every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the K’s, with anti-alphabetical cheats)
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A Killing Affair (1986)
The setting is a small, Southern town in the 1940s, and the opening scene is a preacher preaching in church. Like the people in the pews, I’m losing interest. There’s Kathy Baker, though, and she’s always good, and Peter Weller is in the credits, though he ain’t yet shown up…
Crickets are all over the soundtrack to remind you you’re in a small town, but they mostly underscore that nothing’s happening. Then it is slowly established that the man who manages the mill, the town’s main employer, is an ass. Then more crickets. Then we’re shown that he’s also an ass at home, to his wife and kids.
This was either made for television or taped on VHS, so it looks shitty and smudgy. And the sound is out of whack, with crickets too loud and they never shut up, even on interior scenes. Often they’re accompanied by whippoorwills, croaking toads, a rooster shouting cock-a-doodle-doo in the distance, and sad off-screen harmonica music.
After more than 15 minutes of harmonica, crickets, and croaking toads, the mill owner’s wife discovers a dead body in the barn, which really livens up the place. Ten minutes later, Peter Weller shows up, looking for work at the mill, and after that it’s a strange and intense li’l drama, almost worth seeing, but never worth hearing. The harmonica is fucking oppressive, and the crickets, lord, the crickets.
Verdict: MAYBE.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Killing Fields (1984)
New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) is covering the American war crime of Cambodia, a sidelight of the American war crime commonly called the Vietnam War. A Cambodian dude named Dith Pran is Schanberg’s interpreter, and becomes his friend.
And then, in the middle of Hell already, more Hell breaks out, and Schanberg chooses to survive by fleeing the country. Pran, though, lives there, has family and friends and a life and all, so he stays, and the Hell engulfs him.
The Killing Fields is a winner of universal high praise and the Best Actor Oscar for Haing S. Ngor, a non-actor, himself a refugee from Cambodia. It’s as good as everyone says, but I couldn’t stop thinking it’s simply the American way: make war for no reason, or a nonsense reason, and then bail when the Hell of it gets too intense, and make a movie about it.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
John Cassavetes made many terrific films, and Ben Gazzara starred in plenty himself, but this one is utterly what the fuck. Gazzara plays some night club operator and small time crook, and in lieu of a plot the movie just shows him doing night-club-operator and small-time-crook stuff, on and on and on, until I turned it off and off and off.
Verdict: NO.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Killing of Sister George (1968)
An actress unknown to me, Beryl Reid, plays June Buckridge, an actress on a British soap opera, playing ‘Sister George’. The character is a cherub, nothing but niceness, but the actress is a rude and crude, brassy and bitchy, an angry bull dyke who’s frequently drunk. Who wouldn’t want to kill her?
“That was quite the most moving installment we’ve done so far, don’t you think?”
“So moving it’ll make you vomit.”
Even off-screen, everyone calls the actress ‘George’, so I’ll call her George, too.
She thinks she’s about to be fired by the show, and might be right. She vents her anger at her live-in lover Charlie (Susannah York), a blonde decades younger than George, who’s forced to eat George’s cigar. Symbolism much?
Based on a play and very theatrically staged by Robert Aldrich (The Flight of the Phoenix, Kiss Me Deadly, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), Sister George channels Bette Davis with an English accent and a lesbo motif. The flick could seem anti-gay on a superficial level, but more accurately it’s anti-human, which makes it a blast.
Rated X in 1968, for no reason discernible in 2025.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Killing Time (1987)
In a coastal town so sleepy the cops are unarmed, the police chief is about to retire. But a slimy real estate developer is trying to kill his wife, who’s trying to kill him first, and a newly-hired policeman isn’t who he says he is.
The Killing Time is a throwback to the noir era — enjoyably sordid, packed with interweaving subplots where the good guys aren’t much better than the bad guys. Beau Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, and femme fatale Camelia Kath star, with support from Joe Don Baker, Wayne Rogers, and Michael Madsen.
This frequently played as the bottom of retro double- and triple-features at The Strand in early-’90s San Francisco, where I saw it several times. Remembered it fondly, but over the decades I’d forgotten the title, so it was a pleasant surprise when this surfaced in the Ks on my watchlist.
With a better-than-b-movie cast, it could’ve been a classic, but you don’t get classic with Beau Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, and Wayne Rogers. You’ll have to settle for pretty good, and it is.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Messiah of Evil (1973)
a/k/a Dead People
a/k/a Night of the Damned
a/k/a Revenge of the Screaming Dead
“They say that nightmares are dreams perverted. I’ve told them here, it wasn’t a nightmare, but they don’t believe me. They nod and make little notes in my file, and they watch me now, waiting for me to scar my breasts, to eat insects maybe, or to lift my dress like some crazy old woman and urinate on the floor…”
A young woman kills, seemingly for no reason. Another woman, not quite so young, searches for her missing father, an artist of no renown. We’re shown wild murders at a Mobil gas station and a Ralph’s supermarket, but the companies sure didn’t pay for product placement.
Everything and everybody here is strange. Bleeding-eyeball cannibal zombies show up, but this is more than a zombie flick. Messiah of Evil is an American movie, set in the USA with all-English dialogue, but it looks and feels as Italian as risotto and agnolotti, and it’s delicious.
It never comes together as a story, but maybe that’s on me — I watched it all wrong, ten or fifteen minutes nightly over the course of a week. Doesn’t matter. It’s huge on atmosphere and being eerie, with plenty of inventive cinematography, bizarre sets, and wild visuals all the way.
Oh, and that’s Walter Hill, director of The Driver, 48 Hours, Streets of Fire, The Warriors, etc, being murdered in the opening scene. Hill didn’t direct this, though. He’s just popping in to say hello, and goodbye.
It’s directed by Willard Huyck, and co-written by Huyck and Gloria Katz, co-writers of such classics as American Graffiti and Howard the Duck. Marianna Hill (The Godfather Part II, High Plains Drifter) stars, with Michael Greer (The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart), Anita Ford (Invasion of the Bee Girls), Joy Bang (Play It Again Sam), and surreal cameos by familiar character actors Royal Dano and Elisha Cook Jr.
Gave me nightmares all week long, and I’m eager to watch it again.
Verdict: BIG YES.
Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer.
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If you can’t find a movie I’ve reviewed, or if you have recommendations, please drop me a note.
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No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.
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