JUNE 19, 2010
GENRE: CRAP, CULT
SOURCE: CABLE (TMC)
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?
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.
What say you?
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