The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Six people wake up in different rooms of a large house, each one in identical white outfits and with no idea how they arrived at the house. They quickly meet each other and a voice announces over a public address system rigged throughout the house that “Round 2″ is about to begin. Another man, bloodied and beaten and wearing the same outfit as the others, staggers up the stairs and into the middle of the group. He passes out and they put him in a bed, but no one knows each other and no one knows what “Round 2″ is supposed to mean. They begin to explore the house and soon discover they have been entered into a deadly competition with each other. The winner lives. As if this wasn’t unpleasant enough, complicating matters are the screaming “game show host” who periodically yells over the blaring PA system and a group of masked men who seem hell-bent on killing the contestants.

  Kill takes a fairly worn-out setup and doesn’t really do much with it. The acting is almost universally terrible, and the dialogue often borders on complete nonsense. None of the characters act like anything but what they are– characters in a movie who need to act and speak on cue to keep the story moving forward. This mostly consists of the characters yelling at each other in an endless series of pointless arguments, at least until people finally start killing each other off. However, by that time the action is far too little way too late, and despite some really weird “game show” moments, the film never gets quite weird enough to be really interesting. Even the ending twist is painfully obvious to anyone paying any shred of attention to what’s going on.

  It seems fairly obvious that Kill was made with very little money, and in that at least there is something to be said for the ingenuity of the filmmakers. They manage to use cheap decorations for funny and creepy set designs, and the practical blood effects are decent if not particularly noteworthy. The film is almost completely free of the usual gross-out humor associated with Troma, too, so for a certain audience this might make a good introduction to the low-low-low budget world of Troma Entertainment. Unfortunately it may also be the only Troma film those audiences ever see, because it’s not all that great. That said, Kill goes to show that with no money, a bunch of willing pals, and a bunch of weird stuff sitting around your house, you can crank out a feature-length film. It might not be a good feature-length film, but still!

  Kill Game (2015)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 4 January 2016

  A warning: This is not going to be so much a review of Kill Game as a rant about problems common to many modern horror films in general. So if that’s not what you’re looking for, feel free to move on, thanks for your time, sorry to disappoint. Suffice to say I was not a fan of the movie, for whatever that’s worth, so if you are familiar with my writing on this site maybe that will give you an idea as to whether or not you want to check it out. I’ll happily state for the record that I don’t think it’s worth your time. Personally, I made it about 40 minutes into Kill Game (which runs a mind-boggling 101 minutes total) and then fast-forwarded through the rest of it.

  Let’s see if this sounds familiar: Kill Game is the story of a bunch of stupid assholes who enjoyed playing horrible pranks on other people in high school and end up being killed off one by one. A masked figure captures them, tortures them, and kills them. The film opens at the funeral of one of the pranksters, after which his partners in crime meet up for dinner and the audience gets a chance to meet them. Before that, though, we get a bathroom scene in which one of them pisses blood and his bro boasts about having sex with a Thai girl who looked 12. In the women’s restroom, one of the female members of the crew is lamenting how tough internet dating is and how “fuckable” she was in high school. A little while later, after realizing that maybe someone she treated badly in high school is out to kill her, another female prankster tracks down a girl she played a “prank” on (she wrote a doctor’s letter informing this girl she had contracted HIV from a tainted blood transfusion) and gives her a totally unconvincing apology. She appears to be barely suppressing a smug grin as her victim describes how her mother was crushed when she read the letter. Suddenly, the one character for whom the audience had any chance to empathize with at all has proven she’s just as loathsome as the rest.

  Who could possibly care what happens to these characters? They’re all awful, they all do stupid things. This fundamental miscalculation is a common problem among independent horror movies. There is no one for the audience to identify with or root for; any reasonable viewer is going to be desperate to see these characters die within 30 seconds of being introduced to them. Maybe that’s the idea. Maybe the filmmakers hoped it would be satisfying to watch these characters meet violent, elaborate deaths. However, a better use of a viewer’s time would be to watch another movie that bothers to make characters worth watching in the first place. There is nothing interesting or fun about Kill Game. It’s ugly things happening to ugly people, and it’s presented in exactly the same way horror fans have seen countless times before.

