By Katherine Ramsland
It's difficult to imagine making a film about a person as perverse and demented as Albert Fish, and it's equally difficult to imagine anyone doing a better job than John Borowski. He's producer, director and writer, which means he literally lived with this subject morning and night for a long stretch of time. Given his passionate attention to detail, as well as his willingness to persist inside the mind of a sexual deviant who killed children, he's emerged with a piece of engagingly visual art that has raised the bar on this subject. He knows just how to pair merciless brutality with benign period footage and illuminating commentary to keep it from getting too intense.
That said, this documentary will have narrow appeal, attracting those who can tolerate a lot of gory detail. Viewers will come away with the impression they were flies on the wall during Fish's atrocities, because even after unrelenting re-enactments have set the disturbing images, Borowski presses toward more. He clearly wants viewers to experience what Fish was like.
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| Gracie Budd |
Although Albert Fish is most famous for the sadistically detailed letter he wrote to the mother of Gracie Budd, the 10-year-old girl he took away in 1928 to kill and eat, in fact, he might have murdered as many as fifteen children, being particularly brutal with young boys. He was both cannibal and vampire, sadist and masochist, indulging in long forays of inflicting pain on others and on himself. He liked to whip and cut, removing sensitive parts while a victim was still alive. In addition, he molested at least one hundred children.
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