William Friedkin’s Rampage is one of those strange, half-buried works that seems to have fallen through the cracks of both its era and its director’s reputation. Shot in 1987 but not properly released in the United States until 1992, the film was reshaped, delayed, and nearly lost amid legal and studio troubles. That liminal history fits its tone: Rampage feels suspended between the moral horror of the 1970s and the slick procedural fascination of the 1990s. It’s a disturbing, intelligent, and uneasy hybrid, a courtroom thriller haunted by the logic of a horror movie.
The film is loosely based on the real crimes of Richard Chase, a serial killer nicknamed “The Vampire of Sacramento.” In Friedkin’s fictional retelling, the murderer becomes Charles Reece (Alex McArthur), an outwardly ordinary young man driven by bloodlust and delusion. After committing a series of gruesome killings, he is captured and put on trial. The prosecution, led by district attorney Anthony Fraser (Michael Biehn), demands the death penalty. The defense argues insanity, claiming Reece is too mentally unstable to understand the wrongness of his acts.
This conflict—between law and madness, retribution and mercy, forms the film’s center. Rampage isn’t content to be a conventional police thriller. Instead, it becomes a long moral argument about whether a man like Reece should be executed, institutionalized, or perhaps simply removed from the realm of human understanding altogether.
Friedkin, whose earlier films (The French Connection, The Exorcist) fused documentary realism with moral dread, approaches Rampage with unusual restraint. The violence, though horrific, is never fetishized. He stages the murders almost clinically, using stillness, natural sound, and subdued lighting to create unease rather than shock. The bloodletting happens quickly and without spectacle; the horror lies in the emptiness afterward.
The director’s style here sits somewhere between crime reportage and moral parable. Handheld cameras and naturalistic sets give the film a raw authenticity, but Friedkin punctuates these grounded moments with surreal imagery: flashes of Reece’s hallucinations, glimpses of crucifixes, or distorted flashes of light that suggest the intrusion of the irrational into the real. The overall mood is sterile but feverish—a world where bureaucratic procedure tries and fails to contain madness.
Alex McArthur’s portrayal of Charles Reece is chilling precisely because it avoids showmanship. He doesn’t play the killer as a monstrous caricature; instead, Reece is pale, quiet, and oddly passive, a man who drifts through scenes with blank incomprehension. When violence erupts, it feels less like a choice than an eruption, something terrifyingly automatic. McArthur captures that contradiction with unsettling calm.
Michael Biehn, as prosecutor Fraser, is the audience’s surrogate conscience. At the start, he is morally opposed to capital punishment, but as he confronts Reece’s atrocities, his certainty begins to fracture. Biehn handles this transformation with intensity, though at times the screenplay forces him into didactic monologues. His internal struggle, between rational justice and emotional outrage, anchors the film’s philosophical core.
Nicholas Campbell, as defense attorney Albert Morse, offers a measured counterpoint. His arguments for the insanity defense feel sincere but weary, as if even he doubts the system’s ability to define sanity in meaningful terms. Friedkin doesn’t give the defense as much screen time, which leaves the film slightly tilted toward the prosecutor’s moral point of view. Still, Campbell’s scenes add crucial complexity to the debate.
At its heart, Rampage is a film about the limits of human understanding. Friedkin asks whether certain crimes can even be processed through reason or law. Reece’s killings are so senseless that psychiatry and jurisprudence both seem powerless to explain them. The film constantly contrasts the language of science and law with images of primal chaos, blood on snow, broken bodies, a man muttering prayers over his victims.
The courtroom sequences present a series of ideological clashes: logic versus emotion, punishment versus rehabilitation, sanity versus possession. Friedkin never allows one side to “win.” Instead, he pushes the viewer to sit with discomfort. Even when the film edges toward endorsing the death penalty, its tone remains haunted by uncertainty. The question is never just whether Reece deserves to die, but whether society is capable of making such a decision without becoming monstrous itself.
There’s also an undercurrent of cynicism toward institutions. The psychiatrists, expert witnesses, and legal technicians all appear compromised—more interested in reputation or procedure than in truth. Friedkin paints a system that can measure chemical imbalances but cannot comprehend evil. That pessimism feels characteristic of the director, whose work often circles the idea that order and chaos are thinly divided.