  But again, maybe that’s the idea. Kill Game reeks of a movie made out of the hopes of building a career by making a marketable product. It’s technically competent. It looks fine, the performances are fine, and the sound mix is fine. It’s all fine. But who could really care about this story or these characters? Kill Game ticks off boxes: standard slasher structure, protracted scenes of torture, killer in a creepy mask. It’s apparently marketable enough that Cinedigm picked it up for VOD and DVD distribution, so the filmmakers have something to point to to prove they can complete and sell a movie. Perhaps their next movie will be something they actually care about, a story they feel compelled to tell. But that still doesn’t make Kill Game anything other than an exercise in commercial savvy.

  As the VOD horror market becomes increasingly glutted with movies, the number of cheap cash-ins is on the rise. Movies like Kill Game may not be technically the worst, but they might be the most damaging. They’re just made to sell and fill a slot on the Redbox kiosk or the VOD listings. There’s nothing new or remarkable about them. They take tired but commercially proven tropes and just hammer out another feature-length run through the paces. Maybe enough indiscriminate horror fans will see it and get word of mouth out that they’re not completely unwatchable, and the distributors will make some money back on their investment. But nobody really cares about them. Nobody is going to remember them. They just take up time that viewers could instead spend watching something interesting, made by a filmmaker who really cares about making movies and isn’t just out to fill out their portfolio.

  In other words, there’s no real reason to watch Kill Game when you could watch something by Astron-6 (Father’s Day, The Editor), Jason Banker (Felt, Toad Road), Richard D. Bates Jr. (Suburban Gothic, Excision), Adrián García Bogliano (Late Phases, Cold Sweat, Here Comes the Devil), Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani (Amer, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears), Henrique Couto (Babysitter Massacre, Haunted House on Sorority Row, Scarewaves), Chris LaMartina (Call Girl of Cthulhu, The WNUF Halloween Special), Renaud Gauthier (Discopath), Jim Mickle (We Are What We Are, Stake Land), Dustin Mills (Easter Casket, Her Name Was Torment, Invalid), Zack Parker (Proxy), Jerome Sable (Stage Fright), Phil Stevens (Flowers), Onur Tukel (Applesauce), Ben Wheatley (Kill List, A Field in England), Adam Wingard (You’re Next, The Guest), etc. etc. etc. If you care about horror cinema, be willing to put in some work to find the stuff that really speaks to you made by people interested in doing just that. And leave “product” like Kill Game on the shelf where it belongs.

  Kiss of the Vampire (2009)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 28 January 2009

  I feel like I need to establish one thing right away: Kiss of the Vampire is an extremely misleading title. Not quite as misleading as the film’s working title, though. That was Immortally Yours. Either way, the titles conjures images of vampire romance– Immortally Yours, in particular, sounds more like a Harlequin romance novel than a vampire movie. However, the prospective viewer should be warned that there is little
romance and even less actual vampire kissing in this film. While that may have been the initial focus of the film, somewhere along the way things got really, really complicated, and the final product is truly bizarre.

  As the film opens, Estelle Henderson (Katherine Hawkes, who also wrote the film’s screenplay) attends an opera with her parents and her drunken ass fiancé. During the performance, her eyes are drawn to dark, emo-coiffed Alex (Daniel Goddard). The fiancé makes a scene outside the theatre, Alex steps in, and suddenly Alex and Estelle are having dinner together. There’s an obvious attraction between the two, but Alex has to leave abruptly, apparently sticking Estelle with the bill.

