Killers

The Mo Brothers’ feature-length debut, the cannibal slasher flick Macabre, suffered from having a half-baked screenplay. Conversely, their second film, Killers, is fatally hindered by its overwrought screenplay. Thanks to the ostentatious effort to surprise viewers, not to play according to clichés and to come up with extremely suspenseful sequences, the film becomes tiresome – the attempt not to be formulaic paradoxically becomes a formula. Forcedness and intent emanate from every scene, so viewers do not see the film as either a dramatic narrative that the characters’ stories would draw them into or as an entertaining genre movie. If we say that a film should ideally run like a well-oiled machine, then Killers is a machine that has so many polished and oddly shaped cogs that it stalls and becomes a completely useless artifact instead of a functional unit. At the same time, Killers is an ideal unmasking project for XYZ Films, behind which is the founder of the website Twitch (twitchfilm.net), which in recent years has become an opinion leader in the area of non-mainstream genre cinema. After Todd Brown used the website to build up a sizable group of followers whose tastes were shaped by their preference for particular types of films, he began to serve them films from his own production stable. Though these films have the exact attributes that Twitch contributors and readers prefer, it is becoming increasingly apparent that those attributes do not in any way make them good. It is necessary to add that XYZ Films always figures into the equation as a co-producer or distributor, and it never develops its own projects, but instead takes over projects in the pitching phase (finding investors based on a synopsis or promo video at film fairs). Because of this, the company’s filmography even contains a handful of excellent movies such as The Raid and The Dirties. Whereas these are projects by filmmakers with an entirely clear vision, major talent and the ambition to realise their creative potential in films, The Mo Brothers (and most of the other filmmakers working under the XYZ Films banner) are at best skilful enthusiasts who are unable to breathe any distinctiveness into their movies. [EFM] (27/02/2014)

What a disappointment that was! I’ve always liked Timo Tjahjanto, Macabre is great and his contributions to the anthologies V/H/S and The ABCs of Death have always been among the best, so I was looking forward to his new movie, but well… It gave me the impression of unbridled ambitions, where, after a perfect and straightforward blood-fest (the above mentioned Macabre), the director wanted to make something more complicated, more complex and more meaningful, but it fatally fell apart. I’m really surprised that nobody during the creative process realised how much bullshit this was. The behaviour of the characters is always unreasonably senseless: the first thing I would do if by sheer luck I manage to kill two muggers, and barely got out of it alive, is, naturally, make a video of the dying bodies and upload it to the internet as soon as I get home. Or that unbelievable scene of the chase in the hotel, were a budding assassin (basically, an ordinary, untrained journalist) escapes more than fifty times, but is still there. The classical music fatefully playing during the closing scenes doesn’t take things to a higher level, quite the opposite, in fact. If you add to all this the absurdly long run, I have a candidate for the least pleasant genre experience of the year. (28/08/2014)