Dear Maggie Greenwald,
your film was an interesting adaptation of a Jim Thompson (who I consider to be a pretty bad writer) novel. Usually Thompson's characters are unauthentic and his novels are utterly trite. But your film makes me want to read the book on which it was based. It is a film of place - The Kill-Off is set in an ugly and shabby seaside small town. You obviously wanted to punctuate its ugliness by showing us the electric poles and the long wires that connected them right at the beginning of the film. You filled the film with actors who all had unremarkable faces. I wouldn't remember any of the actors if I saw them in another film. Except for Cathy Haase who played the stripper. The story is not really about gangsters. But just a bunch of people who have lost their way and want to escape their mundane small town existence by stealing money. There is the bed ridden gossipy woman who has a husband half her age. He cannot even find his way around when he leaves town. There is the bar owner who raped his own daughter when she was a kid. The stripper who is bad at her job. They are all low expectation mofo's who try to steal each other's menial jobs and money and try to keep each other repressed. The terrific background score, the desolate setting and the doomed characters makes this a very interesting and obscure little gem. I only wish there was a better print of this. And maybe if you had more money, you could have cast better actors.
Best Regards, Pimpin.
(7/10)
your film was an interesting adaptation of a Jim Thompson (who I consider to be a pretty bad writer) novel. Usually Thompson's characters are unauthentic and his novels are utterly trite. But your film makes me want to read the book on which it was based. It is a film of place - The Kill-Off is set in an ugly and shabby seaside small town. You obviously wanted to punctuate its ugliness by showing us the electric poles and the long wires that connected them right at the beginning of the film. You filled the film with actors who all had unremarkable faces. I wouldn't remember any of the actors if I saw them in another film. Except for Cathy Haase who played the stripper. The story is not really about gangsters. But just a bunch of people who have lost their way and want to escape their mundane small town existence by stealing money. There is the bed ridden gossipy woman who has a husband half her age. He cannot even find his way around when he leaves town. There is the bar owner who raped his own daughter when she was a kid. The stripper who is bad at her job. They are all low expectation mofo's who try to steal each other's menial jobs and money and try to keep each other repressed. The terrific background score, the desolate setting and the doomed characters makes this a very interesting and obscure little gem. I only wish there was a better print of this. And maybe if you had more money, you could have cast better actors.
Best Regards, Pimpin.
(7/10)