Starkweather (2004)

Memorable, crazy movie

Don't Believe the Hype

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

When the highlight of any movie are the credits you know that you have just seen a bomb. This one is a rotten bomb. I doubt that more than $95 was spent on this embarrassment. Cheap scenes, misinformation and more. Phew!Once in a while an error will show up in any movie regarding location or cars but in this case the entire movie was an error.While the facts behind the crimes might have been from the so called police blotters everything else was totally bogus. The description of the cars were far off. There was a scene supposedly in Nebraska on some interstate highway that looked like it was shot on some obscure county road. Moreover if you have been in the Omaha-Lincoln area you don't see a whole lot of mountains either.I could go on and on with how bad this movie was. But I think the message is there.The acting varied from bad to awful. It added to the fact that there was absolutely no redeeming factor to this effort.You saw all the blood and guts which probably was the high (or should I say "low') point of the movie.I seem to recall that Starkweather was caught in California but that's not even important here. What is important is that if there is another book with the 50 worst movies "Starkweather" should certainly be in the top ten.This is a "must miss" on anyone's list.

For all those who complained about killer boom mikes the copy I saw didn't have any but then I wasn't looking for them. There was a comment from someone in Oz that stated that they all sounded like southerners not mid westerners. In post-depression Nebraska and Kansas out in the country they were poor and uneducated for the most part and thats what they sounded like to me.Now for the good stuff. There is a very nice set of articles amassed by Court TV in their crime library. All you have to do is a Google search on Charles Starkweather. It's under mass and spree murderers. I only looked at this movie to see if it had stayed true to the facts. And as far as I can see it has. (except for the mentor appearing every now and then). They didn't glorify his deeds or anything like they did in the "loosely based" movies like Natural Born Killers etc. They pretty much stayed with the facts and what I remember reading in the newspapers back in 1957-1959. So like the rest of the U.S. we read about it in the morning and evening papers when all of this was happening. When I saw the American Justice documentary on this a few years ago it was stated that when she got to prison a kindly matron took her under her wing and made sure she got a proper education and turned her into a nice young lady so if she ever got out she would have something to work with on the outside. At her parole hearing in 1977 (at which members of the families also testified) The matron and the wardens testimony must have carried a lot of weight because she was paroled after spending over half of her life in prison. And from what I understand from that documentary she is leading a useful and productive life. Caril Ann Fugate is only 18 months younger than me. So if anyone really cares about the facts and not just the content and acting in the movie what I saw was good.

This movie was better than i thought it would be but the movie was still a little bit crap the movies about a true story about how a man and his girlfriend go on a killing spree killing 11 people in 1958.The movie stars actors like Shannon Lucio from the t.v show the o.c,Brent Taylor,Jerry Kroll and Lance Henriksen.The acting in this film is OK but it could of been better and the movie is entertaining from start to finish and i recommend this film to rent but save your money and do not bye this movie.Shannon Lucio does an OK acting job in this movie and so does Brent Taylor and over all this movie was OK and my rating is 5 out of 10.

I have to wonder at the completely opposing reactions this film has garnered here, people seem to either love it or hate it. While I didn't hate it, I have to chime in with a few of the things that they've been talking about. I grew up in the Belmont neighborhood of Lincoln, Nebraska, only a few blocks away from Caril Anne Fugate's house. Understandably my childhood was literally steeped in the mythology of the crimes depicted in this film and as I grew older I began to do my own research about them. I've had extensive conversations with older relatives who were living in Lincoln at the time and read an entire book about the crimes based on contemporary newspaper stories about the events as they happened (Headline: Starkweather by Earl Dyer, much better than the movie, if a little dry).Firstly, anyone who says that this is an accurate depiction of the events is fooling themselves. There are parts that are accurate but many that are not. The sad part is that the things that are accurate are the kind of things you would learn after doing a Google search. In fact, as I watched this movie I kept telling my husband that I suspected that was the extent of the research done for this film, which is a sad testament to the people that died in these events, the filmmakers couldn't even be bothered with an in depth examination of the crimes. It's not hard to get the dates and body positions of the dead right, what's hard is making a picture that tries for the truth based on a melange of forensic evidence/psychology and police statements. In this case, where Fugate and Starkweather gave such conflicting stories, it could have been so interesting, but instead we have the gimmicky "Devil" character...please! Now I'll get nit-picky. I will pretty much guarantee you that there is only one shot in this movie actually filmed in Nebraska, and that is the brief beauty shot of the state capitol building. Everything else was clearly in California, my husband and I had that pegged before the Bartlett's even appeared on screen. Where is the snow!? There is a reason we used to call Nebraska winters "Ragnorok". There is also a crepe myrtle in bloom behind the Bartlett house, which I have to say, cracked me up. There are no cacti around Lincoln, and the landscape has _no_ mountains of any type, only rolling prairie and the occasional line of trees as a windbreak. I also enjoy that Lincoln literally seemed like a non-city, with no real shots of streets, traffic, or even any of the houses still exactly like they were in that time period. The southern, stereotypical, hick accents were annoying me before the movie got going. Nebraska has it's own dialect, why ignore that in favor of something so pedestrian? There were other little anachronisms here and there, and other little things that only matter to me; like the fact that there is no Lincoln Gazette (never has been as far as I know), just the Lincoln Star and the Lincoln Journal that covered the events in question.But who cares about all that junk, right? Well, those things are only a barometer that indicates the general level of production value achieved on this movie. You can literally see the actors working their butts off to turn this load into something worthwhile, and I commend them for that. The two leads accurate portrayal of the couple too vacant to stay out of trouble seemed genuine. In fact, the only thing I liked about this movie is the choice to make Charlie to hopelessly dense, violent and romantic all at once.