A middling serial killer thriller saved by a single performance amongst an oddball ensemble cast massacres a #1 spot on streaming

Thanks to our collectively morbid obsession with serial killers, fictional or entirely true content revolving around death, despair, and occasional dismemberment is locked in for a stellar run on streaming, with Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile making its return to the spotlight.

Per FlixPatrol, one of the many, many, many, many accounts tracing the life and crimes of Ted Bundy has set up shop as the number one most-watched feature on Paramount Plus in 18 countries around the world, which has in turn seen it seize the summit on the platform’s most-watched rankings.

Reviews were exceptionally mediocre across the board, though, even if the majority of critics and audiences agreed that Zac Efron comfortably delivers the finest dramatic performance of his career to date by channeling the charm and charisma that defined Bundy, without forgetting about the whole “dead behind the eyes mass murderer” thing.

Having the guy from High School Musical playing the notorious killer was one thing, but the entire ensemble of Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is incredibly random across the board. Lily Collins and Kaya Scodelario make sense because they’re rising young talents that played their parts well, but what’s Haley Joel Osment from The Sixth Sense doing there? Or The Big Bang Theory‘s Jim Parsons? Wait, is that a small role for John Malkovich? No way, there’s no chance that’s Metallica frontman James Hetfield as a Utah police officer. Oh, wait, it totally is.

A random collection of parts to say the least, but not enough to transform the film into a whole as the definitive account of an infamous figure in history.