BHorror
WHAT IT’S ABOUT:
The combination of a title like Kinky Killers and this movie’s DVD cover lulled me into a false sense of security so far as the levels of promised b-grade fun were concerned. It suffers from numerous problems in its execution, not least of which is the fact that the killer is neither the primary focus of the film, nor does he do anything particularly kinky. Other issues include the director’s ‘all over the place’ approach to making the movie, entire scenes where nothing makes sense and entirely different scenes that add nothing to the plot. This is not one of those movies that I would recommend to the truly hardened b-movie fan only; I wouldn’t recommend this movie to anyone. It’s not fun at all, just 85 minutes of non-stop randomness and the occasional display of oddly shaped breasts.
I don’t think I like this game anymore…
How to even try and explain this movie… Well, the general idea is that a number of blonde victims are turning up around the city with various body parts missing. Along with the affirmatively borrowed body parts each victim also has a mysterious tattoo inked into their skin. Two policemen are assigned to the case, but owing to their general approach of screaming at witnesses and breaking down random doors they don’t really get anything useful out of the people they interview. Throw in several psychologists, a few strippers, many useless bible quotes and the use of big words where it’s painfully clear that nobody understands what the hell they’re saying and you’ve basically got the premise of this movie. I wish I could say more about it, but the plot is just too hopelessly convoluted to do anything useful with it.
Even just recalling it fills me with a mild rage…
Man, what a rough week for HMAD. Not only were most of the movies bad, but three (including this) are deemed “Crap”, doubling the number of such films I’ve seen all year. What happened? Are the movies really this bad, or do I just need to drink some cranberry juice? Well, whatever the cause, I’d actually rather watch Seven Mummies or Marina Monster a hundred times again than re-suffer through even a few minutes of Kinky Killers (aka Polycarp, likely changed due to the way too easy “typo” reviewers such as myself are likely to make). Boring, ugly, misogynist, and borderline incoherent, it’s easily the worst film I’ve seen all year, without a single redeeming quality to it beyond the oddball appearance of Charles Durning, whose character enjoys oranges.
All of its problems are evident in the first reel. We have a full four minutes of opening credits over nothing, then a murder scene where it’s so dark that you can’t even understand what is happening, and then finally we meet our “heroes”, two cops played by Michael Paré and some other guy, both of whom are loathsome jerks who call a fellow officer a “stupid bitch”, and refer to other characters as “homos”. And this is their introduction! Then we get the first of many therapy session scenes, all of which include maybe 3 actual lines of dialogue, repeated and rephrased over and over to fill out a 4 minute scene. Here’s an example of some of the dialogue:
Cop: It’s nothing.
Shrink: Should it be nothing?
Cop: I ask the questions; don’t try to play games with me.
Shrink: I’m just asking if you’re really asking the questions
Cop: What is it with questions, always these fucking questions here?
Shrink: You had a question didn’t you?
Cop: It’s nothing.
Shrink: Nothing, is that your question?
Cop: I meant nothing.
Shrink: That’s not what you meant by nothing. You want me to tell you there is nothing inside of you.
Cop: I know what’s inside of me!
Shrink: You don’t know what’s inside of you.
Cop: That’s not true; I know exactly what’s inside of me.
Shrink: OK, what’s inside of you?
Shrink: Should it be nothing?
Cop: I ask the questions; don’t try to play games with me.
Shrink: I’m just asking if you’re really asking the questions
Cop: What is it with questions, always these fucking questions here?
Shrink: You had a question didn’t you?
Cop: It’s nothing.
Shrink: Nothing, is that your question?
Cop: I meant nothing.
Shrink: That’s not what you meant by nothing. You want me to tell you there is nothing inside of you.
Cop: I know what’s inside of me!
Shrink: You don’t know what’s inside of you.
Cop: That’s not true; I know exactly what’s inside of me.
Shrink: OK, what’s inside of you?
And that’s probably the best of the lot (since it’s the first and thus you’re not driven insane by this type of shit already). Other conversations play the same way (except with “bitch” and other colorful terms for one another thrown into the mix), to the point where I began to suspect if the movie was improvised on the spot after a viewing of one of Mamet’s lesser efforts.
Also, half the women in the movie look alike, making the convoluted plot even harder to follow, as I could never remember which one was which (as, again, they also apparently shot half of it without lights). They also combine characters that should be two, such as the lawyer who is also a stripper (?). And no that’s not me confusing one for another character, it’s actually sort of a plot point. A stupid, stupid plot point.
The killer/cult angle is the usual nonsense about some Satanists looking to revive him by assembling body parts, the twist being that they need tattoos of certain things on the body part, such as a particular name or a symbol of some sort. This could have been more interesting, except they reveal it (like three times in a row) near the end of the movie, and instead of finding folks with the tattoos they need, they simply tattoo them on characters before killing them, which seems like cheating to me. And I haven’t a fucking clue what happens after that, as a major character is killed seemingly between camera angles and the final battle between hero and villain occurs off-screen entirely, at which point the movie ends. Seriously, they get into an elevator which begins to ascend, but we stay at the bottom looking at a blank wall. It’s the closest I’ve seen to a film physically dozing off on itself.
