Movies
Sexykiller (TIFF 08)
“A cult films that gives you blue balls, are you kidding me? Tonight the Toronto International Film Festival held the world premiere of Miguel Martí’s SEXYKILLER, which was said to be this year’s over-the-top horror classic. What the audience witnessed instead was a watered down, PG-13 version of a cult film.”
A cult films that gives you blue balls, are you kidding me? Tonight the Toronto International Film Festival held the world premiere of Miguel Martí’s SEXYKILLER, which was said to be this year’s over-the-top horror classic. What the audience witnessed instead was a watered down, PG-13 version of a cult film.
The film follows Barbara (Macarena Gomez), a psychotic student of medicine. By day she’s a student, by night, a crazy serial killer. The audience walks in as she begins an apparent new wave of terror slaying pretty much anyone who crosses her path. Her motive, “why not?” She’s hot, she’s sexy and she’s unforgiving… after a dickhead driver hits her dog, she kicks his ass, pins him to the car and begins her tale of madness as the first two acts are told in flashbacks, before taking the third act to a whole new ridiculous level…. Zombies.
SEXYKILLER opens with a spoof of SCREAM, loads of breasts and a nice splash of blood. Cut to opening credits slashing across the screen letting us know we have a late ‘70s, early ‘80s throwback on our hands. The audience is introduced to Barbara, and goddamn is she hot, clever and intriguing… someone that will be pined over for the next hour and half. But things go sour immediately and continue on a downward spiral until the very end.
How a film called SEXYKILLER opens with loads of breasts on screen and then fails to deliver again is beyond me. There is not a single exposed breast in the entire film past the credits, not even by our sexy lead Barbara. The flaunt is that she’s hot, violent and ready to go – yet never gives the audience any release. But fine, our slutty star isn’t quite the slut as we thought; maybe she’ll get us off with the old ultra-violence? Not a chance.
Even though Barbara kills more people than I can count on my two hands, somehow the gore level is at a minimum. She stabs, chokes and drowns most of her victims. Even when she hooks a guy and hangs him from the ceiling the amount of blood seems a little parch. Now if you wanna really talk about blue balls, don’t even get me started on the use of the chainsaw in the film. Towards the finale of the film a chainsaw is brought into frame, it’s revved and revved and revved. It never seems to work. Finally, it kick starts in the finale of the film where it’s only used to cut a shotgun in half. Yup, that’s it. Not a single person gets a chainsaw to the face, arm or belly and the audience is left wondering why they’re pants are dry.
Even in the developing arch where the car “hostage” is hearing her story, there’s the assumption that he’ll eventually get his – in the best way possible nonetheless. She lets him go, she freakin’ lets him go!! Then he opens his big mouth, she turns and shoots him – that’s it. And speaking of dumb decisions, if Barabara is such a badass killer, why hasn’t she been caught and or mentioned previously to her masquerade in front of the camera? She literally kills 10-20 people and yet there’s no mention of any previous murders in the film. Did she all of a sudden turn into a killer? There’s no development and no notion to what made her the way she is. It’s as if SEXYKILLER attempts to mix DEAD ALIVE with AMERICAN PSYCHO, only fails miserably.
Then there’s the aspect of the direction. How do you take a film from a sexy serial killer flick and turn it into a cheesy zombie movie? The third act takes the movie into preposterous territories as zombies are created by a mind reading machine and decide to go to a party… it’s not funny and it’s not clever – it’s just plain stupid.
How can a movie that’s supposed to be extremely bloody, sexy and violent be so goddamn boring? That’s the question I have been asking myself since I walked out of the theater and it’s nearly impossible to wrap your brain around it. If they had thrown in a few more breasts (especially during Barbara’s sex scene), two good kills and used the ‘effin chainsaw, SEXYKILLER would have at least given the audiences something to talk about. Enjoy your blue balls.
Barbarian director Zach Cregger is sending Austin Abrams on a nonstop survival roller coaster in Resident Evil, and a fresh image from Empire introduces just one of many monstrous encounters ahead.
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil opens in theaters and IMAX September 18 from Sony.
Austin Abrams (Weapons) stars as Bryan, a medical courier who unwittingly finds himself in a non-stop race for survival as one fateful, horrifying night collapses around him in chaos.
In the fresh image, Abrams’ character appears trapped with an infected passenger.
“The concept here is that we’re following an idiot,” Cregger tells Empire. “Not that he’s stupid, but he’s not your typical game character, with no combat skills whatsoever and completely inept at survival. Bryan is very much an everyman who happens to be burdened with this kind of sacred mission that’s going to take him into the heart of everything. It’s kind of like Frodo going into Mordor.”
Zach Cherry (“Severance”), Kali Reis (“True Detective: Night Country”), Paul Walter Hauser (“Black Bird”), and Johnno Wilson (“Twisted Metal”) round out the cast.
Cregger directs from a script he co-wrote with Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapters 3 & 4).
“It feels like one gigantic sequence,” he said of the film’s structure. “Things pop off about five minutes in, and it basically stays like that until the end. What I love about the games is that you move from set-piece to set-piece. Every location has a unique challenge. So again, I’m borrowing from the games directly in that rhythm, where you’re just running through a gauntlet.”
What’s noteworthy about this particular image, though, is that Cregger previously warned that there would be very few actual zombies in his film. Instead, expect a revolving door of T-virus mutants: “This movie doesn’t utilize zombies that much. It’s much more focused on the weird creature stuff than the zombies. There’s really only two scenes, maybe three, where there’s proper zombie stuff going on. And two of those three are in the trailer.”
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