Rating: D-
Dir: Scott L. Collins, Dwayne King
Star: Bracey, Wendell Smith, Leah Carol Myers, Jennifer Mullins
Horror fans tend to have a bad rap in society, often being considered as creepy degenerates. That’s not fair. Having attended and run horror conventions, I can confidently state the genre’s fans and creators are… well, just like “normal” people. Sure, one of the two serial killers I’ve met was at FearCon. But the other one was at a stand-up comedy show, so go figure. I digress. The thing is: when I watch scummy, artless rubbish like Kill Syndrome, I kinda have to wonder if society might have a point. It’s easy to watch this and come to some less than flattering conclusions, about those who would produce or consume such wretched material.
I think the moment in this, where I might find it difficult to defend or explain, was when a man rips a woman’s nipple off with his bare hands, and forces her to eat it. For what we have is your (very) basic torture porn, with a demented “family” of serial killers kidnapping people, and killing them in extended, unpleasant ways, all while recording it on video. Bizarrely – and presumably because it was a location to which the makers had access – this is done out of the lockers at a storage facility. Plotwise, you’d need a magnifying glass to find anything approaching a story. The closest it comes (and that would be “not very”) has an abused woman (Mullins), who finally has had enough, killing and dismembering her husband. She then is unlucky enough to fall into the grasp of the family, though is made of sterner stuff than their usual prey.
Right from the very first shot it’s all utterly unconvincing and barely moves the interest needle off zero. Rarely has a 68-minute movie felt more like 68 hours. I’m not exactly a snowflake. I will happily and enthusiastically applaud the most graphic of violence, even low-budget, when it’s executed with a modicum of energy, skill or simply imagination. [The machete abortion from Back Road comes to mind] This scores close to zero on all counts. Basic rules of cinema, like not shooting directly into the light, are ignored. Art here peaks at turning on a strobe light, for no apparent reason.
The gore is perhaps marginally okay, though it’s hard to be sure, given the piss-poor lighting and camerawork which surrounds them. Otherwise? Everything is awful. This is what happens when you combine second-rate FX with a third-rate story, fourth-rate audio, fifth-rate dialogue, sixth-rate performances (Myers as Sledgehammer Sally maybe merits a pass), seventh-rate lighting, eighth-rate camerawork and ninth-rate direction. Just when you think this film couldn’t get worse, it manages to find another gear and dive deeper into the bottom of the barrel. This DVD supposedly has an audio commentary, and there have been times in this series where such an extra has made me look more kindly on the feature, e.g. Sins of the Father. Here, I didn’t even bother. This is irredeemable.