How did a serial killer hide on a dating show?

Have you ever heard of the serial killer who appeared on “The Dating Game”? Rodney Alcala, often compared to Ted Bundy, is known to have murdered at least eight and possibly as many as 130 women in the 1970s. His horrifically specific approach involved luring his victims into the desert for alleged photo shoots, strangling them during sexual assaults, and then resuscitating them to continue.

“Woman of the Hour” isn’t just a Netflix-style Alcala biopic that exploits true crime. The focus is on his eerie blind date-style TV appearance in 1978, when he was finally chosen by Cheryl Bradshaw, an aspiring actress from Phoenix. She later managed to cancel their date, potentially saving her life, and Alcala was caught the next year.

Anna Kendrick doesn’t look like the real Cheryl Bradshaw, but whatever: she was so impressed by this script that she took on both the role and the directing role. Oddly enough, the weakest scenes in her film are those from The Dating Game itself, which aren’t dirty enough to be convincing: they come across as an over-the-top, very Netflix-esque pastiche of 1970s TV chauvinism. Of course, we have a host (Tony Hale) who implores Cheryl to play dumb rather than smart and to go easy on the clueless men she questions.

Contestant number three Rodney’s (Daniel Zovatto) answers are inevitably creepy to the in-the-know viewer: “We’re going to have a great time together, Cheryl!” – while she’s busy doing it on the other side of the divider, all with some dignity to survive.

Zovatto (“It Follows”), who does incredibly raunchy work here, gets at least as much screen time as Kendrick. Unlike Cheryl, we are privy to Rodney’s crimes.