CitizenX(1995) is the developing world's answer to Silence of the Lambs. Where `Silence' terrorized our peace of mind, `Citizen' exhausts and saddens us instead. This dramatization of the Chikatilo case translates rather well, thanks to a Westernized friendship between two Rostov cops who become equals.
CitizenX may also argue against(!) the death penalty far better than Kevin Spacey's The Life of David Gayle(2002).
Humans are Machiavellian mammals, under which lie limbic brains (lizard-logic). Why did two kids, who knew better, stone to death a toddler they kidnapped? Why do bloodthirsty women yell `li-lilililililii' at acts of OBSCENE terrorism? -My own term for this is `limbic domination', the lizard-logic urge to dominate an `enemy'. If you have the words `enemy'/`vengeance' in your vocabulary, you're easily capable of `limbic domination'.
In WWII-devastated 1980s Rostov (located at the mouth of the Don river near the Black Sea), nothing suppressed Andrei Chikatilo's urge for `limbic domination' from overpowering his layers of civilization. Chikatilo(Jeffrey DeMunn)'s easy victims were paupers, usually children, who rode the interurban train for fun, since they couldn't afford anything else.
CitizenX reminds us that the denials of a rampant Soviet bureaucracy cost the lives of 52 such `lambs'. Rostov's serial killer roamed free for almost 7 years AFTER the police arrested and let him go.
The politicization of crimefighting is harmful to police forces everywhere. Although policing routinely suffers from corruption all over the world, in the west, vote-grabbing by politicians can set up chronic inter-agency rivalries, stymieing a more coordinated response to crime. In the Soviet Union of CitizenX, however, Viktor Burakov(Stephen Rea)'s Killer Department was suffering from a repressive bureaucracy.
Geoffrey DeMunn plays the psychosexually inadequate Chikatilo with faultless but understated authority--to the point of complete obscurity. In real life, too, Chikatilo had a lifetime's experience blending in and evading capture.
His pursuer, on the other hand, sticks out as a strange bird, given to unheralded, naive outbursts. Perhaps by design, Stephen Rea gives a very strange performance as forensics chief Burakov. Rea's Russian accent is impenetrable; and his Burakov is humourless and sullen, at odds with everyone.
So it's Donald Sutherland who walks away with the picture. Sutherland's Col.Fetisov, Burakov's boss, and at first his only supporter, is an overly restrained, patient Militiaman whose dignified carriage bears testimony to decades of bureaucratic machinations. His reawakening as a logic-driven yet still passionate cop becomes the film's cornerstone idealism.
Joss Ackland does another turn as a vicious apparatchik, Secretary of Communist Ideology Bondarchuk, overseeing the investigation. Naturally, he quashed the arrest of the most likely suspect, a Communist, in 1984, a man carrying rope and a knife in his bag, supposedly going home: Andrei Chikatilo.
Soon, he replaced Burakov with another Moscow apparatchik, Detective Gorbunov(John Wood), insisting that the investigation now focus on `known homosexuals'. The funniest scene of this sad, sad film comes during Bondarchuk's & Gorbunov's institutionalized harassment: one stupid cop earnestly reports, `As I suspected, comrade, it's fornication. I've made some drawings'--cue howling laughter.
5yrs after the bodies began piling up, in 1987, the police finally tried soliciting criminal profiles. The only cooperating Soviet psychiatrist was Dr Aleksandr Bukhanovsky(Max Von Sydow), who termed the UNSUB `CitizenX'. He later also observed to Fetisov & Burakov that `...together you make a wonderful person'. We concur.
The drawn-out pace, spread over a decade, perfectly captures the institutional inertia of Glasnost--`openness'--that wasn't. The contrast with Perestroika--`restructuring'--couldn't've been greater for the case. Although Chikatilo was still prowling railway stations, police plans were about to bear fruit.
