Silent Night, Deadly Night

In tribute to my most dreaded holiday season, I spent the last week watching a variety of Christmas-themed horror and slasher films. Although, I have (thankfully) managed to avoid a glimpse of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer's classic peculiar proboscis during this loathsome winter holiday, I did consummate enough beautiful shimmering blood of the same color in extraordinarily festive and equally therapeutic films like Christmas Evil (1980) and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974). Although Black Christmas is undoubtedly the greatest antidote to the retarded philistine joy that comes intrinsically packaged with the Christ-mass season, I found myself especially taken aback by the anti-nostalgic mayhem of Charles Sellier’s Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984); a visceral and venomous work that manages to tear to shreds -- like a homeless man opening a gift-wrapped crate of 40 oz. malt liquor -- most of the things everyone loves about Christmas. In the film, a young boy named Billy Chapman becomes victim to the ultimate life-shattering carnal Christmas; an event that leads to the death of both of his parents and virtual imprisonment in an authoritarian orphanage where he is further tortured by psychological ghosts of Christmas past. Upon reaching adulthood, Billy takes a job at a toy store as a stock-boy and is eventually coerced into dressing up as Santa Clause, henceforth sparking an eruption in his Christmas-fueled psychosis that inevitably results in a totally irrational campaign of indiscriminate merry martial murder. Needless to say, Silent Night, Deadly Night makes for a somewhat delightful Christmas film for disillusioned Christmas-suffering misanthropes, especially those who find the prospect of a Christmas thyme killer more nice than naughty. 

Right from the get go, Silent Night, Deadly Night establishes itself as the definitive anti-Christmas flick.  Unlike most slasher flicks, Silent Night, Deadly Night does not open with a formulaic scene of senseless murder and carnage, but, instead, features little Billy and his family visiting mostly silent and always senile Grandpa Chapman. After being left alone with Billy, thoroughly deranged Grandpa Chapman informs his harmless grandson that Santa will punish him if he has been a bad boy. Being an untainted wee lad, Billy is unable to comprehend that Grandpa is lollygagging lunatic, thus, the boy is left petrified by the very real prospect of old Saint Nick's revenge. I found this scene especially interesting as seeing mentally deteriorated family members tends to be an undesirable, guilt-driven Christmas tradition for a lot of people, yet most do their utmost to forget these painful and sometimes (especially for children) traumatizing experiences. Of course, Grandpa Chapman’s unintentionally wise words prove to be quite prophetic as Billy's mother is brutally raped and both of his parents are gutted like Christmas ham before his very weary eyes and defenseless body. After the premature death of his loving parents, Billy is placed into an orphanage and the tender scars of Billy’s childhood are once again ripped open during every Christmas season by a sadistic sexually-repressed nun who can be best described as the Catholic equivalent of the infamous Nurse Ratchet. Upon first appearing as an adult in Silent Night, Deadly Night, Billy seems like your typical all-American white boy, but beneath the phenotypic façade of his boyish good looks lies a lifetime’s worth of nursed demons who are just waiting to be exercised and fully realized by his emotionally-lobotomized mind. Billy’s boss Ira (a name probably derived from the film's producer Ira Richard Barmak), owner of Ira’s Toy Store -- who is most likely is of the Hebrew faith -- also finds the Christmas spirit to be deplorable phenomenon, but it is his capitalist greed that eventually throws his unstable employee into ecstatic bloodlust. Despite being barely an adult and far from a dirty old fat man who enjoys the warmth of small children on his lap, Billy is convinced by Ira to dress up and play Santa for the kiddies when the original pseudo-Santa working at the store is injured. Proving he is nothing short of an overachiever, Billy certifies that he is a much more proficient merry manslaughter than the highly influential psycho Santa he met as a child. 