In fact, throughout the film there seems to be editing issues, like the editor put them in the wrong order or simply skipped every other scene/shot. Transitions between scenes are as jarring as possible, and we often seem to be coming in late or exiting early to conversations. If the film wasn’t so ugly to look at and our characters weren’t all such degenerates (Paré’s character would stick out as being particularly vile even in a Rob Zombie film), I’d actually cut the movie some slack, assuming it was mangled in post, but there’s absolutely nothing in the film to suggest it was any good to begin with.
Seeking evidence about such a possibility, I took a look at the IMDb bio for producer/writer/co-star Ken Del Vecchio, which largely reads like a press release or something to attract investors, about how his films have all earned “substantial critically acclaim” (current IMDb score just for this one - 3.1/10), secured distribution through major companies like Anchor Bay (who released Stan Helsing), and (the only truly admirable part) shot on 35mm, and it repeatedly mentions that the films all include Academy Award or Emmy winners or nominees (which is why they stuck Durning into the movie as a nothing character, I guess, as he’s the only one in the cast that qualifies). Del Vecchio’s biographer also dubs him a Renaissance man and also pointed out that he has a genius IQ, which doesn’t quite come across during scenes like the one where Paré repeatedly hits a guy in the head with a book. But most of the bio is about how he’s apparently a pretty successful lawyer, so maybe he should stick to that.
And none of the killers are kinky! Everyone in this movie is a sex addict (and true to form, they make even a brief lesbian tryst boring), and it seems there are more killers than victims anyway, so nothing sticks out as being particularly unusual.
Fuck this movie. Waste of a good title. Its only purpose is to make Paré’s collaborations with Albert Pyun look like good career choices in comparison. I’ve walked out of better movies than this.
(Movie Review by Kevin Nickelson) In the early 1980’s, the then-new home video market needed product to sell in between the release of major films. Video companies turned much of the time to independent directors and small production companies who were not able to get major theatrical distribution secured for their films. By directly targeting the consumer with this “straight-to-video” entertainment, celluloid that was destined for a dusty shelf in a warehouse could now be a cash cow for indie filmmakers who maxed their credit cards to get their labor of love made. And thus, the era of directors like Fred Olen Ray and Charles Band, producers like Roger Corman, actors in desperate need of work (like Martin Landau and Gary Busey) and companies like Full Moon Productions began.
Now, insatiable horror/sci-fi film geeks like myself could overload our sense of taste without regret! Well, we did have to drop our gaze to the floor when we got a stare from the video store clerk and we fidgeted when we had to explain to our family why we rented that piece of garbage in the first place. But I digress. The B-video era continues to this day with “straight-to-dvd” productions and internet video downloads. Only the quality of product has gone from cheesy, fun bad to the “Why the ___ did I watch this____crap!?” type of film. “Kinky Killers”, from Vivendi Entertainment, is definitely in the latter category.
The film deals with Dr. Jill Kessey (Beverly Lynne, in a monosyllabic turn) a psychiatrist who’s patients are being captured, tortured, murdered, and dismembered by a serial killer or killers. Or is a satanic cult involved? There are various eccentric characters and red herrings tossed at the viewer to let us know this is a thriller. There’s also gruff cop Barry Harper, portrayed by Michael Pare. The former “Eddie and the Cruisers” and “Eddie and the Cruisers 2: Eddie Lives!” star headlines here with a “please, could you pay my bar bill” role. I guess “Eddie and the Cruisers 3: Eddie Dies For Real” died in the idea stage. Also on hand (probably because Social Security isn’t paying enough these days), is film and tv vet Charles Durning for a scant few scenes as Alexander Hathaway, Kessy’s attorney, who offers his clients oranges repeatedly in between doling out legal advice. Yeah, he’s one of the eccentric characters mentioned above and a few of the victims were clients of his as well.
Who could be the killer or killers and is black magic involved? There’s Kessey’s assistant Tori, who reads and talks about witchcraft. There is Hathaway’s seemingly brain-challenged son, Bob. There is also Kessey’s mysterious roommate Grace Sario (Brooke Lewis), who may be more than she seems. The investigating cops, Harper and his partner Nick Ferelli, have a tough time sorting through it all. All seem to have a connection with the psychiatrist or the victims.
“Kinky Killers” is a botched mix of muted gore, boring sex scenes, terrible performances, and mind-numbing dialogue. Muted gore, while not always a detriment in a film, is a problem when said film is hyped for its bloody content, as this one was on the dvd cover. Gore fans will yawn here. Fans of steamy sex scenes in movies will yawn and fidget in their seats with the dull sex shown here. There is plenty of bedding down (it seems like it happened every other scene) but zero chemistry between actors. And the performances are either on the monotone level of a porn video (Lynne and Lewis) or phoned in (Pare and Durning). It does not help that the dialogue, when not consisting of F-bombs, gives us inane talk about the seven churches of revelation from the Book of Revelations and how they are connected to the deaths and maybe bringing back a certain horned dude who’s name starts with an S. Add to the above problems the plodding direction by George Lekovic, who spends too much of the film in exposition and offers few tension moments, and you have one heck of a mess.
The one positive that kept “Kinky Killers” from being a complete bomb was the use of outdoor locations. This is a nice touch that adds the feel of a big film to a small budget piece. Unfortunately, it only adds a bit of gloss to a steaming, filmic sewage pile that is “Kinky Killers”.
Maybe George Lekovic needs to get in contact with Fred Olen Ray and find out how a zero budget film can be transformed into something more with just the right amount of care.
Full Movie on PutLocker
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