He’d much rather be alone with a bottle, if not killing and slashing open animals, and so it’s something of a mystery who’ll stay by Jeff’s side and why. Jeff (or “Dumber,” as he’s sometimes called around school) isn’t particularly interested in friendship. The happy-ish medium seems to lie with Derf’s (Alex Wolff) small crew, but closeted gay Jeff still feels like an outsider - and a not-entirely-comfortable source of entertainment - around the casually homophobic pack of run-of-the-mill sadists. See Photos: From Slenderman to Jeffrey Dahmer: 9 Notorious Wisconsin Violent Crimes On the other extreme is the school psycho (Miles Robbins), who even scares Jeff when the two of them go into the woods and the other boy instigates a game of Russian roulette. On one extreme is a sweet, presumed-to-be-gay classmate (Jack DeVillers) who invites Jeff to a concert headlined by their favorite singer, Neil Sadaka, and from whom Jeff callously walks away whenever the slighter boy is roughed up for his effeminacy.
In high school, your social circle can become your destiny, and so an inadvertent battle for Jeff’s soul takes place. Much of the handsome but unilluminating “My Friend Dahmer” is a kind of guessing game.
In the most cringe-inducing of these lines, Jeff says of the chicken at the dinner table, “I like the dark meat.” It interests me, what’s inside,” Jeff explains to his new friends in one of several clunky allusions to Dahmer’s later crimes, which disproportionately victimized men of color.
#MY FRIEND DAHMER MOVIE NEAR ME SERIAL#
See Photo: Disney Star Cast as Jeffrey Dahmer Has 'Uncanny' Resemblance to Serial Killer A stooped, yellow-mopped loner in bell bottoms and wire aviators, “Jeff” (played by an opaque Ross Lynch of Disney Channel fame) begins to hang with a trio of bullies after his father (Dallas Roberts) tosses out the teen’s animal-corpse collection. Even with faulty or unpleasurable movies, you can probably figure out a project’s reason for being: niche appeal, a cash grab, a private obsession, etc.Īnd then there’s the rare picture, like “My Friend Dahmer,” that’ll leave you in a puddle of your own dandruff after you’ve scratched your head for two hours.Īdapted from the 2012 biographical comic of the same name by cartoonist John Backderf (credited here by the obvious pseudonym “Derf Backderf”), “My Friend Dahmer” details serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s final months in high school at the tail end of the 1970s. Any feature, as anybody reading this likely knows, is a massive undertaking that requires months or years of intense, sustained effort. Sometimes you spend an entire film wondering why it exists.