KillerKiller (2007)

September 10, 2008

by Nathan Shumate

Written, produced and directed by Pat Higgins
Starring
- Dutch Dore-Boize
- Cy Henty
- Richard Collins
- James Kavaz
- Danielle Lawz

There’s been a burgeoning subgenre in low-budget/microbudget cinema in the last decade of serial-killer killer movies. Usually these are campy, tongue-in-cheek, winking affairs, tacit acknowledgment that the B-movie slasher flick is pretty much played out and useful only as fodder for irony and parody.

KillerKiller opens right in that vein: a blonde babysitter (Danielle Lawz) finishes up a phone call to her boyfriend while a masked killer watches her through the window. When she goes into the kitchen for a drink, he creeps in the unlocked back door; she goes upstairs for a shower (naturally) with the bathroom door open — so she can hear her unseen young charges, one assumes — and the killer with knife drawn creeps up the stairs, down the hall, into the bathroom…

A killer in a Cesar Romero mask?

…And then the blonde turns around with greasepaint-smeared eyelids and bloodshot scleral lenses in her eyes, produces two long blades from nowhere, and slashes the slasher.

Campy, yes, and winking at the cliches of the genre. And then after the opening credits, we’re suddenly in another movie entirely.

A quick montage of psych interrogations introduces us to a handful of the British worst of the worst, remorseless serial killers who can’t really answer the question, “Why?” And then the story proper starts as Lawrence (Dutch Dore-Boize), one our focused spree killers, wakes us in his jail cell. But the jail isn’t as it was when he went to bed. The paint is peeling in huge sheets; there’s no electricity; his cell door — everyone’s cell door — is unlocked, and there’s no one present but the eight convicts.

“Okay, I have some SERIOUS issues with the housekeeping in this facility!”

Yes, escape is the first thing on everyone’s minds, but there’s a bizarre glowing mist around the prison (off-screen) which almost freezes to death anyone who ventures into it. So these fine specimens of humanity are trapped inside with no protection from each other — a situation worse than being inside with locks and guards.

Lawrence and Rosebrook (Cy Henty), the two who come closest to sanity and responsibility, take nominal charge, and the first thing they do to ensure the sanity of all the rest is to lure and lock Nick (Nick Page), the sociopath who scares sociopaths, in the unused foundation tunnels. But whatever safety that assures doesn’t comfort; while the remaining seven are in one room, in the blink of an eye, the neck of one of their number is snapped bloodily. Did one of them kill him, almost too fast for the eye to see? Did he die of some volcanic aneurysm? Or is there something else in the prison with them?

“But — but — I’m Jewish!”

Here’s the roll call (since we’ve gotten rid of the guy whose name we only picked up after the fact):

Lawrence, the “paper bag killer,” who gutted hunters and hikers in the backwoods.
Rosebrook, convicted of tearing the throats out of co-eds, though he swears he was wrongly convicted.
Perry (Richard Collins), who killed half a dozen prostitutes with a drill. He’s been undegoing shock therapy, which explains his patchy haircut and twitchy manner.
Harris (James Kavaz), a former surgeon who removed organs from the poor and replaced them with auto parts in some convoluted attempt to start a class war and put the dregs of society back into their place.
Samuel and Victor (Scott Denyer and Danny James), partner killers who specialized in cheerleaders. (The fact that there are no cheerleaders in Britain is a definite impediment, and they end up racking up the frequent-flier miles. “We should have done nuns.”)
Nick, locked in the tunnels, who… I dunno. He growls something about “bleeding the baby,” and I’m willing to let it go at that.

The characters don’t much trust each other, so they separate frequently, and thus they don’t notice the pattern they we, the viewers, see unfold before us. First, one of these inmates gets angry — murderously angry. Then suddenly, said inmate is taken up in a vision or dream of the kind of scenario in which he killed before: Harris is in an operating theater, Samuel and Victor meet a cheerleader, etc. The intended victim in all these scenarios is that same blonde girl we saw in the opening shower scene. She quickly turns the tables on her would-be murderers, her eyes go all smudgy and bloodshot, and she kills them quite messily. Then ZAP! We’re back in the real world, the “encounter” with the blonde having taken place in a split second, and everyone else sees only the bloody corpse of the latest killer-turned-victim.

Seriously, can you not look like a dweeb wearing one of these?

The problem a movie like this presents is obvious: don’t we usually like to identify with a sympathetic protagonist? And isn’t a character pool composed entirely of spree killers and mass murderers sort of the opposite of “sympathetic”? That being the case, kudos to writer/producer/director Pat Higgins for pulling off the unlikely and engendering sympathy for these characters, or at least some of them. Lawrence is a semi-penitent monster who feels regret for what he did before, but sees no hope for redemption. Rosebrook maintains his innocence of the crimes that landed him there in the first place. Perry isn’t repentant, but his shock therapy has rendered him such an imbecile that it’s hard to hold his earlier crimes — or even his occasional murderous intent in the present — against him.

And this is as much a character study as a horror thriller, with downtime in between killing scenes occupied by tight dialog, usually between Lawrence and Rosebrook, in which they each guardedly feel out the other for trustworthiness and human compassion. Dore-Boize as Lawrence is the best actor on display here, evincing a natural leadership quality that brings the others to an unspoken acknowledgment of the pecking order even while they bitch about it. (The actor’s also got a semi-circular scar around his left eye; for some reason, that contributes to his character’s depth immensely.) Henty as Rosebrook is perhaps not as good an actor (and we only notice because of the sheer volume of scenes which he and Dore-Boize are called upon to carry), but he’s both sincere and reserved in believable amounts, and anyway, a British accent can cover a multitude of sins.

Prison razors: better to just grow your stubble.

Though mention of that British accent brings us into the realm of technical difficulties. The entire movie was shot in Warley Hospital, an abandoned asylum (do a google search; you’ll find a surprising number of them in Great Britain). The location is visually perfect, with grey natural light filtering through windows into empty peeling rooms — so much so that you’re willing to overlook the fact that there’s no way this facility was ever suited for maximum-security detention. But all of the sound was recorded on site, and the echoing acoustics and ambient background noise, combined with the accents and the method delivery of most lines, turns the audio mix into an absolute nightmare for comprehension. (And then, when you’ve got the volume turned all the way up to catch dialog delivered through gritted teeth, somebody starts shouting and you have to scramble to bring the volume down.)

The sound problems could be corrected through re-recording the dialog in-studio — tedious and expensive, but at least doable. The larger problem, though, is the dissimilar tone of the killing “visions.” Not only does a pall of camp hang over them, but they seem cheaper than the main narrative. Or maybe the production values which benefit the main narrative — grey natural lighting, gritty and spare surroundings, long static shots and handheld inserts — don’t serve the inserted scenes as well. They seem too stripped-down and colorless. Unfortunately, reshoots involving the entire cast are a lot more expensive than studio overdubbing, so I don’t know if there’s a way to correct this.

Not that it’s really an option now; the movie’s been released, after all. (And with the blonde as a cheerleader plastered all over the DVD box, thus increasing the audience expectation of straight-on camp in a movie which only drifts to camp periodically and inadvertently.) So if you watch it, realize going in that it’s a much more sincere and nuanced movie than it would at first appear, and that there’s some good storytelling going on behind the technical flaws.