In 1990, Col.Fetisov was expeditiously promoted to General. His nemesis Bondarchuk disappeared off the scene, allowing the investigation to finally proceed without political interference. Staff, communications, publicity--suddenly all were available. In just one night of telephoning around, Fetisov got his depressed forensics chief access to the FBI's Serial Murder Task Force at Quantico, where, Fetisov discovered, staff are regularly rotated off serial murder cases to stave off just such psychological damage to investigators.
Fetisov advises his newly promoted forensics chief, now `Colonel' Burakov, of all these changes in an avalanche of confession that becomes the movie's powerhouse watershed scene. Fetisov's is the most tender apology I've ever seen on film: `Privately, I offer my deepest apologies to you and your wife. I hope that someday you can forgive me my ignorance', he almost whispers.
A HBO production, CitizenX is a film of the highest caliber. Not only do the exteriors look authentically bleak (shot exclusively in the most run-down parts of otherwise spectacular Budapest), but Randy Edelman's soaring soundtrack is entirely overwhelming--and frequently our only respite from the bleak brutality. Those who speak Hungarian will recognize the many Hungarian accents and credits.
Chikatilo's actual murders are depicted as bleak, aberrant behaviour born of character flaws and ignorance in an equally bleak world. This makes the murders seem not-entirely-out-of-place--but of course they were. As President Kennedy reminded us, `we all cherish the futures of our children'.
CitizenX communicates perfectly that killing is far more grisly and obscene than any vengeance fantasy might imply. Serial rapists rape to dominate; serial killers kill to dominate. So do some soldiers. Such `limbic dominators' make poor humans.
WARNING-SPOILER:----------------------------------------------- The real Andrei Chikatilo WAS the world's most prolific known serial killer. Convicted, he was executed in 1992 in the manner of all Soviet Union death sentences: one shot, in the back of the head. Foolishly, such methods destroy any possibility of studying a deviant brain after death.
Conclusion:------------------------------------------------------------ The best outcome is always the prevention of killings, not their prosecution. Executions merely guarantee society's failure to learn from the complex reality of victims' deaths when we dispatch even anecdotal evidence of HOW/WHY they died. Nor do killers learn regret if they're dead.
Vengeance doesn't unkill victims. Baying for the killer's blood constitutes nothing better than counter-domination--once it's too late.
Vengeance on behalf of the grieving isn't justice for the deceased--it's appeasement of the living.(10/10)

Boy what a dud this mess was.But it only lasts an hour and I only paid a buck for it so I'll live....unlike the entire cast of this 1933 clunker who are all dust by now.
So anyway a small village starts having bodies turning up that have been drained of all their blood.The local yokels start talking about vampires ,of course,and a little more loudly after each body is found.The town sheriff or constable or whatever he is,played by awesome actor Melvyn Douglas,tries to tell them otherwise.When he mentions the fact that the dead have one large hole on each side of the neck,instead of two holes close together, the locals simply then say it's a giant vampire bat.The constable insists that vampires do not exist and it must be a human culprit doing the killings.
But Melvyn doesn't seem too bothered either way.He spends most of his time trying to get into the pantaloons of his sweetie,played by Faye Wray.Also in this mix is the town simpleton,played by Dwight Frye,who always seemed to have played the same role in every movie he did.He further freaks out the townspeople by catching bats and drinking his own blood.Lionel Atwill plays the town doctor who seemingly is trying to help the constable solve the crimes.And boy does he ever stink as an actor.Atwill is as close to cardboard in this role as he could get.And Lionel Barrymore is also in this thing....lots of big names to be such a pile of guano.
Other than the terrible mis-title this movie has,the alternate name,"The Blood Sucker" is much better,this movie is also dull and plodding and just silly.
For me the high point of the movie is watching Frye,he nails the freaky town weirdo but other than him this movie didn't offer much.And then when you find out the reason for the strange deaths and see the special effect thing that required all this blood you'll really be let down.
Bela Lugosi did a lot of awful pictures but at least he was fun and interesting to watch.Think of this movie as a really bad Lugosi clunker WITHOUT Lugosi and you'll get a feel for how miserably bad this mess was.
If you can't make a good 1930's horror film at least put Lugosi in it.