The biopic Ted Bundy, directed by Matthew Bright, spares no obscenity in depicting the world’s worst mass murderer. With more than one hundred deaths in his path of rape, titles at the end tell us that the term “serial killer” was coined to describe him. Although the film begins with stills of Bundy (played by Michael Reilly Burke) displaying cherubic boyishness, the drama begins at Seattle in 1974. He has a loving girlfriend and daughter, but he presumably puts off marriage until he can get a decent job. He has flunked out of law school, and he is flunking out of psychology when the film begins. In a short scene, the psychology professor defines the term “sociopath” as someone who will lie pathologically and who cannot be stopped in his determination to engage in anti-social behavior. The purpose of the scene is obviously to provide the only explanation provided in the film for his misbehavior. How does Bundy seduce and rape? His most common ploy is to catch the attention of pretty girls in their twenties with his boyish charm, then he tells them a seductive story that they want to believe in order to get them into his yellow VW Beetle, and soon they are somewhere in the woods at his mercy. At first, his rapes are uncomplicated, but in time they become more and more kinky. With the authorities after him in Seattle, in 1975 he heads for Salt Lake City, and by 1976 he is in Colorado, raping and killing as he travels east. A Colorado girl, however, fights back, reports him to the police, he is arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. He escapes from a Colorado prison, and soon he is in Tallahassee, Florida, repeating his crimes. After another escape and recapture, he is sentenced to the electric chair in Florida. The film shows the step-by-step procedure taken in preparation for the execution as well as the pulling of the switch, presumably to demonstrate that the state showed more care in killing Bundy than he did in his serial rapes and murders, though opponents of the death penalty might claim that the procedure is more brutal, recalling The Green Mile (1999). Flashbacks to his youth end the film, but we are left with no clear psychological reason to account for his sociopathic behavior. MH