The truth came to light in 1993 after Bernardo beat Karla so badly that she was hospitalised. She ended up leaving him. During the police investigation of the incident, DNA evidence led to Bernardo being connected to the Scarborough Rapist case. Karla later confessed to their complicity in the murders. It was after Paul Bernardo was arrested that the case entered into its most controversial phase. Karla Homolka was offered a special plea bargain by the Ontario prosecutor’s office where, in return for her testimony to convict Paul Bernardo, she would be given only a 12 year sentence. (Karla Homolka’s plea bargain has been variously called a “deal with the devil” and “the worst deal in Canadian legal history”). Homolka proceeded to argue throughout the trial that she was an abused innocence but Bernardo responded by leaking the whereabouts of videotapes he had taken of the killings in the hope of arguing that Homolka was the real killer and that he was innocent. The case was mired in controversy every step of the way – from the judge who declared a total publication ban on the trial, resulting in a flourishing blackmarket in details published on the internet or sought in newspapers brought across the US border; to the public outcry against Karla Homolka’s plea bargain, where it was universally seen that she was a complicit party in the murders; to Paul Bernardo’s initial lawyer who tried to quash the existence of the videotapes in his client’s interest; to the judge’s ruling that the videotape evidence be destroyed but some later being smuggled out and sold as snuff movies. Paul Bernardo was convicted in 1995 and is currently serving a life sentence. Karla Homolka was released from jail in 2005 and currently lives under an assumed name in the Antilles.

In recent years, there has been a mini-genre of films based on true-life serial killers, which has so far included the likes of Ed Gein (2000), Dahmer (2002), Nightstalker (2002), Ted Bundy (2002), Gacy (2003), Monster (2003), Evilenko (2004), The Hillside Strangler (2004), Starkweather (2004), The Zodiac (2005), Lonely Hearts (2006), Out of the Blue (2006), Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007), Zodiac (2007), The Alphabet Killer (2008), B.T.K. (2008) and Drifter: Henry Lee Lucas (2009). Like most of these, Karla has been mounted independently and cast with relative unknowns. The Homolka-Bernardo case has such infamy in Canada that an earlier production that would have starred Jason Priestley as Paul Bernardo, even had the Ontario Premier calling for a boycott of the film. When it came to Karla, the filmmakers took the safety of shooting in US locations. (This does leave Karla with a certain irony – the number of American film productions that pop across the border to shoot in Canada and take advantage of the lower return on the American dollar, as well as cities and landscapes that have a similarity to US locales, is legion. Here though we have the example of a film that actually is set in Canada but has been forced to shoot in the US and pretend that it is Canada).

Karla could have been another Monster. Unfortunately, Joel Bender fails to convincingly plumb the psychology of Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. Rather than getting inside either character’s heads, all that Bender seems to do is concentrate on schematically (and rather prosaically) replicating the events of the case. This he does with a fair degree of accuracy but the film never finds its way inside Homolka and Bernardo’s head. The introduction and set-up of the two characters is hurried – it is not long at all between the time that we go from the two meeting and having sex to the very next scene where Laura Prepon is suggesting that Misha Collins put handcuffs on her and enact a rape fantasy. (Certainly, the handcuffs and pretend rape scene does hold a certain perverse kick).

Karla’s greatest failing is Joel Bender’s tameness in the handling of the material. Considering that the film deals with the abduction, brutalization, rape and eventual murder of two teenage girls, as well as much in the way of wife-beating, the accidental drug/rape of Karla’s teenage sister and various other rapes, the fact that the R-rated Karla comes out down around the level of an average true crime tv movie must surely be regarded as a major failure. Not that a film should glorify such acts but had Joel Bender taken us even a little of the way into the darkness that these characters lived in, Karla could have been an immensely disturbing film. Rather, Bender gives the impression that the US censor stood behind his shoulder waggling a sternly disapproving finger the whole through shooting. (Apparently, much of this was originally there but was cut on the insistence of the producers who wanted the film to have broader appeal). His camera shies away the moment that Misha Collins starts to strangle his first victim. When Cherilyn Hayres undergoes various brutalisations, he never shows any of Mischa Collins’ threats or brutalisations in conjunction with the actress in the same frame – all of these take place off camera. Among the abovementioned examples, both Ted Bundy and The Hillside Strangler had the fortitude to take such a journey into the disturbing headspace of its real-life subjects. Alas, Karla cries out for a darker, rawer and more deeply psychological handling than the veritable tv movie treatment that we get.

