DVD Review: Gothkill
Goth Kill: Satanic Special Edition (2008)
Studio: Wild Eye Releasing
DVD Release Date: May 26, 2009
Directed By: JJ Connelly
Cast: Flambeaux, Erica Giovinazzo, Mistress Juliya
Review By: Marc Patterson
Hundreds of years ago, during the inquisition Nicholas Dread (Flambeaux) was a Catholic Priest and an artful inquisitor. When he discovered that the church was prosecuting and murdering innocents as witches for their own gain, he stood up against the powers that be. The result was that he found himself burned at the stake alongside a couple of those witches. Nick in his final moments renounces his faith and on his way to hell is promised the souls of 100,000 mortals as his followers, with the catch that he must come back, kill them, and drag them to hell himself. Now in modern day New York City Nick finds himself in a virtual den of iniquities that is ripe for the picking, and we are given front row tickets to the insane carnage that will inevitably follow.
Let me take a moment to breathe this one through, because I’m going to need to lay down a couple qualifiers before the remainder of this review. Yes, I love all things macabre. Yes, I love Satan (though I don’t believe in his actual existence, anymore than I do that of Santa Claus or the goddamned Easter Bunny). No, I don’t particularly care for most “Goths”, unless I need the butt of a good joke. So given this basic knowledge you can accurately surmise that Goth Kill was guaranteed to have one of two effects on me. Either I was going to love this piece of low-brow, low-budget horror cinema, or I was going to fucking hate it, and hate it passionately. To further my predicament the DVD box calls the film a “tongue in cheek horror fest”. But is it really? And isn’t that often a total copout for making a really crappy low budget film? Oh yeah, you were TRYING to making it intentionally bad. Call that a point against this effort from the start.
Here’s the brutally honest skinny… Goth Kill is a film with an incredibly simple premise that unnecessarily complicates things. The incessant swings between past, present, and in-between convolute the storyline and create disruption to the flow of the story. The overwrought plot drowns in its own melodrama and punishes the audience relentlessly with goofy acting and a story that eventually crumbles and goes straight to hell, which is to say it really goes nowhere. The ending felt like we were two steps from doing the friggin Time Warp again, but in a fetish/bondage, I’m going to tramp on your black soul kind of way. The intended self-mockery of the gothic sub-culture comes off, at best, as a back handed complement to a sub-culture that is laughable to most, and perhaps most of all to myself who felt ultimately robbed of what could have been some quality homage to Satan.
This isn’t to say that the film didn’t have likable parts and certainly I did have some fun with the film. Forget about the muddy disarray that frames this film. Focus on the fun factor. Exploitation, murder, mayhem, and bloodletting are where this film finds its soul. And rarely has the fetish club underground scene been so appropriately and accurately captured on film without any semblance of glorified reverence. This isn’t the gloomy, yet pretty, gothic underworld from The Crow. This is a dirty, dingy, New York City club full of eccentric oddballs dressed in poorly constructed latex, plastered with makeup, playing weekend vampire. It’s icky, sticky, and made my skin crawl from the safety of my living room. I suppose if this loosely constructed sense of play is what the director was after, then indeed he hit his mark. Adding to the playfulness was the gore-soaked go-go dancing dominatrix’s of death, of which Mistress Juliya was one. C’mon… you can’t beat the devil, but you can sure whip his daughter.
Goth Kill is a film that doesn’t promise perfection in any form. It just asks that you try to enjoy it. If you can get beyond its many flaws then you’re likely to have a damned good time.
Brutal As Hell Rating:
2 ½ out of 5
