Movie Review: Kill (2011, Troma)

Directed by Chad Archibald & Gabriel Carrer

Starring Pete Soltesz, Ryan Barrett and Jennifer De Luca

Six strangers fall asleep in their own bed next to their spouses only to wake up in a creepy house. The doors and windows have been sealed shut, there are strange party decorations put up around the house and there appears to be no way out. The strangers gather together in a hallway and ponder what has happened to them, why they are there and how, if at all possible, they can escape. While searching the house for a way out, they soon discover a man who stumbles up out of the basement, covered in blood and barely alive. Soon after this they discover five bodies under a sheet and then realize the house is filled with cameras and speakers. There are also pictures of each of their spouses and hidden in each of the pictures frames is a note telling them that they must kill in order to live. They then discover a room where a banquet-style feast has been prepared for them, some of them dig in while others are suspicious. They soon find that some of their drinks have been spiked with some type of pill and suspicion starts to creep in, is one of them somehow involved?

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The true architects of the abduction are watching behind the cameras and apparently feel as if the plan isn't progressing fast enough and its then that the movie finally starts to pick up the pace a bit. Suddenly we have a bunch of very large men in grass hula-skirts and giant tiki masks chasing after the group, catching them and plunging huge syringes into their necks. Now we have a bunch of extremely high, drugged-out and paranoid people running around with knives and lamps bludgeoning and stabbing each other to death in a mad dash to be the last one standing.

The players appeared hand-picked from the “horror movie grab-bag of stereotypical characters”, the douche-bag shit-talker, the nice guy, the timid guy and the three sometimes meek but sometimes scrappy girls. The tiki-masked guys in skirts injected an interesting element to an otherwise ho-hum story, if not for them I would have definitely fallen asleep by that point in the movie. The best scene of the film for me is the fight between Lauren (Casey Dutfield) and the douche-bag bully Kirk (Pete Soltesz), Laura stabs him in the belly, which pisses him off to the point where he bashes her head against the wall about ten times and then holds her face down on the electric stove-top, burning her up pretty good.

But wait! She's not done yet folks. Just when you think she's dead, she comes back from the brink of defeat to pull off  a nice kill-shot with a steak knife to the chest. As she's limping away she turns and asks the now dead Kirk, “Who's the bitch now?” A great scene but it wasn't nearly enough to save this one from the shit-heap. The obligatory plot-twist at the end was comically lame as well. In the realm of ultra-low budget horror movies (about a $5000 production on this one) you have to understandably lower your standards just a tad, but even with the bar set all the way down to “Would a blind person fall for this?” level, the movie was still a bust. Troma, Troma, Troma.....what are we ever gonna do with you? One day your giving us a masterpiece in Fathers Day and the next your forcing us to endure a movie like Kill.

Now before I completely burn this one down to the ground there was a saving grace in this disc. Tucked away in the special features was a sweet little PSA featuring Lemmy Kilminster from MotorHead, commenting on the plight of transvestites and how we should be nice to them. Where this came from and why it's on the DVD is a complete mystery to me but it was pretty funny as were the Troma trailers (which are always pretty well done).

On the Troma-Meter I'd give it a solid 5 out of 10, pretty standard fare from them. On my standard scale it scores a 3.5 out of 10

Reviewed by KennyB