[31 Days of Halloween 2016: KILLBILLIES is now available on home video and VOD.]
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
The folks at distributor Artsploitation have slapped the Troma-like moniker KILLBILLIES onto a serious-minded Eastern European thriller whose original title translates as the somewhat less marketable IDYLL. A somewhat ignominious fate (or is it?) for what is billed as the first horror movie to emerge from the young nation of Slovenia. The version extant isn’t even dubbed in English.
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
The folks at distributor Artsploitation have slapped the Troma-like moniker KILLBILLIES onto a serious-minded Eastern European thriller whose original title translates as the somewhat less marketable IDYLL. A somewhat ignominious fate (or is it?) for what is billed as the first horror movie to emerge from the young nation of Slovenia. The version extant isn’t even dubbed in English.
The plot (don’t
tell the Slovenian ambassador to Cleveland) is not all that original. In fact
it pretty much riffs on the 1977 Wes Craven THE HILLS HAVE EYES (which itself, you
could say, owes a debt to Sam Peckinpah’s STRAW DOGS and Boorman’s DELIVERANCE,
which themselves had slight overtones of Ray Milland's PANIC IN THE YEAR ZERO
etc. etc.). A group of “civilized” city folk are thrown into a fight for
survival against a bunch of feral, misfit degenerates so crude and malformed
that they can scarcely be considered human. Yet, after all the two-way bloodletting,
you really can’t say one side is any “better” than the other.
IDYLL begins with
three amateur photo models in some Eastern European metropolis carpooling into
the countryside with a male photographer for a casual fashion shoot. But the
rustic denizens (indeed called “hillbillies” in the subtitles; don’t ask me
what the Slovene term is) are all menacing, malformed goons in lederhosen-type
peasant outfits. Two of the disgusting male cretins attack the city folk and
drag them to a rural dungeon.
Rape seems to be
on the marauders’ minds, but in fact there’s a very different fate awaiting
strangers in this region. Throughout the insubstantial narrative there has been
a lot of imbibing of a trendy new liquor with a crudely scrawled pictogram
label, that seems to be produced in great quantities in the hills. Horror fans
won’t be much surprised at how the kidnapping ties in with the bootlegging. Or that it's the most goth-chick of the imperiled girls who has the fortitude to fight back.
Yes, there is
abundant gore, but at least writer-director Tomaz Gorkic doesn’t dwell in
extravagant closeup on the sicko mutilation f/x that are the hallmark of
torture-porn, and you horndog viewers expecting beaucoup nudity alongside the
bludgeonings and piercings are going to be disappointed. And the picture
actually does look good, as though the Slovene film industry really did lavish
care and budget on this thing, as opposed to much of the backyard-video hack
jobs that pass for splatter cinema.
And by the
end there’s a message - supremely nihilistic - to all this brutal torment and
homicide, put across well enough (and depressingly enough) that the feature
equals or surpasses similar Hollywood exercises in sadism like TURISTAS and
HOSTEL. But is that entertainment? Maybe for some people, but if the folks
behind this expect to crank out a whole franchise of eight or nine sequels with
eventual SAW and CONJURING crossovers, then I wish the Slovenians had stuck with Balkan war
dramas and Laibach concert flicks, sorry. (2 out of 4 stars)
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