Cocopugg

I read Paul Mavis's DVD review of The Deadly Tower at http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=42081 and...

Good review, and a great movie. I respectfully disagree with the review where the author states that the movie didn't go into what drove the killer into murdering the people in the movie. That is exactly WHY this movie is awesome! If I wanted a documentary, I would've gone somewhere else. However, when you don't know the killer's motives, you tend to be alot more frightened of him. Just my two cents.

Paul Mavis

I'm glad you liked the review. That's certainly a valid way to look at it, and I think that approach works in other films I've seen (for instance, Larry Peerce's Two-Minute Warning, which bears some similarity to Deadly Tower, uses the killer's inexplicable actions as a major theme). But enough is hinted at for Whitman's actions in Deadly Tower, that I came away with the feeling the filmmakers where either hampered - or scared away - from going into detail. And considering the almost documentary feel and approach of the rest of the film, you feel unsatisfied with the character's design.

Chas Speed

If the movie has gone into his motives it would have been a very different film, for better or worse. They seemed to think it was very important for the film to take place in "real time" and that made "The Charles Whitman Story" impossible. It seems like all real killers motives can be traced to an abusive childhood. It's funny that was one of those movies that seemed to air constantly on cable, but it doesn't seem like it has been aired in years.

sstexas

I've seen this movie dozens of times since it came out. I lived in
Austin for numerous years. In 1966 (when Whitman did his shooting) it
had fewer than 100,000 people and was a nice small, friendly town, with
a mostly white, Anglo population, with few non-white minorities. Now,
almost a million live there--a big, much meaner city with a mostly
Mexican, often illegal immigrant majority population--often without an
education, and the still mostly white students coming from Dallas,
Houston and San Antonio to attend U. Texas. Many current Austin area
residents getting locked up by police and the courts for social and
psychiatric problems, and/or burglary/car theft/rape/murder are the
uneducated resident Latinos often born in Mexico. Thus, if the movie
was remade today (2010), it could be about an angry Tex-Mexican-born
male (maybe, even a female!), who dropped out of high school, looking
for revenge upon society. Though this title may sound ethnic, this is
a fact about Austin today--very few school-educated, white "Charles
Whitman's" around there, but plenty of Jose Gonzales', Jose Garcia's,
etc., who rarely set foot in any school, that could potentially go
berserk and shoot people dead.