For non-Canuck readers who might not be familiar with this media frenzy of the past decade, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka have the dubious distinction of being the First Couple of Canadian Crime. Bernardo, a long time serial rapist, and Homolka, an amoral party girl, had a brief courtship and marriage during the early 90s, in the small city of St. Catherines, Ontario. During this time they were responsible for the torture slayings of two teenage girls, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, as well as the rape and accidental killing of Homolka's 15-year-old sister, Tammy. After a long and bungled RCMP investigation finally led to their capture, Homolka plea bargained by turning evidence against her by-then estranged husband. Bernardo was given life without parole, and Homolka got off with 12 years for manslaughter, on the theory that her involvement was due to battered wife syndrome, and there was indeed well-documented proof that he had regularly beaten her. Only after the sentencing, however, were home videos of the crimes uncovered, and these revealed that not only Homolka was an enthusiastic participant, but possibly the actual killer, which Bernardo continues to contend from his cell. Her light sentence and subsequent release, last summer, has made her one of the most reviled persons in Canadian history. She's nowadays reportedly living in hiding, somewhere here in Montreal.
"Karla" is a sketchy adaptation of "Invisible Darkness", the true crime bestseller by Stephen Williams, which ran into legal hassles and much public outrage, for revealing court-sealed details of the grisly case, such as play-by-play descriptions of the incriminating videos. That there'd actually be a movie version was way too much for the various decency brigades, and no Canadian talent would dare touch it, so this is a rare example of a Canadian tale made entirely in the States by Americans, rather than the other way around. It shows, especially in the casting and characterizations. While the sequence of events, at least the more lurid ones, is laid out with plodding accuracy, it plays like something overheard, then retold, by someone who wasn't there. There's no feel for regional dialect or cultural idiosyncrasies, or even its time frame of a decade and a half ago. TV's Laura Prepon (no doubt imagining that this would be her "Monster" ticket to the big time)is all wrong as Karla, coming across a big-boned trailer trash hoyden perpetually stunned by her situation, rather than the petite, cunning and creepily girlish sociopath who so captured our mass revulsion. Misha Collins is all psycho-jock swagger and hoodlum snarls, with no hint of the pudgy-cheeked sickly boyish charm of the would-be yuppie next door, with his phony Ken Doll wholesomeness, that the real Bernardo not only socially aspired to, but used as such a clever disguise during his reign of terror.
The sheer ickiness of the real life couple is where "Karla" really misses the mark, in terms of both dramatic insight and black comedy potential. While the murders themselves, which the film wallows in as its main focal point, were indeed sad and terrible, there was a horrid hilarity to the killers and the 80s retro, idealized image they presented to the world. With their matching bleach blonde hair and rabid consumerism, they really thought themselves the perfect upwardly mobile couple, or at least a failed yokel approximation of one. Things like Karla's hideous taste in just about everything, and Paul's talentless aspirations to be the next Vanilla Ice, could've inserted some much needed chilly chuckles into the relentless despair, without detracting from the horrific impact. Also barely dealt with is that pompous, ridiculously expensive wedding of theirs, in which they paraded, the very picture of kitschy bliss as they waved to onlookers, through the streets of Niagara-on-the-Lake in a horse drawn carriage, only to finish the day at a grotesque reception of drunken family dysfunction. This could've surely been the most pivotal of climaxes, but is tossed off as a brief visual footnote. If only the film would've taken its cue from something like the cult classic, "The Honeymoon Killers", and balanced its real life horrors with a sense of their absurdity, which the well-written and extensively researched book was offering up in spades. That it didn't is hardly surprising, though, given all the moral indignation and potential lawsuits the production had to tippy-toe around, so that the finished product comes across as one long and pointless apology that it was even made. Of course the pedestrian direction by Joel Bender, veteran of such stellar titles as "Immortal Combat" and "Warrior Queen", doesn't help. His approach to serious docudrama seems to be showing as much nasty stuff as he can away with, with an earnest solemnity he hopes will camouflage his sleazy fixations. A classic case of flimsy talent trying to over-reach his abilities.
At any rate, I caught opening night of its limited Canadian release, and it appears that all the controversy surrounding this film has done nothing to spark attendance, and word-of-mouth certainly won't, either. Prime time crowd of maybe 50, curiosity seekers who learned absolutely nothing new, and smartsy teens (girls calling out to see if Karla was in the audience, and other girls answering, "Here I am!") looking for bad taste laughs, which it wasn't even inept enough to provide. My guess is that in its country of origin, where it hasn't yet found a distributor, "Karla" will go the route of the rest of Bender's products, bypassing the marquees and heading straight to cable.
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