Product Description

Ever seen a film so terrifying that it made you want to sleep with all the lights on? A film so unsettling that some of its scenes were stuck in your mind long after you'd finished viewing it? John McNaughton's horrific masterpiece HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER is that kind of film. Based on true events, this critically-acclaimed classic so believably portrays the senseless killing spree of a dangerous sociopath on the loose, Michael Rooker in a bone-chilling performance, that people can't stop talking about it even twenty years after it was filmed. If you've never seen HENRY before, get ready for the ride of your life. If you have seen HENRY and are one if its many fans, you're not going to want to miss this 20th Anniversary Special Edition, which is packed full of never-before-seen extras and is presented here in a stunning new high definition transfer supervised by the director.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2578 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-09-27
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Special Edition, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 83 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Most horror films exist in a fantasy movie-world safely removed from our existence, populated by zombie-like killers and psychopathic madmen. The power of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is its chilling placement in the mundane existence of everyday life. Michael Rooker plays Henry not as a raving psychopath but as the frumpy guy next door, a drifter who takes out his frustrations on random victims and escalates his body count after teaming up with the violent ex-con Otis (Tom Towles). Though not exceedingly gory in light of the excesses of such fantasy horrors as the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series, director John McNaughton's straightforward presentation and documentary-like style creates a chilling realism that many viewers will find hard to watch. McNaughton neither comments on nor flinches at the brutal violence, which reaches its apex in a disturbing camcorder-eye view of a particularly sadistic murder of a middle-class couple, with Henry and Otis smiling through the deed as they record it for their continued pleasure. Henry straddles the line between True Crime (though fictional, the story was inspired by the confessions of real life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas) and horror, a bleak, brutal kind of terror for a generation deadened by the escalating outrageousness of movie murders and nightly news crime scene clips. --Sean Axmaker

From The New Yorker
This low-budget independent feature, originally made for the home-video market, has a stark, relentless quality that is sometimes mistaken for art. Like Leonard Kastle's "The Honeymoon Killers" (1970), it's a deliberately flat, affectless treatment of gruesome true-crime material. (It's loosely based on the criminal career of a mass murderer named Henry Lee Lucas.) The movie's Henry (Michael Rooker) is a beefy, moronic-looking lug who lives in a miserable apartment with a creep named Otis (played, by Tom Towles, in a style that suggests a syphilitic Warren Oates) and Otis's sister, Becky (Tracy Arnold). Every now and then, Henry gets a sort of funny look in his eyes and goes out to kill somebody. Eventually, he starts taking Otis along, and Otis has a whale of a time; for a while, they videotape their exploits and watch them at home afterward. "Henry" plays like a hybrid of "Blood Feast" and "Stranger Than Paradise"; it mixes gore-movie carnage with Jarmusch-style aimless minimalism. Sure, it's compelling; the nature of the material guarantees that. But it doesn't seem to be telling us much more than that the world is a scary place and murder is ugly. We knew those things. This is tabloid chic. The screenplay is by John McNaughton and Richard Fire; McNaughton directed. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

An amazing horror movie
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a rare film, it's a horror film filled with gore that's actually scary. Micheal Rooker plays Henry with intensity often copied but never as equal. The things that Henry does in the movie are very shocking and the film isn't for those who have a weak heart. I give this film **** out of ****.

Not Scary, But Very Disturbing
Henry is former convict who served in prison for killing his mother when he was just 14. A mother that abused and neglected him for years by forcing him to wear dresses and making him watch her have sex with strangers. We don't see this, it's merely implied by Henry when talking with the sister of his friend and roomate Otis, Becky who stops by live with the two for a while. This explains Henry's hatred for women and why most of his victims are such. He shows a genuine revulsion to any physical contact with women when he is seen killing a hooker in the backseat of Otis' car and when Becky kisses him during a home video session where he looks uncomfortable and wipes his mouth off.

Otis stands more as composite degenerate type with almost every type of sexual perversion that one can muster. He makes advances on young boys he sells drugs to, attempts necrophilia on a dead woman he just killed and is constantly making incestuous advances on his sister Becky only to be stopped by Henry who again shows revulsion to any kind of sex. However at first, he is not a killer until Henry shows him the way and enlightens him to the "rush" of the kill.

Under the "teachings" of Henry, the two go on a spree of killing random victims in different ways so not to leave a modis operande. A good samaritan is shot when fooled into thinking the two have car trouble. An illegal appliance salesman is stabbed with a soldering iron and having a TV smashed over his head. And in the most disturbing scene in the film, we see an entire family slaughtered in their own home as photographed from a video camcorder they stole from the murdered salesman. We then see them sitting on the sofa watching this video and drinking beer like they were watching the Super Bowl!

Sound powerful and disturbing? You bet! Writer/director John McNaughton holds nothing back in this realistic portrayal of diseased minds. Forget Jason, Michael and Freddy who are just fantasy killers with supernatural qualities that seemed to have just come out of adult comic books. This is loosly based on the exploits of real life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas (who claimed to have killed over 300 people).

The film is made in a sort of quasi-documentary style reminiscent of William Freidken's style in The Exorcist, using hand-held cameras and minimal lighting to give it grit and realism. The opening shot is that of a naked woman lying somewhere in a field with blood on her. Then we switch over to Henry doing his day-to-day activities and as he does this, we see brief shots of other various mutilated female corpses juxaposed while hearing the sounds of the murders that took place earlier. I consider this to be the best sequence in the whole film.

McNaughton made this film in 1985 for a mere $100,000 in his hometown Chicago but was not released until four years later. The MPAA refused to give it an R rating due to it's disturbing content so the film was shelved. Like George A. Romero's 1977 classic Dawn of the Dead, it eventually got released as unrated with no one under 17 admitted. It was this film along with Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover that sparked the debate on a new rating that eventually brought in the NC-17 rating.

The acting is top notch, the then unknown Michael Rooker gives a real chilling performance as the title character along with Tom Towles as the goofy but sick Otis. Rooker went on to do several acclaimed films like Mississippi Burning and JFK. Towles moved on to mostly TV most notably with his recurring role as the internal affairs investigator in NYPD Blue.

Critical reaction was mixed when released, some critics like Ebert praised it for it's unflinching look into a killer's head. Others savaged it as exploitation gone way over the top. You be the judge. Scary? Not really, but very disturbing and it won't leave your head anytime soon after watching it.

Horrible Movie
Im an avid Horror movie enthusiast and I was interested in this movie, but unfortunatly I was very disapointed. It's just a poorly put together film, with poor acting and I wouldnt recomend this to anyone. DONT WASTE YOUR MONEY.

-Casey