  The film has already been treading just this side of unintentional comedy, but it jumps over the line and starts running in the next scene: as a “Techno Syndrome” sound-alike song plays over the soundtrack, the camera glides along through a nightclub where three girls grind away on a raised platform and a clown juggles on another stage. It’s here where the film introduces Alex’s vampire clan, the kind of vampires most of us hoped were gone forever in the wake of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They’re standard-issue decadent black-leather Eurotrash, and two of them even have accents to prove they’re, uh, from the “old country.” The police bust the club for some reason, and the vampires leave through the back door and stand around for a couple minutes hissing and striking threatening poses at the cops before Alex teleports them all back to their mansion.

  Already, we have a laundry list of questions: why did the cops bust the club? Why did the vampires leave out the back door instead of immediately teleporting home? Don’t the cops all know what the vampires look like now? Why aren’t the cops more freaked out by the fact that vampires exist? Was there seriously a scene earlier with Costas Mandylor? Did he have a weekend off between Saw movies? Is that Martin Kove? What the hell is going on?

  The film spirals completely out of control soon after this, as it is revealed that Estelle’s father works for a young man named Victor Price (Eric Etebari, who is clearly enjoying himself in the villain role). Victor, as it turns out, runs the Illuminati, despite looking like he’s in his 30s and everyone else in the organization looks to be at least 60. Maybe he inherited it? In any case, the Illuminati are trying to unlock the secrets of eternal life, which dovetails nicely with Alex’s sudden desire to not be a vampire any more so he can marry Estelle and live a normal life. Those two dates with her clearly made a big impression. Estelle’s father agrees to help Alex while the Illuminati look on with keen interest and continue their business of running the world and botching huge drug deals so we can have another scene with lots of CG gunshots and blood.

  Like many low-budget horror films, Kiss of the Vampire is way too ambitious. As three major plot lines all run simultaneously, you can’t help but wonder if at least one of them was just there as an excuse to insert some dull action scenes. So there’s a tiny bit of romance patched into the rest of the film, which is kind of an action movie, sort of a techno-thriller, and partly a horror movie by default (what with the vampires and all). However, I can’t say that I wasn’t entertained by Kiss of the Vampire– depending on your mood, Kiss of the Vampire might be an enjoyable slice of low-budget cheese or an intolerable mess. I would highly recommended it for fans of Martin Kove movies… you know who you are.

  Klown (2010)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 25 September 2012

  The influence of Kevin Smith’s brand of sweet but foul-mouthed comedy has been wide-ranging and occasionally very popular. Judd Apatow took the formula and turned it into a series of hit comedies, and in America this has transformed into a series of female-centric comedies such as Bridesmaids, Bachelorette and For a Good Time, Call…. However, despite a number of promising twists on the concept, the combination of heart and smut has basically gone as far as mainstream American cinema can go– even Smith’s own Zack and Miri Make a Porno proved that for most audiences, the line had been drawn past which they would not follow. God help those folks if they end up watching Klown: based on a popular television series and produced by Lars von Trier’s Zentropa Entertainment, Klown jets past the line of propriety, pushing the Smith/Apatow style well past its logical extremes.

  Casper (Casper Christensen) and his girlfriend Mia (Mia Lyhne) attend a wedding where Mia’s doctor inadvertently informs Casper that Mia is pregnant. When they discuss the matter, Mia explains that she is (justifiably) concerned about Frank’s status as “father material” and is uncertain whether she wants to keep the baby. Casper’s best friend, the impossibly lecherous and self-centered Frank (Frank Hvam), advises Casper to deal with the situation before the two men set off on a weekend canoe trip that climaxes with a visit to Europe’s most exclusive bordello. Through a series of ridiculous circumstances mostly of his own fault, Casper ends up in charge of Mia’s 12-year-old nephew Bo (Marcuz Jess Petersen), and decides to prove to Mia that he is indeed “father material” by kidnapping the boy and taking him on the canoe trip to debauchery. Frank disapproves, but thanks to the intervention of his wife Iben (Iben Hjejle), the matter is settled and Bo joins the men on their trip.

