The Serial Killer Who Was on ‘The Dating Game’

It’s a notorious freak moment in daytime television. On Sept. 13, 1978, one of the three competing bachelors on “The Dating Game” was Rodney Alcala, who turned out to be a serial killer; he was captured the following year. (He was convicted of five murders, though it’s believed that he may have committed as many as 130.) It’s no joke — or maybe it’s a meaningful one — to say that Alcala had the looks and personality of a 1970s ladykiller. He was coiffed like one of the Hudson Brothers, with a chiseled grin redolent of Engelbert Humperdinck. He practically beamed good vibes — along with some semi-submerged bad ones, answering his “Dating Game” questions in a way that was so confident it was…aggressive.

TV, of course, never got much kitschier than “The Dating Game.” I used to watch it as a kid, marveling at the fact that the entire show, with its Herb Albert-on-happy-pills theme music and its flower-power décor, was a kind of leering, smirky put-on that made no great effort to hide it. (It was the first show I’d seen that seemed to be about the sleaze culture of Los Angeles.) I always thought that the squirmiest moment each week was when the bachelor who’d been chosen came out from behind the barrier, and after giving the bachelorette that ritual polite kiss, the two would stand there, arms around each other, as aviator-framed host Jim Lang described what would be in store for them on their date (it would usually be something along the lines of “Because you’re going on an expense-paid weekend to…Tuscon, Arizona!”), as if they were already a couple.

You could say that “The Dating Game” was “The Bachelorette” of its day. And the fact that a serial killer from the Ted Bundy school (outwardly “normal” and presentable, playing off his good looks to lure in the women he would rape and murder) once landed right in the middle of it is at once a jaw-dropping piece of TV history, an event both ludicrous and horrifying, and a giant metaphor that said: For women who were living in the age of the sexual revolution, the dating game was a far more dangerous thing than it looked like.

“Woman of the Hour” is Anna Kendrick’s true-life thriller about Rodney Alcala and this bizarre, only-in-America social-cultural-criminal episode. Kendrick directed the film (her first effort behind the camera), working from a script by Ian McDonald, and she also stars in it as Cheryl Bradshaw, an aspiring actress who is mostly striking out at low-budget movie auditions when her agent hooks her up to be a bachelorette on “The Dating Game.” Cheryl thinks the show is trash (and it is), but it will give her a chance to be “seen.”

As a director, Kendrick leaps around in time through the ’70s, staging a number of Rodney Alcala’s pickups and murders. Alcala is played by Daniel Zovatto, who knows how to lay on the soft-rock sincerity, but then his eyebrows will lower and the smile will melt away, leaving you with a quiet smoldering anger. Rodney, in long hair and a leather jacket, is a photographer, and that’s his bohemian cred — and his homicidal grift. This was a time when men wielding cameras and an arty gaze promised to turn women into stars. Rodney, who likes his victims young (sometimes underage), gets them to pose, which encourages them to let down their guard, and that’s when he goes in for the kill. These scenes are effective as far as they go, though they aren’t staged with the kind of complex fascination that was there in “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile,” the Ted Bundy drama starring Zac Efron.

The heart of the movie is the “Dating Game” episode, which is staged with a kind of kinky verve, though I felt as if Kendrick spends too many moments telegraphing what she wants to say. She grabs onto the metaphor of Rodney Alcala on “The Dating Game” and italicizes it. She makes clear that the show is a meat grinder, from the onscreen double entendres the bachelorette is assaulted with to the crudely hostile offscreen personality of the host (Tony Hale), called Ed Burke here. And I think it’s telling that Kendrick chooses to play Cheryl not as the flirtatious cuddlebug she appeared to be on the show — that was how the women were directed to behave — but as a knowing, almost defiant figure who’s not going to be anyone’s sex toy.

As Cheryl, who poses her canned questions, and finally one of her own (“What are girls for?”), Kendrick is such a good actor that she holds you completely. Yet as a filmmaker, she turns the tables on “The Dating Game” by restaging it in a nearly postmodern way. What “Woman of the Hour” is going for isn’t some ultimate period-piece authenticity. It’s trying to deconstruct television, along with the male aggression that can descend into violence, and to show you how the two work together.

There’s a woman in the audience, named Laura (Nicolette Robinson), who feels a chill when she sees that Alcala is bachelor #3, because she was friends with one of his victims; she tried to go to the police, but to no avail. (That mirrors what happened: a great many tips to the cops about Alcala, which he somehow evaded.) This is the weakest part of the film, though, because the drama is at once too sketchy and too on-the-nose.

The strongest part of the film happens just after the show, when Rodney cajoles Cheryl into joining him for a “date” (drinks at a dive bar) before their official date in Caramel, Ca. Their duel of wits is queasy and, by the time it arrives at a parking lot, scary. In real life, Cheryl and Rodney never did go on their “Dating Game” date, because she thought there was something off about him. And it’s satisfying, at the end of the film, to see Alcala get caught, outwitted by a victim who knows how to play to his vanity. But if “Woman of the Hour” captures a fluky moment when American violence peeked through the façade of packaged American television, the movie doesn’t have a lot of resonance, because it does all its connecting of meaning for you.