This documentary comes with the Director’s Cut Blu-Ray release of David Fincher’s Zodiac. It isn’t your standard DVD “bonus feature” as much as it is its own thing which is an exploration of the crimes of the Zodiac through the eyes of the actual surviving victims and police investigators. At just over a hundred minutes, it takes a lot a time with each crime and delves into the minutae of the experiences. Speaking artistically, I suppose one would say that this is a pretty standard documentary, mostly made up of talking heads on a pure white background. But it has the benefit of a great story in the Zodiac case of course and seeing the actual people involved with the case was pretty compelling. The most gripping and engaging stuff was the interview footage with Mike Mageau, survivor of the Blue Rock Springs shooting, and Bryan Hartnell, survivor of the Lake Berryessa stabbing. They couldn’t be more different. Hartnell is preternaturally cool about the whole thing and incredibly exact in his detailed retelling of the crime; it has, of course, been decades so I wasn’t necessarily expecting him to still be broken up about it, but something about the cool analytical perspective he had on the murder of a close friend and his own near death was surprising to me. Mageau, on the other hand, was homeless at the time of his interview and he seems very mentally and emotionally unstable, sometimes garbling his words and engaging in some physical tics. I don’t know what underlying mental and emotional issues were there already before the encounter with the Zodiac, but it’s hard not to see Mageau as an example of the devastating effects of the kind of violence serial killers perpetrate. Even as a survivor, he seems broken and when he talks about Darlene Ferrin, the girl who died at Blue Rock Springs, he seems still very disturbed and haunted.
The film also gets into the investigations in really interesting detail. I found the sections on Lake Berryessa and the Presidio Heights shooting to be really interesting and often surprising. You get a lot of details that explain why so many conspiracy theories have sprung up around this case. Most people who have dug into the case very far at all know about the incorrect description of the Zodiac sent out by the police dispatcher in the Presidio Heights shooting where the Zodiac was identified as a black man for just long enough for the actual Zodiac to escape the net of police officers converging on Presidio Heights from all directions. I won’t spoil it, but there’s something that I found even more shocking in the section of the film on Lake Berryessa that involves a police officer that was able to actually speak to Cecelia Shepard on the scene before she lapsed into the coma from which she would never awake. Hopefully that’s a tantalizing enough tease for you to check out the movie (or at least Google this particular detail), because I think this movie is good. I will confess that the visual sameness of it, just scene after scene of a talking head against a white background, got a little wearying and I was getting tired of the movie toward the end. So, it isn’t a gripping piece of cinema; but I found it very interesting and it’s probably worth watching just for the survivor interviews which are quite compelling. 3 stars.
tl;dr – documentary about the Zodiac Killer is workmanlike and not artfully done, but it has the benefit of a compelling story and the survivor interviews are gripping. 3 stars.