G8R 8U2 This one was pretty bad. As others have said, virtually no part of the setting was realistic for the time. Additionally, and contrary to some other opinions, Mauro Lannini's portrayal of Albert DeSalvo is absolutely terrible... not chilling or the least bit believable. The only thing going for Lannini is that he does look a lot like DeSalvo. However, DeSalvo was born and raised in Massachusetts, so he wouldn't have had the decidedly Italian accent that Lannini had and couldn't disguise in the movie. This one is certainly worth missing, and I actually wish I hadn't wasted my time. There seem to be a lot of lame efforts at making a good serial killer movie lately from true stories that have a lot of potential without any added "artistic" or "creative" contributions; yet filmmakers continue to ruin them. This is another.

coffeepro Right off the bat I noticed the same thing another reader mentions... the longish, styled 70's haircut the lead detective is sporting. NO police force allowed hair like that in 1965! Also annoying is the fact it is set in Boston, yet I hear ZERO Boston dialect! If you listen carefully there are a lot of phrases that didn't come into vogue until at least the 90's. I realize this is being nitpicky.. but c'mon these were obvious and very easy fixes. Who writes this junk anyway? The frequent night shots of the Boston skyline (same shot repeated over and over) were also annoying. If the set pieces matched the actual time frame I might have boosted this up a notch.

shadylanes This is a good example of a interesting idea horribly executed.The only positive thing i can say about this film is that Mauro Lannini gives a credible performance as the unbalanced DeSalvo. This, however, can not save this low-budget effort.The sparse sets are mostly dreadful - there is no period detail whatsoever and therefore very little atmosphere. Apart from Lannini, the quality of acting is mediocre and the script itself is uninspired and instantly forgettable.The director relies too heavily on "flashback" sequences giving the film a disjointed feel and the numerous overhead shots of Boston in-between scenes soon got on my nerves.On a lighter note, the film concludes with one of the most amusingly awful "aging" effects i've ever seen as Jason David wears a tonne of make-up to portray an old detective Riley.Overall - definitely one to miss.

cteditor The 2006 movie Boston Strangler is not a remake of the 1968 movie with that same name, since they have completely different perspectives on the historic basis of the respective stories, although both versions attempt to blend fact and fiction about events in the early to mid 1960s. The 1968 version accepted as fact that Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to the murders of 13 women, was the Boston Strangler. The 2006 movie (which this review will exclusively refer to from now on) raised doubts on whether DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. The movie is a low-budget, independent film and you can tell it. If a person makes allowances for this, which I am personally willing to do, then the movie has some strong points. The movie is directed by Keith Walley. The character of Albert DeSalvo is played by Mauro Lannini and the character of Detective Riley is played by Jason David. DeSalvo was a real person who confessed to 13 murders and was subsequently murdered in prison. Riley is a fictional creation, used in the movie to raise doubts about the validity of DeSalvo's confession. Lannini gave a chillingly believable performance as DeSalvo and David gave a strong performance as a skeptical police detective. For the most part, the less important characters were portrayed in an adequate manner, although there were some lines that were delivered in a stiff manner and a few lines were overdone. Close to the end, the back story about Riley jerks ahead twice, giving insufficient information about what is going on. If we're given this fictional subplot, then it needed to be developed better. There are two anachronisms in this period piece that jumped out at me. In one scene, a character said, "They're all looking for their 15 minutes," an apparent reference to a statement by Andy Warhol made in 1968, three years after the time of the statement in the movie. I confess that I had to look up the time of Warhol's statement and it is a trivial point. To some people, the other anachronism might also be trivial but I found it highly annoying. The time of Detective Riley's first appearance in the movie was identified as March 1965, slightly more than a year after the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, shocking most adults with their not-quite-shoulder-length hair. Not only did Detective Riley have longer hair than the Beatles wore on Ed Sullivan, it was highly styled. This would be roughly the equivalent today of a police officer showing up for duty wearing purple spiked hair and a red rubber clown nose. This bothered me so much through the movie that it lowered my estimation of the movie from fair to mediocre.