Every week, I scour Netflix for a movie rated at one star and put it in my queue, suffering through it for your entertainment so that you don’t have to. In the past, I’ve taken on backyard wrestling, softcore Iraq war porn and lesbian prison camp anime, but as we head towards Halloween, I’m turning the spotlight onto slasher flicks.
Kinky Killers (2007)
Starring: The “Before” screen from a Proactiv ad; Satan.
What makes a great erotic thriller? If you said “bacne,” then congratulations:
You’re George Lekovic, director of 2007’s Kinky Killers.
Originally titled Polycarp–and presumably changed when they realized how easily that could be rearranged by smartass reviewers into what this movie actually is–this thing is damn near incomprehensible. After an opening sequence that’s basically four and half minutes of credits over a shaky close-up of the instruction manual to Castlevania, the viewer is treated to the Cliff Notes version of Saw. There’s a girl in her underwear tied to a bed that’s been adorned with so much scrap metal that it officially qualifies as a “contraption” in a poorly lit basement being menaced by a knife-wielding maniac, and while that would normally be something to be concerned about, Kinky Killers barely gets an eyebrow raise.
Before long, the nameless girl’s been murdered and hacked up, and as the police tend to be concerned about that sort of thing, we get a pair of investigators that Lekovic insists are our leads, no matter how hard that might be to believe. They’re about as bland as characters get, but it’s worth noting that one of them is shown to be going through a rough spot in his marriage, owing mostly to the fact that he thinks it’s a good idea to crawl into bed at the end of the day and tell his wife all about the grisly murder scene he just investigated. But who knows? Maybe she’s got a fetish.
The one thing that’s really remarkable thing about this movie is how amazingly bad the policework is. And I don’t mean that it’s bad like it normally is in movies, like when Riggs handcuffs himself to a guy and jumps off a ledge, or when Murtaugh manages to completely avoid an international incident after murdering a foreign national by the use of a well-placed one-liner, either. These guys are more the kind to break into a woman’s house and interrupt her in mid-sex scene so that they can handcuff and interrogate her beau in the shower before ditching him under a nearby bridge.
Eventually, the policework gets so bad that the plot decides to just go ahead and wrap itself up, and after a few more murders that fail to make anyone actually care, the characters pair up to have sex with each other while quoting the Bible. Seriously.
See, every female character in the movie is a cultist dedicated to resurrecting Satan using instructions coded into the Book of Revelation in a conspiracy that even Dan Brown would think was convoluted. As it turns out, they’ve been murdering and dismembering people so that they can build a new body for Satan, which requires an actual bubbling cauldron to pull off, giving the ending ritual the feeling of one of those church-sponsored haunted houses where you learn that pre-marital sex will get you landed straight in Hell.
This explains the original title’s reference to Polycarp of Smyrna, an early saint who was burned alive and stabbed in a martyrdom that was slightly less painful than watching the movie named after him. And that, believe it or not, is the movie’s biggest failing: it fails to live up to its title. There are killers, sure, but aside from standing doggystyle while quoting scripture – which only happens the one time and is more weird than anything else – they’re not particularly kinky.
To be honest, I was expecting a plot where people were murdered by having their junk stepped on with stiletto heels or being smothered by fursuits, and the shocking thing is, this is a movie that actually would’ve been improved if that was the case.
Check out the Worst of Netflix archive.
 Chris Sims is a freelance comedy writer from South Carolina. He briefly attended USC before he dropped out to spend more time with Grand Theft Auto, and his career subsequently took the path that you might expect from someone who makes that sort of decision. He blogs at http://www.the-isb.com and creates comics at http://www.actionagecomics.com. |