  Frank immediately decides that in order to keep Bo from talking about what he plans to do on the trip, Bo must either have the time of his life or Frank and Casper must get some kind of blackmail material on Bo that they can threaten to reveal if he talks. This is a distant second, however, to Frank’s constant quest to have sex with as many women as possible. The weekend quickly degenerates into one disaster after another as Frank attempts to get laid while Casper tries to keep Bo entertained and in the dark about Frank’s activities. For his part, Bo just seems miserable most of the time, and is more interested in collecting enough caps from Underberg bitters bottles to cash in for a toy car than anything Frank and Casper are doing. After Bo storms off thanks to being embarrassed by a massively stoned Casper, the weekend is cut short when Mia and Iben appear at the festival. Casper’s plan is foiled and things look bad for Frank, but Casper decides to make one last very, very bad decision in the hopes of getting Mia back and patching things up with Bo.

  Klown is truly, deeply inappropriate and all the more hilarious for it. More to the point, its humor is often based in concepts that American comedies would never go anywhere near– the very idea of taking a pre-teen boy on a weekend sex trip, after all, is not the final punch line of the film but the point from where it kicks off. As raunchy as the film gets, though, its heart is always in the right place. Casper is completely unprepared for fatherhood, but he honestly loves Mia and becomes a (terrified, drunk, kind of awful) father figure for the extremely shy Bo. The film shifts between very bad behavior and sweet moments of bumbling earnestness at a moment’s notice, which can make for something of a schizophrenic viewing experience, and the running joke about Underberg may cause more confusion than laughs for American audiences. Still, there’s no question that Klown is one of the funniest films of the year, and a huge score for Drafthouse Films. Be sure to catch it before the inevitably disappointing American remake!

  Knock Knock 2 (2011)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 8 August 2012

  If you’re wondering “When did Knock Knock come out?”, you’re not alone. Produced in 2006, the original Knock Knock is an interesting artifact of post-Saw/pre-Grindhouse horror. In a lot of ways, Knock Knock is a throwback to cheap 80s slasher films, only with that obnoxious jump-cut/strobe editing that the Saw films popularized in the mid-2000s. “Interesting” doesn’t necessarily mean “good,” but Knock Knock is at least an amusing curiosity. It also has absolutely no tie to Knock Knock 2, a “found footage” horror film originally titled 1666 and picked up by Lionsgate for distribution and retitled, presumably to take advantage of the Knock Knock franchise’s popularity. Which may or may not be almost entirely nonexistent.

  Aiden (Aiden Cardei) and his girlfriend Jordan (Jordan Elizabeth) get engaged, and then Jordan and her best friend Stephanie (Stephanie Lovie) decide to take Aiden and Stephanie’
s boyfriend Beckett (Beckett West) out on a tour of famous murder sites around the Los Angeles area. They drive around, make a lot of noise and annoy a lot of people who live in the infamous spots, and finally end up at “1666,” a house with a particularly unpleasant history. They manage to get into the house, but quickly panic when they discover they are trapped inside. A 911 call that plays at the start of the film informs the audience that Aiden is the last one to die, leaving the order of his friends’ deaths the only question in the last act of the film. This is literally everything that happens in the course of the film, other than the opening title and the end credits sequence. Thanks for coming out, everybody!

  Knock Knock 2 is easily one of the worst, laziest “found footage” horror films to come down the pike yet, which is saying quite a bit. Early in the film, Aiden puts his camera down and points it at a section of wall and a toaster, then stands around talking to Beckett just off the right edge of the screen, leaving the audience to stare at that toaster for over a minute. Occasionally an elbow will poke into the frame from the right side to remind us that if the camera were pointed about 5 more degrees in that direction, we would be able to see the characters. Later, when Jordan and Stephanie are researching and pitching their murder tour, Jordan uses the exact same wording in three different scenes to describe the condition of the body of the Black Dahlia when it was discovered. Apparently since there was no budget for makeup or special effects, the characters keep shoving pictures into the camera of Elizabeth Short’s actual corpse, presumably to remind the audience that this is supposed to be a horror movie and not just a document of a particularly boring evening in Los Angeles.