The countdown to Halloween begins with a feature-length foray into one of the nastiest serial killers of the past couple of decades, Jeffrey Dahmer. This film version, titled simply Dahmer, boasts an extremely impressive performance by Jeremy Renner in the lead. Renner is all-too-creepy as the conflicted gay man who, according to the speculative fictions of this film, became a killer after being brutally rejected at a sensitive young time in his life.

The film’s structure is intriguing, as we leap between several of Dahmer’s “dates,” in which the tension builds as he courts his various targets, drugs them up, then drills into them, poses for Polaroids of himself with the corpses, cuts the bodies up into pieces, and so on, all in a rather unpleasant mating ritual. Needless to say, this fellow was some sick puppy.

Though writer-director David Jacobson acknowledges fictionalizing some of the events and characters, included is perhaps the most horrifying true incident in the killer’s oeuvre, when one drugged-up escapee was actually returned to Dahmer by police.

Still, despite these goings-on, the film doesn’t manage to be nearly as horrifying as it should be. Surprising, considering what Jacobson had to work with—easily the most shocking criminal in recent memory. : - Matthew Hays