If you don't know too much about the actual Zodiac killings, then you might find this movie worth the rental fee, but if you do then I suspect that you will react by turning the movie off after the second murder. For whatever reason, the slaying of Darlene Ferrin & the attempted murder of Mike Mageau is set up as two teenagers who have parked in a lover's lane in Vallejo to I assume make out, which isn't the case at all. It doesn't state tell you that Darlene was a married waitress, who ran around on her husband with cops for the most part & that Darlene had been followed for months by a stocky man who went by a one syllable handle such as 'Bob.' Nor did it inform the viewer that Darlene new this man & was very afraid of him & would tell her friends not to approach him whenever he was around. Darlene had also confessed to a baby sitter who had spotted the man outside of her house that she had witnessed this man commit a murder. Nor does it inform you Mike was one of two twin brothers who were infatuated by her and rivaled for her affection. It doesn't seem to tell you that Darlene had predicted that something big was going to happen on the night of her murder saying quote,"Expect to see my name in the paper, tomorrow morning." Nor does it show the fact that Mike Mageau was wearing three sets of clothing in July for some unknown reason & that Mike had told police after Darlene's murder that she seemed to know the person who had attacked them. It is these sets of facts that make the Zodiac slayings so spooky & to show them as just random killings seems to trivialize the whole thing into nothing more then a glorified slasher film. Also, the killer had phoned the police afterwards from a pay phone that was in eye sight of Darlene's home & just across from the sheriffs department & the weapon was different then the one used in the David Faraday & Betty Lou Jensen murders. Igoring these kinds of facts are the reason I turned the movie off 40 minutes in. If you don't know much about the Zodiac killings then this might be decent introduction to them, but I would suggest starting with the Robert Graysmith novels or go & see 'Zodiac' the movie based off of the Graysmith novels which I hear stay true to the actual killings. It saddens me that Justin Chambers, Robin Tunney, & Rory Culkin were apart of this film because I could tell that there performances in this film were inspiring & it pained me to not be able to stick with them through the whole sham of a movie.
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