Parents' Guide to Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman

This is a terrible movie that didn't need to be made. It has some surprising "facts" that may be unknown to some viewers. Among other things, Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman teaches the viewer that there are mountain ranges in Florida, easily viewed from a yacht while sailing on the Atlantic Ocean. By extension, there are also valleys, and diner waitresses make small talk about the weather in the valley where they live and work. For Floridians, this will be as shocking as anything else revealed in this movie, not because there are mountain ranges in Florida (spoiler: there aren't any mountain ranges in Florida, and no valleys in Volusia County, Florida), but because the rest of the movie is pure exploitative garbage. This particular movie's angle on the serial killer is to explore the short-lived marriage between Wuornos and a much older yacht commodore in the mid-1970s. Lines between fact and fiction are blurred under the premise of this being the last interview Wuornos conducts from prison before her death by lethal injection in 2002.

The "unreliable narrator" approach reduces this to a story not so much about Wuornos but about serial killers, and, by extension, it becomes another gross example of what amounts to serial killer porn. The acting is easily the best thing about this movie, but the story itself so clumsily handles the debate in the depictions of Wuornos as some kind of "outlaw of the patriarchy" or someone with sociopathic tendencies (or both) that the acting can't compete with how gratuitous everything else about this is. At the beginning of the movie, the filmmakers show their hand by presenting a quick montage of noir movies from the '40s centered on femme fatales, an attempt to place this movie in that tradition. It just isn't, no matter how "lurid" those movies may have also been viewed by some back in the day. Maybe it's time to stop it already with movies about serial killers: "American" or otherwise.