‘Zodiac Killer Project’ is murder on true-crime tales
Where would all those streaming services be without the cheap, easy-to-produce fodder that is true crime? And isn’t it about time someone dared satirize its numerous cliches? Well, cheeky filmmaker Charlie Shackleton is game, using his bloody good “Zodiac Killer Project” to dispatch those all-too-familiar tropes.
He knows from where he speaks. When setting out to adapt former California Highway Patrol officer Lyndon E. Lafferty’s 2012 memoir “The Zodiac Killer Cover-up: The Silent Badge,” Shackleton worked tirelessly, plotting and storyboarding his ideas, only to be derailed late in the process by the decision of the Lafferty estate to rescind the film rights. What to do?
Instead of giving up, Shackleton decided to approach his movie in a manner that would not merely enable him to tap his years of research but also poke fun at himself and his peers, whose works are virtually all the same except for the interchangeability of the crimes and perpetrators. It’s really kinda ingenious. And I’m willing to bet a much larger box-office potential than if he had played it straight.
It’s immediately evident that Shackleton is a firm believer in the meta musings of Charlie Kaufman, a screenwriter well-versed in the absurdity of attempting to subvert the conventional while remaining within the strict rules of the genre. Accordingly, Shackleton’s flick echoes the themes of Kaufman’s Oscar-winning “Adaptation,” where Nicolas Cage’s blocked screenwriter divided himself into two characters at odds with each other in pursuit of the same goal.
So, in essence, we get two Shackletons, one filled with deep regret that he didn’t get to make the film he wanted, and the other an ambitious rebel determined to skirt the legalities to deliver the next best thing. As the narrator of his own story, Shackleton cleverly tells, instead of showing, what his original film might have been, and does it without violating a single copyright law.
For example, after laying out in great detail how his unmade movie would have opened, he ends the segment by lamenting, “Fuck, it would have been good,” knowing full well he’s successfully planted the images in our minds. It’s a device he revisits frequently, and almost always with the same vivid detail.
It almost goes without saying that he will deliver re-enactments, a staple of the genre, as well as all-too-familiar shots of yellow police tape being unspooled, a shadowy figure pointing a gun at the camera and that old reliable standby: spent shell casings bouncing off the floor in super-slow motion. He also slyly mocks the more dishonest elements of recent smash hits such as “The Jinx,” “Tiger King,” and “Making A Murderer.”
Never, though, does he lose sight of the compelling story he’s telling about a rogue cop come vigilante, taking it upon himself to conduct his own investigation into the man he’s certain committed the Zodiac’s five known murders in and around Marin County in the late 1960s. With the dogged determination of a stalker, Lafferty followed the guy for years, even tricking him into being his friend. As Shackleton notes, it was an obsession equal to that of Robert Graysmith, the San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist who spent years attempting to decode letters the murderer wrote, culminating in the memoir that became the source of David Fincher’s masterpiece, “Zodiac.”
I’m sure it eats at Shackleton that Fincher’s movie came to fruition, with no less than Jake Gyllenhaal portraying Graysmith, while his didn’t. But the “Zodiac Killer Project” is a sweet consolation prize, injecting it not just with new, pertinent information about the unsolved case but presenting it in such an entertaining manner. After seeing it, you’ll likely never look at true crime the same way again.
Movie review
Zodiac Killer Project
Rated: Not rated
Director: Charlie Shackleton
Writer: Charlie Shackleton
Runtime: 92 minutes
Where: In theaters Nov. 21 (limited) before expanding Nov. 28 and Dec. 5
Grade: B
