Monster (2022)

[Ed Gein] didn’t just kill people; he dug up corpses and turned them into arts and crafts projects. At least he was creative. So, too, is this “Monster“ installment (currently streaming on Netflix) — especially when it artfully mixes the story of Gein, played by Charlie Hunnam as the ultimate damaged mama’s boy, with the fictional monsters he inspired.

Thankfully, this latest in the Monster series lacks the gruesome excesses of Dahmer. But it also feels like a muddled mix of the best and worst of Murphy’s oeuvre. It’s likely to please his legions of fans, but may leave his detractors feeling a little queasy.

There is almost a conflict between the show’s goals and Peters’: “Dahmer” wants to make him, at times, haunting, a terrifying person whose reason is beyond our understanding, but Peters plays him, very often, as vacant and kind of oafish. This paradox would be compelling, particularly in relation to the way that police basically allowed Dahmer to continue his crimes if the show weren’t so excruciatingly boring.

Dahmer has a habit of announcing what kind of show it wants to be instead of actually being that show. ... I can only hope creators will realize there is a way to tell these kinds of stories with more sensitivity and care rather than mere gestures toward sensitivity and care. In the sixth episode, Dahmer does exactly that, but it doesn’t maintain that approach for the entirety of its season. ... It’s admirable that Dahmer wants to honor the victims’ lives and celebrate who Hughes was as a person. But that effort can’t be a complete success in a show that also insists on literally reducing Hughes to a piece of meat.

The show comes close to earning its wallow when it turns to focus on Glenda and others, when it shakes its head angrily at the disregard of the Milwaukee police. But far too much of the show is spent standing over Dahmer’s shoulder, watching him in action. It becomes hard to see the show as anything more than lascivious.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is as pulpy and sloppy as the comics that Ed reads, a product of sensationalism, rage bait, and misinformation.

Monster seizes the opportunity to indict the very audience that made it one of TV’s most popular shows. The upshot of this contempt is a season that layers hypocrisy as well as sanctimony over the grubby, tedious nihilism that made Dahmer so miserable to watch.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Pretty good show. Before watching it, I had never heard of Jeff Dahmer. I am not fan of the back and forth in chronology, but to the maker's credit, they provided date so the spectator would not be lost. Also, some scenes, like the night club ones, could have been shorter. On the opposite, I would have liked more interrogation scenes. Despite its qualities, the show only gets a 6 because of the heavy woke propaganda. Ok, Balcerzak was a very bad cop and the police union had too much power; this is still not a reason to push all this propaganda.

This was way too long, and I mean that. And it's brutally flawed with the fact that to some extent it seems to be glorifying this murderer. I'm really not sure what Ryan Murphy was trying to do. Evan Peters is too expressionless to consider his performance to really stand out, but his work is good in its own right. From what I see with its success on Netflix, the streaming giant clearly got what it wanted, but in some ways I think this show feels more like an introduction of this serial killer to modern audiences who had probably never heard of him and all the rest is merely the idea of combining the grotesque with something that could be considered entertainment.

Some of the early episodes where they were just telling the story were great. There were little hints early on that the makers were going to be a little moralistic and “my truthy” about things, but it was forgivable and still well done and at times riveting. Then came the last few episodes. Wow, what a steaming pool of wet poop it turned into. Just endless scenes and hours of sappy, patronizing, moralizing, sophomoric crap.

A mildly interesting show. Like many crime dramas, there is always that thrill that accompanies them, the morbid curiosity, and the show plays on it well. Beyond that, it is mostly boring. However, the biggest flaw is the incessant, inane, and bat **** crazy attempt to make it all about race. The first people who were victimized were white. Many different races were targeted. The revisionist history of a "woke"-pandering hollywood is in full display in this one, to the detriment of the viewer. Dahmer was a homicidal, loser, maniac cannibal who targeted vulnerable people, drugged them to get them defenseless, then killed them and defiled their bodies. That's the story. Not a racist criminal operating in a racist city that happened to involve murder, cannibalism, and predatory behavior. For that, the show loses major points.