Not long after its initial holiday season release, the prissy and pissy Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) successfully had Silent Night, Deadly Night expelled from movie theaters around the country due to their very public outcry. Despite the rampant backlash against the film, Silent Night, Deadly Night still managed to outgross West Craven’s “slasher” masterpiece A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) during its opening week. To the credit of the PTA, it would probably not be a good idea to show Silent Night, Deadly Night to young children as the film is potent enough in its blasphemy to ruin Christmas for both children and other seemingly innocent beings. Silent Night, Deadly Night is also one of the “better” slasher films as it indubitably manages to do for Christmas what John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) did for Halloween. One major convention-breaking aspect of Silent Night, Deadly Night that makes it standout from most slasher swill is that by allowing the filmgoer to see how the killer “comes of age”, the film demystifies him, henceforth turning him into a somewhat tragic figure as opposed to your typical coldhearted, born-psychopath. Thus, Silent Night, Deadly Night is not merely offensive due to its figurative rape and murder of Christmas, but also due to its moral ambiguity and seemingly nihilistic stance. If you find yourself more and more disgusted by the taste of eggnog and the sight of mistletoe, and question whether or not it really is a wonderful life, Silent Night, Deadly Night, much like Black Christmas, makes for a pleasurable and somewhat liberating cinematic coal in your tattered, vintage Christmas stocking. 

-Ty E

Pastoral: To Die in the Country

As far as I am concerned, Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974) aka Pastoral Hide and Seek directed by Shūji Terayamav – a work that manages to bring together the masterful technical precision and craftsmanship of Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick and the salient surrealism of auteur filmmakers like Arrabal and Buñuel – is one of the greatest , most original, and downright creepiest Japanese films ever created. Not only is Pastoral: To Die in the Country a film of Japanese origin but it is also a complex cultural dichotomy of ancient rural life and the technocratic Westernization of the tiny Übermensch Northeastern Asian nation and an intimate personal history of the country as expressed so vividly yet abstractly by Shūji Terayamav. To say that each individual scene and segment of the film manages to illustrate critical issues that post-post-modern Japan is facing would be an one-sided understatement. Of course, being the refined artistic Renaissance man that he was, Terayamav brings up these issues in a most wonderfully carnal-carnivalesque and self-indulgent manner that would even bring a blush to Maestro Fellini’s tanned ½ Roman face in this brilliant film-within-a-film. Transcending all cinematic conventions, genres, and forms of storytelling, Pastoral: To Die in the Country is a work that revamps cinema in general and demands unwavering attention and commitment from the viewer. But more than anything, the film is Shūji Terayamav’s reflective post-pastoral quasi-tribute and personal-obituary to Japanese rural life and culture. Like fellow Japanese artist Yukio Mishima, Terayamav especially focused on his awkward and hopelessly petrified adolescent encounters with members of the extra-fairer-fairer Japanese sex. In the city, the confessing protagonist is merely a nameless and faceless ant in an intimidating ant metropolis, but his disheartening past life in the country lives on in his memory as if the tortured souls of formerly known ghosts have taken residence in his often tormented mind.

 In the world of Pastoral: To Die in the Country, mothers stare in joyous awe at their deceased fetuses, elder women rape young boys, bare-bottom beastesses/temptresses roam wild and the narrator contemplates killing his mother over 20 years after various traumas had taken place during his ominous adolescence. For the thoroughly perturbed protagonist, the past violently bleeds (both literally and figuratively) into the future. Whereas the rural world of Pastoral: To Die in the Country is a kaleidoscope of cut-throat colors and nefarious intrigue, the urban world is a culturally-retarded realm of restricting electronic-based banality where technology has seemingly trumped and triumphed over nature and has turned man into a mere insignificant cog in the machine.  Unsurprisingly, this post-industrial phenomenon has left a a somewhat appreciated hole in the soul of the protagonist. For most people, nostalgia is something to be cherished and retained, but for the protagonist of Pastoral: To Die in the Country, past memories are an agonizing and tormenting army of ghosts who have taken his mind hostage. Despite all the unwanted memories that have conquered his mind, the protagonist also seems to have a vague bit of fondness for a past that he has no option of forgetting. Most violently tattooed on his mind’s eye are the protagonist's various female encounters; the most penetrating being the unforgivable sins of his sadistic mother. As a child, the protagonist tells his mother, “Mommy, I want to get circumcised.” Of course, this young man would grow up to live in a spiritually and culturally circumcised post-World War II Japan, a time and place where the ancient code of the Samurai was disposed of in a manner as careless and unsentimental as outdated technology. The folk of the protagonist's rural hometown also suffer from mental and physical degeneration as they no longer have the spirit and organic health that enabled the humble peasants of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) to fight for the livelihood and preservation of their community. The world featured in Pastoral: To Die in the Country is certainly symbolic/symbiotic of German historian-philosopher Oswald Spengler’s quote, “It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.” 

