Ah, yes.  This is what makes watching hours and hours of movies that the normal person wouldn’t go near worthwhile.  Killer Flick is packaged like a standard indie road movie complete with a silly tag line (“Making Movies is Murder”), albeit with several nice quotes and a few festival notices, but it’s really so much more than that.  It’s a deconstructionist indie thriller that grows constantly odder and self-referential, as much influenced by the French New Wave as Oliver Stone.  It’s similar to the amazing cyberpunk flick Split (which I’ve got to get around to reviewing one of these days) and it’ll probably infuriate as many people as it fascinates.

    Do I have your attention now?

    Killer Flick is the story of four guys on the road to Hollywood.  On the way, they’re making a movie about roadside lunacy a la Natural Born Killers.  The thing is, they’re causing all this havoc themselves, blowing up a gas station, torturing the attendant, taking mushroom trips and dancing around with their shirts off. Killer Flick is the story of four guys on the road to Hollywood.  On the way, they’re making a movie about roadside lunacy a la Natural Born Killers.  The thing is, they’re causing all this havoc themselves, blowing up a gas station, torturing the attendant, taking mushroom trips and dancing around with their shirts off.  The director, Rome (Zen Todd), leads the pack, and they frequently quibble with the gay writer Max, who controls all the events around them.  Cameraman

    One-Eye (eyepatched Christian Leffler, who played Phil Spector in the Sonny and Cher biopic) shoots in black and white and encourages explosions and musician Buzz tries to come up with a suitable score.

    When in need of a love interest, the crew picks up a fresh-off-the-bus girl whose “audition” is a shower scene.  She objects to the dialogue she’s being given and demands her character get a little more depth.  The characters talk about the clichés of the script, participate in an impromptu dance number and say things like “I’m sick of this anecdotal bullshit.”  A police officer is killed when he flubs a line explaining why his death is just excess violence.

    As if the whole “it’s a movie about the movie it is” aspect isn’t surreal enough (a bit like The Player’s punch line stretched to feature length), the film shifts around in time, switching occasionally to a famed character actor (Fred Dennis, in kind of a John Vernon role) playing a police chief that’s hunting them down.  Or, actually, an actor playing a famed character actor playing a police chief.  See, because everyone in the film is just an actor and—

    Oh, forget it.  This is the sort of movie that works better in analysis than explanation.

    One fine sub-plot that encourages a deeper look is when the writer picks up a black love interest of his own, and the rationale is that “If the girl can come along as a love interest, why can’t the guy?”  It’s a great way to confront the inherent homophobia and racism of low budget film making, and while the guy does eventually get cast out of the group, it’s because he’s an (intentionally) irritating character, not because he’s gay or black.  Huzzah!

    The cast is excellent, switching between their “real” characters and the characters their characters are playing (and thus, less convincing) with ease.  The camera technique is very Natural Born Killers influenced, but this time with a purpose—the black and white shots represent the film-within-the-film instead of more cinemasturbation.  The score is good stuff as well, very reminiscent of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet.

    It’s not perfect, of course.  It gets a bit repetitive near the end and some of the dialogue is a bit full of itself.  It’s also kind of an easy trick to pull off intentionally bad scenes if you’ve got characters talking about how bad the scenes are, but Killer Flick manages to be, for the most part, convincing stuff. It’s certainly one of the more encouraging debut films I’ve seen in a while, and I hope that, unlike Split, director Mark Weidman goes on to bigger things.