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Category:    Home > Reviews > Thriller > Horror > Murder > Serial Killers > Ticking Clock (2010/Sony Blu-ray) + Dear Mr. Gacy (2009/Anchor Bay Blu-ray)

Ticking Clock (2010/Sony Blu-ray) + Dear Mr. Gacy (2009/Anchor Bay Blu-ray)

 

Picture: B-/C+     Sound: B/B-     Extras: D/C-     Features: D/C-

 

 

The subject of serial killers is so beyond tired that I am always surprised when any show up anywhere outside of the news.  Any good feature films on the subject have long since been made for now and yet, the torture porn cycle has allowed more bad features to be made.  The latest two duds are now on Blu-ray and are very, very bad.

 

Cuba Gooding Jr. (a name synonymous with bad releases 99.9% of the time) is back in the laughably atrocious Ernie Barbarash disaster Ticking Clock (2010), in which Gooding plays a writer about major crimes whose girlfriend is killed in a very brutal way.  Despite his long history of journalism, he does become a suspect, yet the killer seems to always be one step ahead of him.  John Turman’s script tries to give this aspect new life, but it does not work and Gooding is a real bore here.  However, the actor playing against him is another story.

 

Neal McDonough (Captain America: The First Avenger, Traitor, Star Trek: First Contact) steals the show as the sick serial killer with a uniquely devious power in this otherwise formulaic, predictable and tired cat & mouse serial killer thriller with few thrills.  Would somebody please give this man a good script with a lead role!

 

Then we get the almost as dreadful Svetozar Ristovski’s Dear Mr. Gacy (2009) supposedly based on some true story (notice these claims are never really so?) about a bizarre relationship that develops between the infamous, sick killer John Wayne Gacy (William Forsythe) and a young 19-year-old boy names Jason (Jesse Moss) that is so goofy that I was surprised it ever got made.  Another title was going to be The Last Victim, but that sounds too optimistic as these bottom-of-the-barrel releases will continue to be churned out to no end.  This was another Silence Of The Lambs wanna-be (aren’t they all?) and is a very sloppy production with only some of the Gacy aspects very passively interesting.  A documentary would have been a better idea.

 

Both Blu-rays offer 1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image transfers and both look poor, though Gacy is even worse, both stylized in silly ways that are beyond cliché, but Clock had some more money to apply.  Too bad they both look like bad cable movies.  As for sound, Clock has a DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless sound mix that is decent for the most part despite some dialogue flaws and limits and Gacy offers a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix pushing its low-budget audio a little more than it should.

 

Clock as no extras, while Gacy has a making of featurette, teaser trailer and theatrical trailer, but it might as well have been a basic disc to.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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