 

Pastoral: To Die in the Country is a work that certainly demands a lifetime's worth of re-viewings as the man who created certainly assembled of lifetime-size collection of autobiographical mise-en-scènes that encompass the joys of madness, misery, and menacing mammary glands. The fact that Pastoral: To Die in the Country remains a somewhat obscure work in the Occident is nothing short of baffling. Predating the Japanese Cyberpunk explosion by around a decade, Pastoral: To Die in the Country is certainly a first-class film that has failed to get its due as a revolutionary artistic and cultural work of the most grand cinematic kind. If it were not for Pastoral: To Die in the Country – a splendidly freaky flick that acknowledges the miserable death of the country and the birth of the technocratic bureaucracy – it is doubtful that the inevitable birth of the Cyberpunk genre would have been so timely, potent, and necessary. In short, Pastoral: To Die in the Country makes Akira Kurosawa’s nostalgic Dreams (1990) seems like the innocent childlike recollections of a kindly old man suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.  I know if I ever live long enough to suffer the retarded delights of that mind-disintegrating old timer's disease, I will still be mentally cognizant enough to name Pastoral: To Die in the Country as my favorite film from the Land of the Rising Sun.

-Ty E

Perdita Durango

Before becoming the king of international Spanish-Language cinema, a relatively unknown Javier Bardem played the lead role of Romeo Dolorosa – a cracked character with most likely the most hideous haircut in cinema history – in the criminally underrated film Perdita Durango (1997) aka Dance with the Devil directed by Álex de la Iglesia (The Day of the Beast, The Last Circus); a film based on the Barry Gifford's novel 59° and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango. Gifford’s ultra-venomous femme fatale character Perdita Durango made her first cinematic appearance in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) and was originally portrayed by the beautiful Swedish/Italian actress Isabella Rossellini. Upon first discovering that beady-eyed Afro-Puerto Rican actress Rosie Perez played Perdita Durango in Perdita Durango, I was more than a tad bit disappointed. After all, few actresses can level up to the hypnotic beautiful insanity of Rossellini’s performances, especially someone as seemingly unappealing as the woman who played Spike Lee’s bitchy Baby Momma in Do the Right Thing (1989) yet Perez, like Bardem, manages to give a performance that is nothing short of fully artistically committed and stripped (both literally and figuratively) in Perdita Durango. In the film, Bardem and Perez star as the Hispanic equivalent of Bonnie and Clyde, the main difference being that the leading man’s sexual potency is fully intact and that he is a Santeria witch doctor. Showing their undying commitment to meszito pride, the loco Latino couple kidnaps a young bourgeois WASP couple and uses them as their own personal sexual playthings. Despite their instinctive proclivity towards psychopathic criminality, Romeo Dolorosa and Perdita Durango – like their killer couple forebears Bonnie and Clyde – are extremely likeable anti-heroes whose charisma and charm is only rivaled by their moral instability. As one would expect from a film directed by Spanish auteur Álex de la Iglesia, Perdita Durango is as carnivalesque as a Fellini film and as sardonically (yet sillily) surreal as a work by Jodorowsky and Buñuel, but assembled in a more cohesive and linear manner, thus making the film accessible to both cultural philistines and snobbish cinephiles alike. 

On top of all the cross-genre and thematic insanity of the work, Perdita Durango also features macabre Negro singer Screamin' Jay Hawkins as a spooky Santeria spook that certainly "puts a spell on you" despite his somewhat brief appearance in the film. Naturally, Perdita Durango also features music by Screamin' Jay Hawkins which – like the musical score by Simon Boswell – compliments the overall vivacious and equally visceral feel of the film. Perdita Durango also features an underweight James Gandolfini as a Drug Enforcement Administration officer who has a knack for getting hit by cars like Wile E. Coyote and an ironic cameo from Brit punk auteur Alex Cox as a cop. I am not usually one to describe a film as “cool”, but Perdita Durango permeates divine derangement and subtle (and not so subtle) cultural references throughout, thus it is the kind of work that such would-be-cool contrivers like Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone wish they could make but lack the organic-suaveness to do so. After all, I cannot think of another film in the vein of Perdita Durango where race-based Stockholm syndrome is sexy and killing is kinky. In fact, I would go as far as saying that Perdita Durango is the ultimate action-packed cinematic “Meszito-Negro-Europid Western-spiritual” as it is a work that mongrelizes an eclectic collection of cultural, genre, and spiritual ingredients in a melting-pot that, for once, does not reek of repellant anti-cultural decay but smells like a most refined dish of the most delicious exotic and erotic kind. Needless to say, Perdita Durango is just another great example as to why Álex de la Iglesia is one of the greatest – if not the greatest – Spanish directors working today. If Luis Buñuel were alive today, I am sure he would take De La Iglesia out for some fine Spanish cuisine. 

