The reportage of a serial killer becomes the subject for a novel by William P. Wood and for the movie "Rampage" by William Friedkin. The film "Rampage" opens with the scene in the suburbs of a town where Charles Reece, Alex McArthur, he's a nice free and easy guy, looking a little enigmatic behind a pair of sunglasses. Wearing a red coat, he walks towards a house.

Then he shoots to the persons inside, using a gun brought at a shop, starting in a series of homicides. Charles Reece carries out these crimes because he's convicted that he must to feed himself with other people's blood to remedy his own blood. In psychiatric criminology, perhaps he could be considered a visionary serial killer. His obsessions lead him to continue in these murders.

Visiting the Tippetts' house, he makes another massacre, but some of them are not at home, so they're on safe, Tippetts, Royce D. Applegate, can give a description of this psychopatic.

Policemen start to effect an inspection at Reece's house, talking with his mother performed by Grace Zabriskie, to understand something about Charles Reece's personality. For the police when suspects become certainty, detectives go to a fuel station where Charles Reece works.

This is one of the most charming scenes to see how Reece shows himself sly, polite, lying to detectives' questions. Trying to swindle them, he searchs to escape. When detectives incriminate him going to prison Reece makes some examinations, also he must to be at various court's hearings. In the movie it's interesting the psychological dialogue in the prison cell when Charlie wearing a detention suit, he's interrogated by policemen, giving them an hallucinated statement of the reasons who have pushed him to do all those murders. The procurator Anthony Fraser, Michael Biehn, must to meet to a hard trial which it also becomes a subject of coscience. Public prosecutors want to accuse Reece of voluntary homicide for all the murders, while psychiatric authorities charged by the defence lawyers work about his insanity.

So they ask themselves what to do: the execution or the internment at a criminal asylum. During the law court's hearings, Charles Reece seems normal. Alex McArthur performs him with

the look of a good guy. Reece wearing a stylish suit, he looks with his blue eyes at the public, it seems like to search for comprehension while people look at him, asking themselves how he could have done those actions. And still Charlie is unforeseeable. In fact when he's escorted by warders from the prison, Reece smiles with them to socialize. It's when he attacks them, trying to escape. In the structure of the movie characterized by symbolic sequences, one of the most remarkable scenes it's when Reece puts blood on his skin with a tiger on the background.

It seems to express an explosive primeval ferocity in the abyss of his madness. Tracked he comes back to prison and when the sentence of guilty is pronounced, a series of analysis demonstrate his mental sickness. In the new version of "Rampage" when the Tippetts go to a fair among lights and entertainments, Charles Reece writes a letter behind the prison bars. The american version of "Rampage" on screening at Torino Film Festival in italian version it's titled "Assassino senza colpa" on video, "Ritratto di un serial killer" for television.

Film extrêmement complexe et ambigu sur la peine de mort, d'autant plus que Friedkin changea d'opinion sur la question en cours de route, et tourna deux fins radicalement opposées dans leur discours. Rien que pour cela, Rampage mérite une édition DVD (avec les deux montages, évidemment !).