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.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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