Offensive & Gross......Avoid at ALL Costs, Ladies Especially!!!

Rating: Null/10 (8 May 2000)

I don't know why, but my local newspaper gave American Psycho such rave reviews. So, reading that review coupled with the fact that I like Reese Witherspoon as an actress, I was dying (no pun intended) to see it. I'm a horror fan who rarely gets nightmares and can leave visions of terror on the screen once the film is over, and though this film isn't intended to be horror but suspense, it managed to scare me and give me nightmares. It isn't the kind of fright that's fun and enjoyable like that which comes from the adrenaline rush you get watching chase scenes in "Halloween" or "Scream." It's one that disturbs and offends.
SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!
Set in the 1980's, the title "American Psycho" chronicles the daily life of a young 27-year-old prematurely successful Wall Street businessman who, by night, is a murderous psycho with disgusting tastes in film and a proclivity to kill graphically & imaginatively. Nice! He makes Skeet Ulrich's "Scream" character look like Mickey Mouse. Reese Witherspoon's talent is wasted; she only appears briefly in a few scenes as the woman who so wants to marry Christian Bale's psycho killer Patrick Bateman, unaware, of course, that her man is a murderous sociopath quite capable of killing her, too. Patrick manages to kill off a few acquaintances & friends throughout the film. You end up scared out of your mind every time he has dialogue with each of the characters. He manages to incorporate lewd sexual acts with some of his killing rituals. He also obsesses over porn, song lyrics, & "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" from which he collects some of his ideas for killing people & dealing with the remains afterward. He's like a financially successful, handsome, heterosexual Hollywood version of Jeffrey Dahmer. And, yes, like Dahmer, Patrick also takes pleasure in cruelty to animals. It gets no better throughout the whole movie. While I was expecting there to at least be a point to this sick plot in the end, I was disappointed by a discouraging and unrealistic ending.
The film is somewhat like "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (though that was a good movie) meets "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" with a pornographic rich Wall Street yuppie twist. Patrick's saner Wall Street colleagues are sexist pigs who show no respect for women, and Patrick himself exerts his dominance over them in the sex scenes in a most annoyingly medieval fashion. The film features few women on Wall Street; most of them are spoiled socialites aiming to marry someone like the wealthy Patrick. I've heard feminists in political debates accuse Corporate America of discriminating against and insulting women, but this film insults women and Wall Street at the same time. Ladies & businesspeople keep away! For that matter, everyone should keep away from this horrid film.