Trash auteur Matthew Bright largely made his reputation with his screenplays for 1980's Forbidden Zone and 1996's Freeway, two cult classics that paid cheeky homage to sleazeball B-movies of decades past. Bright moved into the directing chair with 1999's disappointing Freeway 2: Confessions of A Trickbaby before penning 2000's After Diff'rent Strokes: When The Laughter Stopped, the most memorably titled TV movie this side of Tori Spelling's Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? Bright turns his satirical gaze toward a criminal more dangerous than Dana Plato and Todd Bridges combined in Ted Bundy, an oddball biopic of the legendary serial killer. Bundy's life and crimes already provided fodder for the critically acclaimed 1986 TV movie The Deliberate Stranger, but while Ted Bundy overlaps with the earlier film, they're wildly dissimilar in tone. In sharp contrast to the conventional, by-the-book Stranger, Ted Bundy posits its serial killer (played by Michael Reilly Burke) as the ultimate yuppie spaz, a bow-tie-wearing, yellow-Volkswagen-driving dork who doesn't seem capable of outwitting a small child, let alone evading police and escaping from prison. In Bright's film, Bundy isn't just a rapist and serial killer, but also a shoplifter, chronic masturbator, car thief, bad boyfriend, Republican, binge drinker, burglar, and lousy disco dancer to boot. As a figure of menace, Burke ranks somewhere between Son Of Sam and Yosemite Sam. For a while, Ted Bundy gets by on audacity alone: Depicting the life of one of America's most notorious serial killers as one long sick joke takes a certain gonzo courage, but where Freeway required a second film to wear out its one-joke premise, Bundy exhausts its satirical load in its first hour. Part Pee-wee Herman, part Goofus, and part Patrick Bateman, Burke's Bundy is a singular creation, but as the corpses pile up, the film degenerates into just another sleazy exploitation movie. Plenty of films have attempted to reveal the humanity behind history's most notorious murderers, but Ted Bundy might be the first to turn a famous serial killer into a ridiculous cartoon character. It's one of a kind, and that's probably for the best.