DigitalRevenantX7 Albert H. Fish is a prolific serial killer who targets young children, killing them & eating their bodies afterwards, who haunted New York City in the 1920s. He cons his way into a poor family's home & kidnaps their young daughter, pretending to take her to a birthday party. He takes the girl to an isolated house where he kills her & eats her body. When she fails to return, the family calls in the police. Missing Persons Unit detective William King dedicates himself to the case & attempts to track down Fish. But Fish is an exceptionally clever killer & the only thing that stands in King's way is Fish's deteriorating mental state.This is a retelling of one of 1920s America's most infamous serial killers. While many aspects of the story shown here are fabricated for the narrative's sake, the fact remained that Albert H. Fish was a menace to society at the time.The film does a good job of recreating 1920s' America, right down to the buildings & shop-signs (where you could get a soda for only 10 cents!) & the attitudes of the society at the time. Also of note is the fact that the limited forensic resources of the era allowed Fish to kill & eat as many children as he ultimately did & that the detective in charge of the case nearly lost his sanity chasing down the killer. The film is not perfect, but director Scott Flynn manages to make a passable detective yarn & in part an insight into how such a deranged mind could wreak as much havoc as he did at the time. Patrick Bauchau dives deep into the Fish character with fearless abandon, portraying a disturbed mind who was partly shaped by the bad childhood he experienced in the orphanage he grew up in (the ghostly pale boy that appears in some scenes is meant to be a symbol of Fish's lost childhood). For the supporting cast, Jack Conley is solid as the detective after Fish while Silas Weir Mitchell, who Steven Seagal fans will remember as the militia's second in command in the uber-flop The Patriot, does his role as Fish's unwitting son well. The only flaws in the film were the portrayal of the dead girl's mother as a complete attention-seeking buffoon & the somewhat slow pace but the film remains a reasonable entry in the thriller genre.

sddavis63 This movie was not exactly what I was expecting. I thought it would be a more focused character study of Albert Fish - the kidnapper/murderer/cannibalizer of young children in New York City in the late 1920's-early 1930's. That angle isn't lost here. The movie opens with a depiction of Fish as an abused child in an orphanage, giving some insight into where he developed his sado-masochistic tendencies, but really this movie focused more on the police investigation into one case - the kidnapping, murder and cannibalizing of 10 year old Grace Budd. The Budd case was the one that eventually brought Fish down, and the movie really revolved around Police Detective William King, who headed the investigation into Budd's disappearance.Fish seems to have been one of the earliest serial killers to prey on young children. The cannibal angle makes the case even more sensational. The movie, thankfully, isn't very graphic, although the details of exactly what was done to young Grace are talked about but not depicted. What we hear is very disturbing. As far as the Budd case is concerned, the movie seems to be a pretty accurate depiction of real events, but really the Budd case is the only one looked at in any detail, even though there were several other child killings that Fish was responsible for.Patrick Bauchau was pretty convincing as Fish. He captured the part well - the guy was someone we would all think of as crazy, and yet he was sane enough to plan things out pretty methodically. And in a lot of respects he seemed pretty normal and trustworthy - making him even more frightening. Bachau did well. I wasn't entirely taken with Jack Conley as Det. King, and I found the depiction of Grace's mother (Jillian Armanante) to be strange. She was portrayed almost as being more interested in publicity than in her daughter. That may be true (everything else in this seems pretty accurate based on what I've read so I don't know why they writers would make that upon) but it still seems pretty strange to me.Really, this provides a glimpse into the mind and one crime of a notorious serial killer. A little more depth and insight would have been necessary to make this a truly good movie. (6/10)

glyptoteque Considering that this film was supposed to tell the story about one of the most bizarre serial killers in history, it's absolutely amazing that the end result we get served is this tedious muck. Something is definitely wrong when you realize that the film you are watching easily can be labeled " a film for the whole family", a film the Hallmark channel would "proudly present." Instead of a thoroughly deep-dive into Mr. Fish's murky psyche, a proper probing into the mechanizations that drove this deranged specimen of a man, a both tell and show with the slaughter and cannibalizing of Grace Budd, what you get is a badly acted detective-story ( with film-noiresque monologue ), a lead that don't remotely look like Albert Fish, and a misplaced focus on the detective in charge. The gore is of course non-existent, and while this "tell, don't show" approach work excellently in films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dahmer, here it is sorely missed. Inexcusable. Not to mention that certain liberties is being taken in regards to what really happened.Bottom line; if you want a scary film for the kiddies ( age 3-12 ), go for this one!! On the other hand, if you want a properly nasty horror-film about good old Albert, you better keep your fingers crossed for a director that truly have the courage to handle this dark material the way it deserves! Hopefully soon one will come along......

