Multiple sequential, rather than simultaneous, murders are nothing new under the sun, nor is public train-wreck fascination with them. Initially an FBI technical term, "serial killer" may be of recent popular coinage, but the phenomenon has for years been a minor Hollywood staple, most successfully in sometimes fact-based fictions like 10 Rillington Place, Badlands, The First Deadly Sin, The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, American Psycho, numerous Jack the Ripper spins and the upcoming Monster.

Generally less successful as cinema are documentaries on the theme, in part because the subject killers and victims are dead, gone and unfilmed, leaving only scenes and associates to tell the tale. Or because the true center is not the Henleys, Gacys, Bonins, Bittakers or Bundys but, rather, as in the reprehensible Collectors, those who exploit them, their memorabilia and supposed artwork, for "serial killers are hot, packaged and consumed en masse." And too often, non-fiction considerations have this or that axe to grind and, far from documenting, cry attention to themselves as what pioneer Robert Drew labeled "illustrated lectures"; with Drew associate Richard Leacock, "the minute I'm being told the answer, I start rejecting it."

Such is the case with Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, whose directors Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill have a track record of scandal-, celebrity- and sensation-driven filmmaking. Having maintained contact with the condemned woman since his 1992 Aileen Wournos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, Broomfield was subpoenaed to her final appeal in Jeb Bush's Florida and witnessed the execution months afterwards.

Reassuringly British-accented, he serves as connective tissue here -- co-director and usual cinematographer Churchill is seen for only seconds -- on the witness stand, defending his earlier film, interpreting meaning, asking questions, being shown around on car rides to the usual flapping windshield wipers -- and telling us how unjust the death penalty is to him and Amnesty International. Told what to think, the viewer is distanced by film acknowledging its film-ness: by the narrator-as-narrator, by video and Channel 7 News (5:02 AM, 77 degrees) shots, by names bleeped out, by seeing the camera, director, clip-on mikes and handheld booms.

What sticks, however, is the frightening, unstable personality of Wournos, forty-four at the end of her life. In hometown Troy (pop. 80,959), Michigan, she had a terrible childhood, although versions differ considerably: abandoned by a birth mother whom she never knew but hates, devastated by the death of a stepmother; drugs, early sexual initiation (perhaps incestuous), promiscuity and a pregnancy at thirteen; surrounded by abusive family and other males, expulsion from home followed by a winter alone in the woods.

Taking to the road, bikers and Florida, she became a hitchhiking prostitute, married briefly, then settled into a seemingly stable lesbian relationship. Arrested in 1991 for the murder-robbery of seven "clients," she futilely pleaded self-defense against roughhouse masochists. Commentary and clips from the earlier "Selling of" focus on the incompetence of joint-smoking defense lawyer "Dr. L." and the scramble to cash in on film rights on the part of lawyer, friends and police.
Aileen, muses our present narrator, "is the most honest person" among them, though she subsequently admits that she murdered to get money for a new apartment, but then reverses herself again. Now a born-again Christian, she is by turns repentant and defiant, convinced that her brain is being pressured by radio waves from a TV or mirror, that nukes will get the earth in 2019 but she will be safely with space-ship angels.

Contradictorily emphasizing the woman's insanity yet remarking on a 1989 Supreme Court ruling allowing execution of the mentally defective, the film hammers away at venal police officers, Aileen's appalling background and the failure of the social system. While such issues are germane and the woman's deranged, increasingly frequent harangues --especially on her last full day -- make one squirm, less mannered and more sobering indictments have been done. For documentary starters, there are the considerations of Thomas Miller-El in the middle section of the Javier Corcuera triptych The Back of the World, and Liz Garbus' separate made-for-TV features on Antonio James, Herbert Baumeister and Wanda Jean Allen; and, of course, the Barbara Graham- and Matthew Poncelet-based stories, I Want to Live! and Dead Man Walking.

(Released by Lantern Lane Entertainment Ltd.; not rated by MPAA.)