On paper, “Feast Of The Assumption: BTK And The Otero Family Murders” should be a fascinating, unique documentary. The subject matter is ripe; the film sets out to chronicle the life of Charlie Otero, a survivor along with two of his siblings of the rest of his family’s brutal, disturbing slaying at the hands of the BTK killer. But in the hands of rookie filmmaker Marc Levitz, the film is an unfocused mess that squanders all its avenues to remain interesting by a director who believes that just interviewing a subject (and rather poorly at that) is enough to lay a foundation for a feature film. Errol Morris, Levitz certainly is not.
The lack of additional interviews and research hobbles the film right out of the gate. ‘Assumption’ starts on a compelling note with Otero, speaking from prison (more on that in a second), about the day he discovered his parents, horrifically slain in their Kansas home. It’s raw and real, but things get even more intriguing when he lays out a case that perhaps, the BTK killer (aka Dennis Rader) didn’t kill his family, and that maybe his family wasn’t just the victim of the random whims of a serial murderer. It turns out Otero’s father had regular, somewhat cladestine meetings with high ranking Panamanian officials and Charlie believes his Dad got involved in something he wasn’t able to get out of. Cut to an interview with George Scantlin, a now retired detective who worked the case back in 1974, who after recounting his work on the case says that he thinks Charlie might be onto something. Compelling right?
Well, forget about the film investigating this angle, learning about Otero’s government dealings or anything else because the film shifts to covering Charlie’s release from jail. Eerily, it’s only a few months later when Rader is arrested and formally charged with murders stretching back decades. It should be a moment of great introspection for the entire Otero family but instead, the film gets into Charlie’s past with women, his son that’s never seen, while the other living siblings from the tragedy are inexplicably not interviewed. Then almost as randomly, the filmmaker decides to interview Steve Relford, another man who survived his family being killed. Why he is shoehorned into the narrative makes no sense except that he shares an experience with Otero (thought it’s unclear, it appears they only met as a result of the film).
This hopscotching continues right through the trial. In what should be one of the most compelling pieces of the film, Rader’s confession to his crimes and his explanation of his motivations to the judge once he switches his plea to guilty on all charges, Levitz makes the curious decision to chop up and edit the footage, highlighting Rader’s ums and ahs and facial expressions, in what we can only guess was an attempt to try and make Rader look like an idiot. We’re not quite sure what the point of the exercise is, but it completely takes a large amount of the emotional weight out of the film. However, Levitz does know how to go for cheap thrills as he has absolutely no hesitation in showing, unedited, a sequence in which the gruesome crime scenes photos are displayed during the sentencing part of Rader’s trial. There is absolutely no justification to show Charlie’s then eleven year old sister, bound, gagged, partially stripped nude and hanging from a rafter in the basement. Levitz certainly provides no narrative basis for showing the picture, and frankly it’s a cheap, exploitative moment from a director who clearly was running out of things to do.
It’s the trial that should provide the central core of the film, but with no interviews with any other Otero members or anyone in the community who might’ve known them, or how the capture of Rader affects the family on a day to day basis Levitz misses giving his film this focus it needs. As it continues to meander on we begin to wonder just what the actual subject or theme of this documentary is. Following the trial, the film goes down yet another narrative path, this time involving Charlie finally visiting his son, who now lives in Wisconsin with his mother, and seeing him for the first time, eagerly looking to take on the father figure role in the child’s life. It’s an interesting story — but it belongs in a completely different movie. There is a mild twist involving the son which we won’t spoil here but it continues to spin the film away from the titular murders. As the film draws to a close, we hear from Charlie again, talking about the case and his thoughts regarding Rader and once again, he circles around to the conspiracy theory and his belief that there was more than meets eye to his family’s murder.
We’re still stymied by Levitz’s approach. The film is so lazily put together, so clearly bereft of any passion or interest by the director to dig deeper and find the notes of what should so easily be a heartbreaking and emotionally textured story, we almost wonder if the director was just trying to make a quick buck with a movie he could say starred the survivor of one of the worst mass murderers in American history. “Feast Of The Assumption” (btw, that’s a shitty title too) mistakes access to a subject for depth. Bereft of even the basic elements of simple documentary filmmaking, unfocused and crossing over a few times to simply being in bad taste (yes, that is Wesley Willis’ “I Murdered Your Family” you hear over one scene) ‘Feast Of The Assumption’ doesn’t find justice for its subjects. [D]