Although I am an unwavering fan of David Lynch’s film, I must admit that De La Iglesia’s Perdita Durango is more wild at heart than Wild at Heart. Apparently, a lot of Álex de la Iglesia’s Spanish fans felt that the Perdita Burango was a "sell-out" film and that the director was pandering to mainstream North American audiences for mere monetary gain. I find such masturbatory fan-boy sentiments to be nothing short of patently absurd. When watching Perdita Durango, it feels as if Álex de la Iglesia is boisterously and jovially raping American cultural values, especially mundane white middle-class mores with his uncompromising Spaniard flare, hence the somewhat obscure status of the film in the USA. It can only be assumed that the cult following for Perdita Durango will grow steadily as the years pass as it is surely one of the most underrated films of the 1990s. Luckily, Javier Bardem has finally earned the reputation he deserves as one of the greatest actors working today, but it is still most unfortunate that few have seen his unrivaled performance as the romantic homicidal rapist loon and Herb Alpert fan Romeo Dolorosa.  Additionally, it is obvious that Rosie Perez will never again bare her derrière in a film as gloriously gory as Perdita Durango.  Although a hyperbolic work, Perdita Durgano is celluloid on speed at the peak of the high and a flick that never leaves the viewer adrift in a muddy swamp of action-packed banality.  Perdita Durgano is a lusty and lurid romance film for those that absolutely loathe romance films and for that reason alone (among many others), it must not be overlooked.

-Ty E

Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers

Although most individuals would probably not notice it upon a first superficial glance, South African auteur Aryan Kaganof has a somewhat of an ironic, and arguably even an oxymoronic full name name. Everyone knows the sort of negative connotations that come tagged along with the ancient word “Aryan” but the surname Kaganoff – meaning descended from a ‘Kohen’ (aka Jewish priest) – is a tad less obvious. Of course, Aryan Kaganof uses the word “Aryan” in the sense of the original Sanskrit meaning (derived from 'ārya') of being “noble” and his version of Kaganoff is missing the last letter as if he is one letter short of being descended from the ancient aristocratic Jewish priesthood but his new self-invented name (apparently created after first meeting with his biological father) is interesting nonetheless. While still working under his original birth name Ian Kerkof, the subversive white South African artist completed his first feature-length film Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers (1994); a work as aesthetically ironic as the name the filmmaker would later adopt. Although comprised of around ten monologues from serial killers (some are from fictional works and mere non-serial killer criminals like Charles Manson), I found Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers to be a relaxing and soothing cinematic affair that never left me remotely shocked nor disgusted as one would expect from the film’s title and dvd cover art. In fact, I found the most obnoxious and repellant aspect of Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers to be the inclusion of the Jeffrey Dahmer-inspired Geto Boys song “Murder Avenue" but that is for my own Eurocentric aesthetic reasons and not because I was offend by any sort of bodily dismemberment or what have you. Sure, the film features a scene of Mr. Kaganof himself jerking off to an unintentionally hilarious monologue of Ted Bundy complaining about the supposedly nefarious influence of pornography and slasher films, yet this scene still manages to hold a certain spiritual transcendence (albeit, in a peculiar away). 

