The first three minutes of “Killer Killer” are much unlike anything you’ve seen in quite some time. The question is, however, whether the remaining seventy two can live up to the promise of the first three.
And it does, in something of an unrelated sense. Basically, about a half a dozen serial killers are going to wake up in their insane asylum to find the world around them graphically changed. All the cell doors are open… the guards have vanished… and a seemingly limitless and insanely cold mist has settled in around the facility. The facility itself, meanwhile, has clearly seen better days and is now falling apart. Now, it’s left to the serial killers to figure out what’s gone on with their entire world even as their group thins out in sudden, horrible and unexplainable deaths.
It’s a clever idea, but execution causes it to suffer heavily. My copy, for example, had some serious problems with the audio and no subtitles of any sort. I couldn’t make out dialogue in several key incidents. And a movie as dependent on dialogue as “Killer Killer” was NEEDS to have the crystalline clearest dialogue it can possibly have. There’s just no two ways about it.
Which is sort of another problem– “Killer Killer” is a little too dependent on dialogue. There are long stretches where the killers just talk. Talk about their lives, their pasts, their crimes, their childhoods, their hopes, their dreams, their aspirations, and so on, and so forth, until you just want to scream.
This hyper-dependence on dialogue reduces a thrilling idea–and a thrilling opening!–to a dull, sludgy malaise.
However, things pick up somewhat during the last half-hour. Perhaps sensing that there was nothing more to say, and that they’d have to DO something for a change, “Killer Killer” indeed launches into the “do it” phase with something like aplomb. This is not enough, though, to supplant the snoozefest that was the first forty minutes.
“Killer Killer” tried its best to be a clear winner, but sadly, couldn’t cash the check that its first three minutes wrote. An excellent idea was brought down in the throes of lousy execution.
