Killers is indie sleaze that commits to the bit
Mike Mendez’s 1996 home invasion horror gets a Blu-ray boost from Synapse.
This is Re/Play, where we take a fresh look at an older film, TV series, or video game to see if fond memories hold up under remastered scrutiny. This week: The Blu-ray rerelease of Mike Mendez’s Killers from Synapse Films.
THE MOVIE: Killers
ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: Sometime between January 16th and 26th, 1997.
NEW FORMAT: Blu-ray disc featuring a 1080p (23.976 fps) digital restoration of the original unrated director’s cut scanned by Multicom Entertainment Group. Aspect ratio: 16:9. From Synapse Films.
RE/PLAYING: Killers debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997, one of the few publicly available pieces of trivia about this heretofore under-the-radar horror/thriller/comedy by director Mike Mendez (The Convent, Satanic Hispanics) and writer/star/producer Dave Larsen. I bring this up because visualizing Sundance's elite frowning at this movie during its Park City at Midnight screening while horror hounds howled at it is too funny a mental picture not to share.
Killers is a niche of a niche, and feels like it was discarded as a rookie footnote in Mendez's career eons ago. Watching Killers today, I think it's representative of the oppressive influence Quentin Tarantino had over the Mid-Nineties indie scene, if not an outright rejection of it, which might explain why Killers has been largely forgotten in the years since. Pop culture references, loquacious characters, and wanton gun violence? Check, check, and check. Missing any poeticism, precision, or serious point? You bet. By the time Killers hit Sundance, Redford's people had already been inundated by a horde of T-clone aspirants to the throne. What was one more for the thresher? Killers came, and Killers went.
I don't know if Synapse Films' rerelease makes Mendez's movie ripe for reappraisal or if it will elevate its presently faint cult status (anecdotally, it was big in Germany), but it will doubtlessly put a few more eyes on it. It certainly caught mine, and I will say, if nothing else, Killers is indie sleaze with a commitment to the bit that I admire. And if Killers is a T-clone, it's because its makers are of the same caliber of keyed-in film obsessives as Tarantino. And they aspire to more with their movie, swiping the American media critique from Natural Born Killers and using it as a springboard to indulge in a bit of mayhem and sordid trash. Its execution is janky, its philosophies are shallow, and its sense of humor is irrepressibly puerile, but there's at least something behind it powering its stores. Trashspoiltation with delusions of sophistication. I say this with respect!
Killers is ambitious. Here's a home invasion thriller, a black comedy that lifts from Wes Craven's People Under the Stairs, and a cannibal horror movie with all the attendant profanity, severed limbs, implied incest, and unpleasant basement-dwelling surprises you hope for from such things. It is budget filmmaking, however, and has its limitations. The violence Mendez shows us (lots of exploding guns and fewer well-timed squibs) might have spiked the blood pressure of parental watch groups, but its limits make the gore seem tame by mid-Nineties standards. Likewise, its cannibalism angle creates the goons-chomping-on-props effect of a cheap zombie picture. Still, if you're into this kind of low-budj filmmaking (as I am), it's not hard to appreciate the dim-bulb pleasures of Killers.
When I say "dim-bulb," I mean it. Mendez and Larsen (who died in 2003) fumble their attempt to tap into the cracked equilibrium of Oliver Stone and Tarantino's Natural Born Killers — it sets up an "America's obsession with murder" reproval-as-comedy, but Larsen's sincere line deliveries muddle their sense of humor on the subject. Killers does feature fewer discordant visuals than Stone's movie — I'm sure obtaining archival footage of violent American history and local news reports would have maxed out their budget — but if Mendez and Larsen had some message to convey about America's diet of sensationalism and violence (which all of Larsen's monologues suggest that they do), it is entirely too vague for the viewer to grasp.
Consider this a plus if you want; I do. The desire to be taken seriously allows us to spend more time with Larsen, who waxes ridiculous notions about life, death, and America for long stretches of the movie's first act. In the director's commentary, we're told Larsen was a huge Mickey Rourke fan, and that tracks, given how he carries himself in his performance (and practically makes love to his omnipresent cigarette). Larsen was an interesting screen presence — his slicked-back hair, chin-first smirk, and flicking Zippo combo suggested Rourke, but his size, glowering expressions, and trenchcoat were a dead ringer for Marv from Sin City. It's funny how those two are now synonymous thanks to Robert Rodriguez, but in 1996, Larsen was well ahead of the curve by evoking Frank Miller's crime comic in both body and cadence.