Aside from including monologues from such charismatic quasi-carny criminal heavyweights as Ted Bundy, Edmund Kemper, and Charles Manson, Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers also features lucid literary monologues from the likes of J.G. Ballard and Henry Rollins. I found the Rollins monologue especially interesting as I have always found his writings to be the odious expressions of a barely articulate meathead with a soft side and Kaganof makes surprisingly good use of these wretchedly written works. Recently, I viewed a post-popularity video (during one of his various TV commentary cameos) of Rollins mocking singer Morrissey and the British in general, so I was extra thrilled to see a little limey lunatic fellow act out the anti-Anglo ex-Blag-Flag-singer-turned-goofy-minor-mainstream-media–celebrity’s early borderline-psychopathic writings. Kaganof almost managed to do the seemingly impossible by turning an excerpt from J.G. Ballard’s novel Atrocity Exhibition into a vivid ole thyme Negro spiritual. The first monologue of Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers is of a matricidal fellow named Mr. Kemper who naturally has mommy issues and has no problem admitting so, even if he does seem a tad bit apathetic while speaking about it in a most monotonously monotone manner. To his credit, this 6’9’’ tall and 300 pound mommy-killer does give evidence that he is somewhat respectful of his lady kin when after mentioning how he decapitated her, he sentimentally states that he “came out of her vagina” thus by killing her, he “went back in." After watching Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers, I must admit that I felt no ill will towards any killer, rapist, nor ex-punk icon featured within, and for that, Aryan Kaganof must be commended. 

Before David Cronenberg ever directed a somewhat loose cinematic adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, Aryan Kaganof already included a homoerotic excerpt from the novel in Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers, but, of course, the South African filmmaker’s portrayal of the same material is figuratively and literally from another continent. Starting with a solid black blank screen and eventually sporadically weaving various excerpts (in a manner more erratic than the most ADHD-driven of Soviet montages) from other monologues in Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers, Kaganof’s brief adaptation of Ballard’s Crash seems like what a madman’s would see if his whole life flashed before him as he died. More than just serial killers, the film is also a peculiar and sometimes absurdist celebration of the marriage between life, death, and sex in a most aesthetically tantalizing yet oftentimes schizophrenic way. I seriously doubt any viewer will go into viewing Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers with certain postulations and having a single one of those expectations met. Not only is the film an ambiguous and idiosyncratic look at the minds and visions of serial killers; Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers is also a warped but wonderful audio/visual roller-coaster through the doors of hopelessly damaged and deranged perception.  For more info on Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers and director Aryan Kaganof, please visit: kaganof.com/

-Ty E

Copkiller

Call me anti-Guido but I have never been particularly allured by the mostly cheap scent of stereotypically gritty Italian giallo flicks. Of course, I love such giallo classics as Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and Lucio Fulci’s odd Catholic-guilt themed work Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972) but I generally rather re-watch a Hitchcock classic than put blind faith in an obscure film from the Italian horror-crime-mystery subgenre. Recently, I took a chance on the criminally underrated giallo Copkiller (1983) aka The Order of Death aka Corrupt aka Bad Cop Chronicles #2 aka Corrupt Lieutenant directed by Robert Faenza and featuring Harvey Keitel and John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten (of The Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd) in his only starring role. In Copkiller, Keitel and Lydon play a cryptic gay game of back-and-forth homoerotic, sadomasochistic master and slave. Leo Smith (played by Lydon) is a spoiled little boy with nothing to do but confess to Lt. Fred O’Connor (played by Keitel) that he is the sole culprit in a recent string of vehement cop-killings; the most serious and personal offense when it comes to dealing with the men in blue. Immediately upon hearing Smith’s confession, O’Connor finds such claims to be nothing short of dubious and intrinsically ludicrous. After all, Smith looks and acts like a relatively harmless Mick fairy from outer-space, thus O’Connor prematurely concludes that the ladylike lad lacks the testicular fortitude to commit such suicidal cop-antagonizing deeds. O’Connor is more concerned by the fact that Smith has been stalking him and has found his secret “Bad Lt.” apartment that he shares with his fellow crooked “police partner.” After questioning him and bitterly shoving his head in a fully-functional and running oven a couple times, O’Connor decides to imprison Smith in his bathroom and keep him as a barely-clothed personal pet.  Naturally, O'Connor is not a totally mean kidnapper as he provides Smith with food via a dog bowl and sympathetically acknowledges to his captive that it is a shame that such a "good looking guy like you, locked-up in a bathroom." To say that Keitel and Lydon have an idiosyncratic, prowling yet strangely affectionate kind of relationship throughout Copkiller would be a gross and naive understatement.  The sort of unnatural chemistry the two leads in the film have is the kind that leads to genocide and gang warfare. Simply put, Copkiller may be one of the strangest “buddy flicks” ever assembled. 