oyason "The Gray Man" is an important addition to the horror genre. Director Scott Flynn chose to tell the story of Albert Fish, a serial murderer who is believed to have murdered and cannibalized several young children in the late 1920s and early 1930s in the environs of New York City. Fish worked as a handyman and painter in most of the neighborhoods he lived in, and was seen for the most part as a relatively inoffensive and grandfatherly individual by many people. In reality, he is said to have possessed a raging sociopathic pattern that knew its roots in the harsh treatment he received in state orphanages run by religious fanatics in the upper boroughs of the city. Flynn's film gives the viewer a slight background of Fish's character so that even the most offended audience member can understand Fish's motivation. The man remains genuinely creepy in depiction, however, simply due to the deep horror of life that true degeneracy, or "evil", if you must, rarely has a loud "telegraph". Albert Fish is scary because he looks like the earnest, hard working sort of character who you'd hire to repair your furnace. "The Gray Man" is also a significant work in horror, because it puts to rest the idea that a grisly tale must rely upon grisly depiction in order to unsettle the viewer. Director Flynn has wisely chosen not to graphically re-create the murders, and does not bother with lurid presentations of children being dissected or disposed of as meat. It might seem ridiculous that I would even have to point this out, but anyone who knows contemporary horror understands how little credit all too many Gothic film makers lend the imagination of their public anymore. I don't want to belabor the point, suffice it to say that "The Gray Man" puts films like "Saw" and "Hostel" to shame. Very few things in this life are as terrifying as a child murderer, Flynn and his cast put this true story across without much reliance on the sensational. Why, they even rely on a few little tricks like "atmosphere" here. Imagine that.Leading the cast is veteran actor Patrick Bauchau, who brings the character of Albert Fish himself a terrifying but not entirely unlikeable quality. His work in this film is a delicately balanced affair that is more effective than that of Anthony Hopkins in "The Silence of the Lambs". Hopkin's performance in that work is outstanding, of course, but it is relatively melodramatic and over- the- top compared to the craft and restraint Bauchau offers here.. Following Bauchau up as the intrepid Missing Persons investigator Will King is Jack Conley, whose world weary demeanor I found very welcome in this age of celluloid depictions of lantern jawed law enforcement officials who always know what to do. Conley's King is a man unsure in his surety, a gumshoe who's likable for the same reasons we like Jake Gittes in "Chinatown" and Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon". He's sort of an anti-bureaucratic bureaucrat.The other supporting cast members are quite good, most notably the perpetually bemused children of Albert Fish, Gertrude and Albert Jr., who know him alternately as both solid family man and abusive personality. The roles are handled by Mollie Milligan and Silas Mitchell. Jillian Armaneni is powerful as the mother of Grace Budd, the victim of Fish whose disappearance finally put investigators on his trail, and Lexi Ainsworth is very fine as Grace herself. Ben Hall holds his own as Grace's brother Albert, and character actor Bill Flynn has an appearance as the notorious Dr. Frederick Wertham (yes, he of the controversial 1950s anti- comic book crusade) who was a defense witness at the Fish trial as Fish and his crew pleaded insanity.As for accuracy, who knows? So much has been written about the case that, now, seventy five years after the events themselves, it's even more difficult to separate the folklore from the reality of the moment. Albert Fish has entered that realm of real-life bogeymen with a distinction known by few, so the scuttlebutt will continue to blossom. Be that as it may, "The Gray Man" is a finely crafted, ambitious and riveting horror film, one of the few in the contemporary samples from the genre that is worthy of the time it takes to view it.