After killing three women (oopsie!), dismembering them, popping their heads into his fridge, and becoming convinced they’re telling him to kill more people because they want more fun severed-head friends, Jerry gets caught, and no wonder: His fantasy version of the world doesn’t actually include any of the bloody incriminating clues he leaves all over the place. He literally can’t see them. So when cornered by cops in his burning building, he consciously chooses to lie down, breathe smoke, and die, because he knows he can’t be trusted in the world anymore. Even Bosco has informed him that he’s a bad, bad dog.

And so the movie ends with Jerry essentially in heaven, a bright spotless place where he and all his victims and his long-gone parents can sing and dance to their hearts’ content. It’s a little Bollywood and a little Hays Code-era punishment drama, where no matter how audiences might sympathize with a tortured bad guy, he can’t get away with murder forever. 

But while this isn’t remotely what the movie is about, could we maybe spare just an ounce or so of pity for his victims? They don’t ask to be stabbed, smashed, and chopped into bits, and then they don’t ask to be turned into self-affirming voices in his delusion, constantly praising him and saying they didn’t mind being murdered and that he did the right thing and they forgive him. And then they don’t ask to become background dancers in his happily-ever-after heavenly choir, either. It’s hard to sympathize too much with characters who only really exist as props in his comic downfall from harmless kook to killer kook, but it’d only take a hair of difference in the film’s judgment toward his victims for this to be a nasty piece of work. It even has the classic women-in-refrigerators (okay, one refrigerator) to underline the point.