What the hell is wrong with Stephen King? When doing what he does best, the horror that surrounds his work tends to break through the barriers between intelligent decency and mindless gore. Even a mastermind such as King has his disappointing ones, and "Apt Pupil" is certainly one of them.
In this latest film from "Usual Suspects" director Brad Singer, Brad Renfro plays Todd Bowden, your typical all-American boy -- Baseball player, straight-A student, valedictorian. Bowden, however, has a sense of emptiness inside him, an emptiness that he fills with his hobby: An extreme fanatacism of Nazis. After stalking a former SS officer he has found hiding in Southern California, he is able to coerce Kurt Dussander (who now calls himself Artur Denker) into divulging graphic information about the Nazis' instruments of mass murder through blackmail.
Accompanied by various flashbacks to the concentration camps, Singer's film went far beyond the boundaries of good taste. The film went so far out on a limb to be disturbing, and because of this its own theme drowned in a pool of blood on a basement floor. However, the credit for this shocker is not in the hands of Singer, but of sicko Stephen King.
King has used numerous methods to spook his readers, but in this one he uses a horror that is not of his own creation: The Holocaust. King himself is more afflicted than his two characters combined: A demented high school student whose obsession with Nazis brings him to the edge of his sanity, and a goose-stepping ex-Nazi who gets pleasure out of wearing his old uniform.
While "Apt Pupil" attempted to get its point across with chilling music and suspensful but sickening plot elements involving severe cruelty to animals, the only thing I could think of it was "They're really trying too hard here." Ian McKeller (Dussander) played a masterful role as the old Nazi, a demon walking among us and Renfro was also very believable as the deranged pupil, but in every place where the acting shined, the film was crusted with unneeded blood. In fact, the best acting in the world couldn't save this irresponsibly distubing film. "Apt Pupil" will no doubt also be paralled for years to come with an intelligent movie about hope during the darkest hour of history made in 1992, but its sick gory violence detracted too much from its already disturbing story to go down in history with "Schindler's List."
-Ethan Kaplan
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10/25/98