Kill

Released by: Troma Entertainment
Released on: 4/10/2012
Director: Chad Achibald, Philip Carrer
Cast: Ryan Barrett, Pete Soltesz, Thomas Gofton
Year: 2011
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The Movie:
A group of complete strangers wake up to find themselves in an unfamiliar house, decorated with a lot of plastic. No one knows where they are or how they got there, but they do know that the whole thing is fucked up. And it becomes even more fucked up when a crazed and bloodied man stumbles into the room and dies. What is this? One of those reality shows or something? Yes or something. But it takes an eternity to get to the point of it all and it isn't fun of a trip getting there, for the people in the house or the people watching the movie.

Some costumed people show up for some sequences, probably in an attempt to up the creep factor, but to an ineffective degree. Their mission is to drive the people in the house to kill in order to survive the game they've been thrust into. They have to kill all the others in order to get out of this and so that's what they do: kill each other. But what reward will the survivor get? Won't THAT not surprise you…

The acting is pedestrian at best, and the dialogue sounds mostly non-scripted. How so? They repeat the same shit over and over again. “What the fuck is this?”, “Who the fuck is doing this to us?”, etc. Real thought-provoking stuff. It wouldn't be so bad if the actors could convincingly ad lib, but they cannot. Repetitive and generic sounding mood music plays throughout the running time and contributes absolutely nothing to the movie or its faux-reality “story”. It just calls more attention to the fact that this is a low-rent, no-budget movie.

But that notion isn't what makes this movie a bad movie. As any fan of schlock knows, lots of low-budget movies are amazing in their own right, and it doesn't take money to make a good movie. Creativity and invention are what make great movies. This one is lacking in both. The “set design” for example, is obviously there to protect all the items in whoever's house they shot this in, and instead of trying to make it look halfway decent it looks like they took the lazy route. Maybe if the story/dialogue/acting were a bit better, the plastic all over the walls wouldn't be such a distraction. But it is.

There's really not much else to say about this movie. There is nothing there to suggest this was a labor of love, or anything impressive based on the low-budget restrictions, and it comes off as nothing more than an attempt to make something cheap and sell it for profit. Everything about this movie screams lazy and un-inspired, including the twist/shock/come-full-circle ending. Kill is proof that not just anyone can make a movie.

Video/Audio/Extras:
The video quality is decent, with an aspect ratio of what looks to be 2.39:1. Colors look pretty good, detail is there. The movie uses different camera looks change now and again (like using closed circuit for example), but when they use the normal camera it looks fine. Nothing impressive though. It looks like what is expected of a no-budget digitally shot movie. The audio is a 2.0 channel stereo track that sounds like the video looks, just ok. Balance seems good. No authoring issues to note, and it serves its purpose. You can hear every unnatural, forced line just great.

For extras, a commentary by the directors can be listened to. Some dead spaces are present, but for the most part the two do a pretty good job of filling the running time, but it's a typical commentary. A trailer for the feature and some overused “Tromatic Extras” get more mileage, but that's it.

The Final Word:
You might want to see if you can find it streaming before you go plunking down your money for this one.