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The Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer (1993)

Dir: David R. Bowen

Backed by his own narration we follow the murderous trail of real-life serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (the film’s writer Carl Crew) who prayed on young men.
Dahmer would drug his victims before killing them, often having sex with their corpses (until the bodies rotted in his bed) and he would even store their body parts in his fridge, and often cook them up to eat.
This way, Dahmer said, his victims would always be a part of him…

 

This sadly rather obscure low budget movie is a pretty damn accurate reconstruction (without going too far into gruesome details) of Dahmer's 17 corpse murder spree and does a far better job at showing the cruelty and tragedy of his crimes than the more widely seen “Dahmer”, although this version of the story was made and released before Dahmer’s subsequent murder in prison.

We have a few dubious performances sometimes (the actors playing the cops during the finale are especially bad and hurt this pivotal scene), but overall “The Secret Life” is very well made and obviously a labour of love for David R. Bowen and Carl Crew.
And Crew himself is pretty good for the most part (though he does have a few moments that skip from the wooden to the overwrought) and his dream-like readings of Dahmer's thoughts and feelings are especially effective.
A nice music score (songs by various artists and an original score by Bowen) also helps the sombre proceedings.
And sombre this movie most certainly is.
It basically covers not much more than Dahmer's murders themselves and as such the ceaseless production line of corpses and snatched away lives makes for a very sobering and bleak viewing experience.  Especially when combined with the grainy cinematography (by Michael A. Jones and Ronald Vidor), sombre music and narration.

Although not very gory (we do see some body parts and splashed/spraying blood) the film is pretty grim and violent as, although it does not show gore, it almost always shows the victim's death in detail.
And some of these deaths are very unpleasant.  The most effective scenes are a still living man pushed into the (infamous) barrel of acid and a truly harrowing scene where a victim wakes up, after Dahmer has drilled a hole in the side of his head as part of his plan to make compliant zombies,  and the following screams and jerky convulsions (made worse when acid is injected into the drill hole) are genuinely unsettling and downright nasty.

The film only briefly, mostly via the narration, touches upon the necrophilia aspects and the cannibal aspects (though this is certainly made obvious), but is otherwise extremely accurate in how it portrays the macabre events, including the shocking incident when one young Asian man escaped Dahmer and reached the Police, only to have them send him back with Dahmer when he persuades them the young man is his drunken lover. Once back in Dahmer’s clutches the young man was quickly murdered.

The screenplay is ultimately narrow in scope and as such rather repetitive in it‘s endless catalogue of death, but this is still a film that is well worth getting hold of as there is much to admire here as it treads the fine line between respectful reconstruction of the events and the inevitable exploitation of them.
Well made and suitably sombre in execution, “The Secret Life” is ripe for re-discovery.