By Keri O’Shea
If I’m honest, when I got offered the chance to review a film called ‘The Killage’, a certain amount of devilment made it seem like a good idea. Devilment, and who knows – maybe even a little bit of optimism. We get a lot of DVD screeners sent through to us, many with frankly uninspired titles (particularly if an otherwise decent title has been changed by a distribution company which thinks its target audience in the UK are morons) so I suppose I hoped The Killage – as one of the absolute worst names I’d heard in a while – would be absurd enough to really own a title like that. It could have done. It could have been bold, and ready to poke fun at itself because it had real ideas. It could have, and incidentally, since watching it I’ve remembered that optimism is a frankly arse-backwards philosophical standpoint which lays itself wide open to disappointment and takes no account of the world as it stands.
What to say about this film? I mean, it starts with the obligatory modern horror trope of a person-tied-to-chair surrounded by menacing DIY tools, which never helps, before ditching that particular blaring plot marker to take us somewhere in suburban Australia to meet a gang of people somewhere in the 18-25 age bracket, all about to go off to – camp, silly, for some sort of team building exercise. Perhaps in some execrable attempts at being ‘meta’ (a lofty if now common cinematic aim which this film NEVER achieves) we have the standard array of stereotypes – an apparent goth who looks more ill-at-ease in black lipstick than even goth themselves do, a ‘jock’ called Jock (geddit?) who is meant to be the buff sporty one but looks suspiciously like he wouldn’t know a dumbbell if it was labelled and then of course, the others – the bimbo, the bitch, the flamboyant gay man, the one who you know is going to be the ‘final girl’ from the minute she arrives…the slightly geeky ones, the stoner one – ah, you get the idea.
As they head off to the back of beyond for camp, you have plenty of time to sift through your early impressions of these people as they enjoy the incomprehensible urge to yell their godawful lines at one another, and you’ll be able to wonder just how much the film is sending itself up. As the jokes start whistling past your head, if you’ve any standards at all then you’ll decide that no, the film isn’t genuinely sending anything up, because it isn’t smart enough to do so. You can’t just cherry-pick the most inane elements of a frankly mostly boring genre, add in a few more dick jokes and turn up the volume an obnoxious amount to get a film. Well, you can – but why would you?
Anyway, once at the camp, we go though the usual whodunnit formula for a few murders via some CGI which looks like it’s been done on a Sega Megadrive, all until one character is left. Poor writing, bad acting (with the exception of final girl Rita Artmann, who deserves better) and loathsome characterisation means it’s very hard to care.
Ah, but aren’t I just missing the point? Let me see. I never read other reviews before watching a film myself, but curiosity got the better of me – so I bit the bullet and went through a few. It’s a funny thing: in a couple of cases, I read the word ‘satire’ as applicable to this film. I certainly saw the word ‘spoof’ attached to it, too. To start with the word satire, I don’t feel like The Killage was really removed enough to hold anything meaningfully up to ridicule; it isn’t smart enough for irony, and dodged sarcasm to call a character Dickman. You want a satire on the slasher genre? Try Behind the Mask. As for the word ‘spoof’, despite there being overlap with satire this is usually used now as a get-out clause, a means of accusing anyone being critical of lacking humour. ‘It’s a spoof, you’re not meant to take it seriously!’ Right, because taking issue with a spoof cannot be done. It’s immune. And to call a film out on its obnoxious, crass depictions of, say, a gay man (‘twist’ in the tale be damned) means you just haven’t got your head around it. To which I say, bollocks – you want to write that lazily, then expect some people to have good reasons to dismiss your work. You can’t hide behind the ‘joke’ defence forever (especially if the film isn’t actually funny). This film is not a satire, or a spoof – it’s a lame, cynical attempt to turn a quick buck, a cheap trek through everything which has been done better elsewhere.
I usually try to make it a point that I never write anything about a film that I wouldn’t say in person to the filmmaker(s) – I’m not generally into polemic for the sake of it, and I don’t think manners hurt. But seriously, if I could talk to Joe Bauer, it would be to ask him why he thought anything here was a good idea. From its opening bars of canned music, The Killage is childish, glib and deeply stupid. It’s not excessive enough to be OTT (the lack of practical effects contributes here), has no twists nor makes any comment that adds anything to the genre, and no finesse at any stage to make it appear competent. Made in 2011, it’s apparently been in stasis since then – and it should have stayed there. The only claim The Killage can really make is that it’s actually worse than the title suggests.
The Killage will be released by Monster Pictures on 26th October 2015.