Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer
Directed by Nick Broomfield
1993/UK
Channel 4 Television Corporation and Lafayette Films
#852 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
First Viewing
Aileen Wuornos: [In court] I’m trying to save taxpayers money; you people don’t care. You wanna press on with a jury and everything else to try to impress the public. And all I wanna do is go back to prison, wait for the chair, and get the hell off of this planet that’s full of evil and your corruption in these courtrooms.
Aileen Wuornos was the inspiration for the character played by Charlize Theron in Monster, thought to be the first female serial killer in the U.S. Aileen herself disputed that, claiming that each of the seven murders she committed was in self-defense. This documentary is not so concerned with Aileen’s life, however. It largely focuses on how she got mixed up with her attorney and a woman who ended up adopting her. These people convinced her to plead no contest to six of the charges against her and proceeded to try to cash in on Aileen’s story. At the same time, certain police officers were also selling her story.
While this documentary was OK, I would not call it “must see” viewing. The film maker got precious few interviews with key players so there is an awful lot of filler. It seemed to me, also, that the documentarian himself was also cashing in on the story, while criticizing others that were doing the same thing.
Trailer
