REEL FANS:Sign of a good movie

Daily Pilot staffer Sue Thoensen went to Edwards Metro Pointe 12 to get moviegoers’ opinions of “Zodiac,” based on the book by reporter Robert Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, and also starring Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards.

In the late 1960s into the ‘70s, a serial killer known as Zodiac terrorized San Francisco. Investigators (Ruffalo, Edwards) and reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle (Gyllenhaal, Downey) become obsessed with finding the killer, who has been sending coded messages and letters to the editor of the paper.

“I thought the movie was very good. When I was a kid, I remember hearing about the Zodiac killer, and I liked the songs in the movie too. My husband said that he never knew it was unsolved, but I remembered hearing that they had never solved it, so it was history. I liked the part in the movie when he [Gyllenhaal’s character] was talking to the guy in the basement — that was good and very scary. It was a long movie, but it did keep me on the edge of my seat.”

KATHY DUKE

Lancaster

“It was a great movie. I was wondering how they were going to put an ending on a movie that didn’t have an ending, so it turned out good. I enjoyed it. The cast was great — Robert Downey Jr. is really good in it. The movie was a little long, but it was worth it. The basement scene was my favorite part. I enjoy going to these suspenseful kind of movies.”

JEFF DUKE

Lancaster

“The movie was very interesting. A lot of facts came out that I didn’t remember or didn’t know in the first place. I was living in Southern California at the time of the killings, so I vaguely remember stuff. It was set so well bSack in a time capsule — the cars, the dress, the language, the smoking, the airplanes. The nostalgia was very interesting. What stood out for me was the stabbing of the couple by the lake, which was really vivid…. My thought was, ‘God, please shoot me, don’t ever stab me.’ ”

JOANNE MEDINA

Tustin

“I thought the movie was very good. I knew the story somewhat before I came to see it, and it held my interest even though it was long. I didn’t expect it to come out with a probable ending, as far as the suspect, but I thought the cast was very good, and I liked Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance very much. The gory scenes weren’t too pleasant, but the killings stopped in the movie because they had stopped in real life.”

RALPH SIREK

Huntington Beach

“For me, I lived in the Bay Area during the Zodiac murders, so this put a closure on it for me. I feel now that I sort of know what happened because I didn’t have any sense [of the facts] at all at the time. I was very conscious of what was happening at the time that it was going on — everybody was. Being a young girl, I was conscious of the Zodiac killer just going out with my boyfriend [because he was targeting couples]. I liked the credits at the end — when they tied it all up.”

BARBARA DILLON

Surfside