Director Darrett Sanders’s debut film, Kill Me Deadly, is a black-and-white noir thriller with a comedic twist. With a 1940s classic look and feel, the story is ripped from the pages of the works of Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, and Raymond Chandler. There’s even a Maltese Falcon statue in one scene.
It’s 1947, and hard-boiled private eye Charlie Nickels (Dean Lemont) is working for a client whose priceless “bengal diamond” is missing. The situation heats up when the client, Lady Clairmont (Leslie Mann), is murdered. Her sex-starved daughter Veronica (Raleigh Holmes) and her dim-witted son Clive (Nicholas S. Williams) round out the family. Against his better judgment, Charlie must collaborate with femme fatale torch singer Mona Livingston (Kirsten Vangsness) to solve this case.
As a faithful spoof, Kill Me Deadly hits all the noir marks with lethal precision, while the humor wanders into goofy satire, with snappy dialogue strained and dragged out to absurd extremes. Some of the characters even make a game effort to replicate the faux Received Pronunciation accent that made those old films seem more posh than they were… almost British. There have been many great parodies of the noir film era, including Steve Martin’s brilliant Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, so it is a bold move to make a low-budget film meant to compete. While this doesn’t quite measure up to that level of quality, for what it is, it definitely punches above its weight. Some of the humor calls back to farcical parodies like the Val Kilmer-starring Top Secret!.
Lesley-Anne Down portrays the enigmatic Lady Clairmont in the noir comedy Kill Me Deadly.
“…working for a client whose priceless ‘bengal diamond’ is missing. The situation heats up when the client is murdered.”
Contemporary black-and-white films can feel pretentious, but the cinematography and camera work in this film strike the perfect notes of nostalgia, while cementing its noir credentials. The strained, austere gravitas of the images also lends to the humor and just gets funnier the longer it goes on.
Above all, the performances are the foundation of the film. Williams plays Clive as an homage to Ruprecht the Monkey Boy in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Mann and Holmes are delightful in their admittedly limited range roles, and Joe Mantegna even pops in to deliver an over-the-top take on real-life gangster Bugsy Siegel. Lemont perfectly nails the laconic, non-reactive detective, leaving all the heavy dramatic lifting to Kirsten Vangsness as Mona. Bill Robens’ script is a marvel of overkill, beating every noir trope to death, then resurrecting it for another round of torture. The voice-over narration also goes to 11 with hard-boiled cliche slang munged into a barely intelligible, dizzying stream of increasingly outrageous metaphors.
The film is warm and silly. It’s congenial cinematic comfort food for a certain demographic. That is also its greatest weakness. A large percentage of the movie-going (now streaming) audience will not know the references that make Kill Me Deadly so entertaining. Show of hands of people under 40 who have seen The Maltese Falcon? Still, this is good fun, even if you don’t get it.
Get more on the official Kill Me Deadly website.
"…congenial cinematic comfort food..."