Certainly, one of the best aspects about Karla is the casting of Laura Prepon in the title role. Laura Prepon was previously known as Donna in the tv series That 70s Show (1998-2006). The role of Karla Homolka allows Prepon to spread her wings and show she can carry a film as a serious actress. She does a good job of looking abused and shell-shocked by events. If the film surrounding her had been better than it was, I would happily have considered Prepon as worthy of nomination in this site’s Best of 2006 awards. Alas, one of the major things that Prepon does that kills her (and the film’s) credibility is keep her underwear on during the love scenes. I am not trying to argue for gratuitous nudity but Karla is a film whose subject matter concerns a couple who have a perverse sexual relationship. Any raw realism the film might aspire to in depicting this surely gets shot in the foot when you realize how fake the scenes look when the various actresses seems to be spending as much time protecting their modesty for the camera as they do looking frightened.

However, the biggest problem that one has with Karla is its portrait of the real-life Karla Homolka. The film takes the position that was argued by Homolka and her defence lawyer herself throughout the trial – that she was an innocent party who was constantly beaten by Paul Bernardo and ended up complicit in his crimes out of fear. Certainly, the end titles cards talk about Homolka’s apparent moral vacuity and lack of remorse for the crimes but were that not there the film could leave one with an entirely different portrait of the Karla Homolka that existed in reality. In actuality, a number of things emerged during the trial that showed that Homolka was anything but an innocent party in what went on. There has been her constant refusal to accept any responsibility or show remorse for the crimes; there was the videotape evidence that showed that she was an active participant during the attacks and even joined in and had sex with the bound victims. Furthermore, Homolka encouraged Paul Bernardo’s activities as The Scarborough Rapist and there were reports from eyewitnesses of another woman being present during the rapes videotaping Bernardo (who almost certainly was Homolka). Moreover, if Paul Bernardo had brutalised her into participating in his depravities, her fear of him should surely have lifted once she was incarcerated – but to the contrary, Homolka became involved with another killer in jail, which shows that her problem was not being the victimised and abused innocent but that she had a pathological attraction to dangerous men.

What suspects happened here was that Karla was made concurrent with Karla Homolka’s release from jail. Rather than dramatise what everyone believes happened, the filmmakers ended up being so afraid of lawsuits that they took the position that Karla Homolka argued throughout the trial that she was an abused innocent. This is ultimately the killer disappointment about Karla – a film that reads as afraid the whole way – too afraid of lawsuits to vary from a patently false court testimony, too afraid of an overbearing US censor to venture into any of the rawness that the subject matter begs to be dealt with. All the film ends up as is a justification of Karla Homolka’s actions that could have been written by Homolka herself.

The character of Paul Bernardo is present more as a function of his relationship to Karla than anything else. He is expectedly shown as violently abusive and there is much focus on his unrestrained sexual appetite. Disappointingly, the film only rarely gives us the image of Paul Bernardo as the charmer he was often described as being – we briefly do during one scene where the police interview him about the Scarborough Rapist, but that is it.

Elsewhere, director Joel Bender has only ever made B-budget horror films of no particular distinction. These have included The Returning/Witch Doctor (1983), The Immortalizer (1991), Midnight Kiss/Vampire Cop (1993), Jennifer is Dead (2002), The Cursed (2010) and The Romanian Tomb (2012). In trivia notes, one can see an unknown Brandon Routh, later to take the title role in Superman Returns (2006), as the young man that Laura Prepon picks up in a nightclub after splitting up with Paul.