For all its ambition, Rampage is not seamless. The pacing can feel uneven: the early scenes of investigation and capture are taut and frightening, but the courtroom drama that follows sometimes bogs down in exposition. The dialogue occasionally becomes heavy-handed, spelling out ethical positions that would have been more powerful left implied.
The film also bears the scars of its troubled production history. Multiple cuts exist, and the American release differs notably from the European version. Friedkin changed the ending, shifting the film’s moral emphasis and simplifying its ambiguity. The result is a final act that feels more decisive than the film’s own logic justifies. Some viewers see that as betrayal; others find it an appropriately bleak conclusion.
Another limitation lies in its depiction of mental illness. While Friedkin avoids sensationalizing Reece as a cartoonish “psycho,” the film still treats insanity as an inscrutable evil rather than a medical reality. Modern audiences may find this perspective dated or simplistic, though it reflects the 1980s climate in which it was conceived.
When Rampage finally surfaced in the early 1990s, it was met with mixed reviews. Some critics praised its seriousness and craftsmanship; others accused it of moral hypocrisy, condemning violence while lingering on its imagery. The delays in release meant it arrived too late to capitalize on the decade’s serial-killer obsession, and it quickly faded from view.
Yet in retrospect, Rampage feels oddly prophetic. Its fusion of psychological horror and courtroom drama anticipated later films like Silence of the Lambs and Seven, though without their polish or catharsis. What those movies turned into pop culture entertainment, Friedkin treated as existential inquiry. The difference is one of tone: Rampage wants not to thrill but to disturb.
Among Friedkin’s body of work, the film stands as a dark outlier, more cerebral than Cruising, less operatic than The Exorcist, but animated by the same obsession with moral corruption and the limits of order. It’s not a forgotten masterpiece, but it is a film that deserves to be rediscovered as a sincere and troubling reflection on evil.
Rampage is not an easy film to love, but it’s impossible to dismiss. Its flaws, structural unevenness, blunt dialogue, shifting tone, are inseparable from its ambition. Friedkin aimed to confront viewers with the horror of both crime and justice, and he succeeded in making a movie that denies comfort on either side. The violence shocks, the courtroom arguments exhaust, and the ending leaves a residue of unease.
The new Rampage 4K UHD and Blu-ray release from Kino Lorber offers the most comprehensive restoration of William Friedkin’s overlooked thriller to date. Both the original and recut versions of the film have been newly scanned from 35mm elements, presented in stunning HDR and Dolby Vision on the UHD disc, and remastered in HD on the Blu-ray. The 4K transfer reveals impressive texture and shadow detail, restoring the film’s gritty, naturalistic look without compromising Friedkin’s stark visual style. Audio options include both 5.1 surround and lossless 2.0 tracks, ensuring the unsettling sound design and understated score are preserved with remarkable clarity. The inclusion of dual commentaries from noted film historians Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson, covering both cuts of the film, provides an invaluable layer of context about Friedkin’s process, the production’s troubled history, and the moral complexities that define Rampage.
The second disc expands the package with a robust selection of new and archival extras that dig deeper into the film’s legacy. Chief among them is Where’s the Blood, a new interview with lead actor Alex McArthur, who reflects on inhabiting the unsettling psychology of Charles Reece and working under Friedkin’s demanding direction. True crime author Harold Schechter contributes Psychotic Vampire, a fascinating segment that connects the film’s fictional narrative to its real-life inspiration, the infamous “Vampire of Sacramento” case. Rounding out the set are a newly restored theatrical trailer and the same dual audio options featured on the UHD. Housed on a dual-layer BD50 disc, the Blu-ray mirrors the care of the UHD presentation, offering fans the definitive edition of Rampage, a release that finally gives this challenging, long-misunderstood film the technical polish and critical attention it deserves.
More than three decades later, Rampage feels eerily contemporary. Its questions about mental illness, state power, and moral responsibility still sting. The film may stumble, but its seriousness of intent gives it weight. It’s a work of grim conviction, a mirror held up to the darkest corners of human reason, asking whether reason itself can survive the reflection.
Rampage will be available to own on 10/21, and you can save 33% off the retail price if you pre-order directly from Kino Lorber.
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