Back to the anti-subtlety of Killers. In its first moments, we meet two brothers, Odessa (Larsen) and Kyle James (David Gunn), who prep and then execute the shotgun murders of their parents. Now, who do you suppose Mendez and Larsen are evoking here but Lyle and Erik Menendez, whose sensational murder trial preceded that of OJ Simpson's by two years? And OJ gets a mention a little further into Killers, too, when two daughters from the film's central household, Jami (Nanette Bianchi) and Jenn Ryan (Renee Cohen), discuss their mother's quiet fascination with Odessa's death row coverage on TV. Their mom, Rae (Damian Hoffer), has the hots for the bigger James brother, and the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. "He's got that OJ thing going for him," Jami says. "Totally guilty, totally cute."
It's probably time to talk about the Ryan family. Charles (Burke Morgan), the patriarch, is a doddering Jimmy Stewart type who balks at vulgarity. ("If you're going to talk like that, you can just take it somewhere else!") There seems to be more going on with Rae, who chops carrots and washes dishes with half-lidded boredom, wears a deep shade of lipstick, and seems well over this nuclear family facade. Jami is seventeen and smokes pot, while Jenn likes collecting celebrity autographs. (Her favorite? Adam West!) When the James brothers, who have freshly sprung from the hoosegow, crash into this quaint suburban home on their way to Mexico, you might have cause to worry for the Ryans.
The first half of Killers is a boilerplate set-up for this hostage situation — it establishes both the fugitives' dispassionate approach to mayhem and the messed-up lives of their suburban hostages, only to then sit back as unexpected (or wholly expected) things happen when these two groups mix it up. Killers peaks about halfway through when Mendez and Larsen successfully pull off their big twist — Charles isn't the Howdy Doody dweeb he makes himself out to be; he's a bona fide badass with a Purple Heart and a Congressional Medal of Honor, all the bells and whistles of a decorated Vietnam War vet.
As for Rea, her sudden amiability towards Odessa begins to make a lot more sense. She served time for armed robbery, was convicted of manslaughter, and, as a former prostitute, has a host of aliases and a rap sheet the length of your arm. The Ryans aren't who they appear to be, and when the floor finally gives out under this revelation, Killers careens from topical media criticism into full-on exploitation schlock and is all the better for it.
ACTUALLY SPECIAL FEATURES: A barebones rerelease from Synapse, with one alternate ending that I promise was justly tossed out, a couple of trailers, and a squirrelly and effusive essay about the film by critic Heather Drain. Synapse was good enough to arrange a director's commentary with Mendez, who fields questions from author Michael Gingold and yields fun insights about the making of Killers (its Fincherian rain storms came courtesy of a good water hose) and some kindly-worded recounting of Mendez's contrasting opinions on aesthetics with Larsen's. (The best recurring bit is Mendez and Gingold getting into the weeds about film vs. digital whenever there's an awkward sex scene on.) If there's an audience eager to unearth the behind-the-scenes secrets of Killers, they're about to hit the mother lode.
RE/PLAY VALUE: Multicom's scan is pretty lush for 1080p; the shadows are inky black, and the excellent lighting (from DoP Darko Suvak of 8MM 2 and True Blue) shows off soothingly fuzzy film grain. Killers may not reach the heights of its ambitions, but it's a sleazy enough time spent with a committed cast and two filmmakers still learning their way. Any further sanding down of its edges by a more competent writer/director duo, and it'd be junk. Killers is imperfect trash cinema, and kind of wonderful in its unique way.
6 / 10
Killers is available on Blu-ray Tuesday, October 7. For purchasing information, click this.
Directed by Mike Mendez
Written by Dave Larsen and Mike Mendez.
Director of Photography: Darko Suvak.
Starring Dave Larsen, David Gunn, Damian Hoffer, Nanette Bianchi, and Wendy Latta.
Produced by SE Larsen, Dave Larsen, and Joseph Jones-Marino.
Stills sourced from Cultsploitation.com.