Killer Joe

So the day after I see one of the weirder endings to a film ever, the news breaks out that Zhang Ziyi has been prostituting herself to local Chinese officials and has earned up to 100 million dollars! 100 million dollars??? I mean she certainly is crazy cute as the bratty kung fu queen in Rush Hour 2 and Crouching Tiger but is that really worth 100 mill? Well the answer is...yes of course she is! Are you kidding? We could reenact scenes from Rush Hour and she can be my hot groupie at illegal street drag races. And we'd do other things too of course. But why do I bring this up? Because it is just as random and disturbing as the movie Killer Joe.

 William Friedken (the director) did it right with French Connection and The Exorcist but lately his movies are just ok at best. So when you see Matthew Mcconaughey yelling "you know i'll kill you right?" in the previews, you cant help but snicker a bit because well, it's Mcconaughey. I mean, has there been a  performance that was more unintentionally funny than Matty M's in A Time to Kill? He looks so confused when he's spitting out lawyer jargon, you just know that he had to smoke 3 bowls before each scene to keep his head from literally spinning. But I love Gina Gershon and Emile Hirsch, so I decided to give it a shot.

It starts off as a pretty standard crime caper. It's about a dysfunctional white trash family in Texas whose last name doesn't rhyme with tush. And we are immediately introduced to Chris (Hirsch) who is being hunted by the local drug lord because of money he owes him. So he reaches out to his father (Thomas Hayden Church) about a scheme to have his mom killed so that they can collect the insurance money. They eventually agree to reach out to Joe (Matty M) who is a local detective who also does knock off jobs on the side. But once Joe realizes that they can't pay his fee upfront he proposes that they give him Chris's innocent and naive sister Dottie (Juno Temple) as his sex slave until they can pay up. Given the fact that everyone in this movie is total slime with the exception of Dottie, they of course agree to to it. And this leads to a very uncomfortable scene where she loses her virginity to Joe. Well if you like twisted things like this in movies, this is just the start. Because from this point on things start to unravel and you begin to see what separates this film from any normal made for tv movie that's played on LMN. How many Not Without My Daughter movies can you make?

This movie got the death nail from the ratings board with it's NC-17 so it's only getting a limited release but you can totally see where the rating came from. The first time you see Gina Gershon, it's not her face you see but her um other asset that men ultimately are interested in. The final confrontation scene which lasts about 20 minutes had to be toned down just to get it a theatrical release. It's so out there and weird that it will sway you one way or the other. You will walk out loving it or freaked out so much that you hate it. Most of the people in my theater fell into the latter. I however sat through all of Hills Have Eyes and Hills Have Eyes 2 when most people walked out in the first 10 minutes so naturally I loved it. I give this movie a rating of FRESH if for no other reason than I got to see Juno Temple naked. I've been following her since Year One and Greenberg so this felt like a reward for all of the money and time I invested.

***spoiler alert***

So I am fairly certain that the chicken Matty M makes Gershon suck on forever was initially supposed to be his member but there's no way this movie would've been released in the theater if it had been. So instead we get the strange scene that was shot and you either laughed at the absurdity of it or you bought into the fact that Joe was really that messed up. And finally all of thew evil and corruption got to poor Dottie and she eventually went down to everyone else's level...or did she?