Film Review: Valentine Road

Director: Marta Cunningham

A 2013 HBO documentary film that investigated the controversial shooting of Larry King by classmate Brandon McCarthy in 2008. The shooting happened in the small town of Oxnard, California and when Larry died two days later in hospital it became a national news story. Questions arose over the motive of the killer as it was revealed Larry was a homosexual and a cross-dresser who had shown an interest in Brandon who it was believed had allegiances to white supremacist groups and an obsession with Nazism. The story is told largely through interviews with students, teachers and the legal teams from the time.

Animated still from the film of Larry

The story itself is a heart-breaking one in more ways than one, Larry's bleak childhood was starting to improve after finding a stable legal guardian and his life was tragically cut short as he started to finally express his true self to the world. But Brandon the killer also had a very tough up-bringing with an abusive father and a drug addicted mother. In many ways both children were failed by the people around them and the system.

The film asks a lot of the right questions in its interviews with everybody involved at the time, with some of the reactions by the local community were shocking in their support of what Brandon did. Many mistakes were made in his trial but the fact that many would call Brandon the victim to what Larry was doing is incredulous. But the documentary itself whilst fascinating is quick to gloss over the childhood and up-bringing of the killer Brandon in favour of Larry, in trying to be impartial it did fail in this regard. As well as questions having been raised over the editing of interviews with some of the "fanatical" supporters of Brandon who said they were edited to look crazy and out of touch.

2.5/4 Intriguing documentary but not as impartial as it wishes it was