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Being a movie reviewer, especially one who is a horror film expert besides by sheer dint of having seen a number of  titles sufficiently large that I’ve lost count, allows you to see some of the worst villains Hollywood can dream up.  Monsters straight out of hell itself and from everywhere in between—even a few sent from heaven!  But out of the many, many such evildoers that I’ve seen in my day, there are precious few who can compare to the sheer insensate evil that was Albert Fish.

So when I heard about The Gray Man, a movie about him, I knew it was going to be an interesting ride, one way or another.

Indeed, that’s what The Gray Man is all about—in 1928, a ten year old little girl by the name of Grace Budd was kidnapped, last seen in the company of a kindly old grandfather figure by the name of Albert Fish.  Six years later, authorities arrest Fish for his role in the kidnapping…but what else they’ll discover is beyond anything they could have imagined.

This is a man who was so evil that he wrote a series of anonymous letters, detailing his crimes, and sent them to newspapers.  This is a man so spectacularly evil by human standards that one of his letters detailed a recipe.  The recipe was for “roasted child ass”.  It involved onions and carrots.

Watching this admittedly dramatized piece about the life of a man whose evil was downright shocking by any standard is at once difficult and compelling.  Getting a look at his family life is also a shocker, as nothing I had ever seen before focused on that angle.  It was a surprise to see these different angles, and they added to the whole thing with a certain depth and clarity that really made this interesting.

A word about actor Patrick Bauchau, the guy who portrayed Albert Fish:  this guy was absolutely amazing, nothing but.  He went from kindly old grandfather to raw meat eating psychopath in a matter of what seemed like minutes.  He could ooze elderly benevolence one minute and project a menace almost too thick and black to see through the next.  His range is beyond belief and must be seen to be truly appreciated.

I’ve seen a lot of horror movies involving true crime figures—the BTK Killer may have the most right now, and everybody from Jeffrey Dahmer to the Alphabet Killer and the Zodiac and all the rest have at least one.  But The Gray Man could easily be the best one I’ve ever seen.  Fuelled by Bauchau’s downright compulsive performance and riding a fearsome wave of source material that’s both brutal and horrifying, The Gray Man may well be one of the scariest, classiest, and most compelling pieces of suspense / horror I’ve seen in some time.  Even better is how, in the end, they actually manage to arrest Fish—but not on murder or abduction charges.

I warn you ahead of time, though—if you have a weak heart or stomach or constitution in general, then you’ll likely want to stay away from this one.  It’s downright brutal, even if there’s not a whole lot of blood.  But if you want to look into the face of an evil deeper than any Cenobite or Cylon or anything else Hollywood can dream up, then The Gray Man is exactly the movie you want to see.

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