attorney Joseph Allen speculates might have induced him to kidnap children as surrogates...
Regrettably, the film spends a great deal of time in detailing the not very illuminating background of everyone involved in the incident. (It does, how ever, offer Woods a chance to give a splendid performance as a psychopath -jaunty, furious, ingratiating, ignorant and intelligent in bewildering turns.) The film's deliberate piling up of superfluous minutiae tends to have a numbing effect even before the characters get down to the main business of the plot: the murder and its endless afterlife in court...