Right from the beginning, Copkiller is a wonderful filmic present that is quite pleasurable to unravel for those cinephiles that love surprise gifts. Not only does one discover who purported copkiller Leo Smiths is but one also discovers that Fred O’Connor is simply not a corrupt cop with a rough exterior. From the get go, one gets the impression that little midge O’Connor is a posturing brute of sorts, but, as recognized by Leo Smith, the lunatic lieutenant has a 'maternal' Achilles heel. Although seeming like a weak and harmless pervert, it is quite apparent that limey Leo has something much starker lurking beyond his physically and mentally sickly yet strangely charismatic persona. Initially, it seems as if smiley Smith’s aim is to be gang-raped by a precinct of police but his true conspiratorial agenda is not completely revealed until the remaining minutes of Copkiller. Indeed, the film has a couple notable deaths and the killer looks most daft yet delightful in his cop uniform and matching black ski-mask but the real delicious "red meat" of Copkiller is the thoroughly jovial and equally sadistic psychological power-play between Smith and O’Connor. Throughout the film, one is kept wondering who is the craziest partner of this truly odd couple. Of course, stoic O’Connor is the man in the relationship as he personifies the ad hominem-based, cultural marxist “authoritarian personality” type and Smith is surely more effeminate and conspiring in his constantly unpredictable, passive girlish behavior in the sense outlined by Otto Weininger.  In other words, whereas O'Connor is a stern 'man-of-action', Smith is a cold and calculating conniver. Like O’Connor, the viewer unravels who Smith really is as Copkiller progresses yet the more one learns about this truly loco sod, the more confusing his true agenda seems. That being said, Copkiller deserves recognition amongst the greatest of giallo films, but it is also entitled to notoriety as a work that totally transcends the restricting and stereotyped subgenre. 

One of the most obvious aspects of Copkiller that makes it stand proudly alone (and relatively unknown) amongst most giallo films is its all-star international cast and New York City setting. Of course, there are some other giallo films that take place in NYC (i.e. Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper) but Copkiller – unlike any other film of the subgenre – truly manages to capture the violent zeitgeist of the city at that time as if it was directed by Abel Ferrara’s homo-serial-killer cousin. If it were not for Copkiller director Robert Faenza’s fondness for Marxism, it is doubtful the film would have ever been made as the director was forced to work in the good ol’ free USA after his Italian Communist Party-sympathetic work Si salvi chi vuole (1980) was deemed politically incorrect in his homeland. Featuring a musical score by legendary Italian film composer Ennio Morricone, Copkiller permeates a distinct atmosphere that one can only find in the great gritty NYC crime films of the early 1980s, but, at the same time, the film is secluded in a unique "ghetto" all of its own. In a sense, Copkiller is also a “thinking man’s slasher film” as one gets to deeply penetrate the hopelessly tainted mind of a coldblooded, psychopathic killer in a most personal way. Although I am sure many cinephiles see Copkiller as an primer and/or unofficial sequel/prequel (as some greedy fellows later tried to market as) to Abel Ferrara’s more successful work Bad Lieutenant (1992) starring Harvey Keitel, the film stands fairly well on its own two feet as an unconventional anti-giallo that twists and wonderfully warps all of the rules of the subgenre it barely belongs to. Like William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), Copkiller defiantly (yet more subtlety) enters an area of the gay-world that is most certainly off limits to modern politically correct filmmakers. Although seemingly different, Leo Smith and Lt. Fred O’Connor share a vice that is for them, more naughty than nice, henceforth Copkiller is a work that most significantly enters into the deplorable and forbidden realms of the psyche than the less disturbing physical world of a corrupt cop's secret apartment.  If I had to guess John Wayne Gacy's or Jeffrey Dahmer's favorite film, Copkiller would undoubtedly be at the top of the list.  Unfortunately, like many Americans, I seriously doubt these two upstanding U.S. citizens had the grand opportunity to watch this lovely piece of cinematic Americana.

-Ty E