“The Killer Inside Me”

When Anadarko, OK-born pulp fiction writer Jim Thompson’s fourth novel hit the revolving paperback book racks of 1952′s drugstores, supermarkets and bus stations, it sold for 25 cents a copy. You couldn’t find “The Killer Inside Me” in respectable establishments where hardbound best-sellers and highly regarded literary works were sold. The mainstream reading public just wasn’t ready for a story told from the point of view of a soft-spoken, small-town deputy sheriff whose long-repressed sadistic and homicidal urges are suddenly unleashed by a defiant, sadomasochistic prostitute.

The book has since grown from underground classic to a recognized seminal masterwork of noir fiction along with many of Thompson’s other novels, although the author never enjoyed such accolades in his lifetime. Several of his books have been adapted to film, some more successfully than others  (James Foley’s “After Dark, My Sweet” and Stephen Frears’ “The Grifters,” both released in 1990, hewed closest to Thompson’s bleak vision), but none have nailed the heart of the author’s darkness more effectively than this effort by director Michael Winterbottom (“A Mighty Heart”) and screenwriter John Curran (director of “The Painted Veil,” “Stone”).

With twilit Oklahoma locations standing in for 1950s West Texas, Casey Affleck’s coolly unnerving portrayal of a deceptively pleasant country gentleman harboring monstrous, pent-up lusts, and Kate Hudson and Jessica Alba both playing brilliantly against type — the former as a longtime, love-desperate girlfriend and the latter as a fiercely independent bad girl with appetites to match the deputy’s — Winterbottom creates a love-triangle-from-hell scenario that bravely plumbs the darkest recesses of the human soul and is as heartbreakingly tragic and strangely touching as it is brutally shocking.

But most of today’s mainstream moviegoers still aren’t ready for Thompson’s style of startling and disturbingly truthful storytelling, due mainly to the film’s graphic depiction of furious physical violence, which garnered negative reviews and poor box office that were sorely undeserved. Maybe someday this superbly crafted and acted film will gain the same measure of cult appreciation that Thompson’s haunting book finally achieved.

— Gene Triplett

Jessica Alba

As chopped-off noggins roll around like careening bowling balls and as blood spews in ghoulish crimson fountains, “Machete” pushes the boundaries of on-screen action violence to the limits of ridiculousness and beyond.

To say writer-director Robert Rodriguez’s comic-book vigilante saga is madly, gleefully over the top is a gross understatement. In fact, it’s a vigorously in-your-face, gloriously gory, politically incorrect romp through B-movie exploitation territory, all gussied up with a campy Hollywood cast of stars, starlets and has-beens.

Serving as an unlikely star vehicle for Rodriguez regular Danny Trejo, whose pocked face and lumbering countenance scream anti-leading man, “Machete” realizes a long-held scheme by the Austin-based filmmaker to create a franchise that casts Trejo as a sort of Mexican Charles Bronson.

Machete, a renegade Mexican federale who dispatches bad guys with vicious sweeps of his broad blade, first showed up on movie screens in a garish “fake trailer” inserted into Rodriguez’s and Quentin Tarantino’s tandem 2007 B-movie tribute, “Grindhouse.”

And true to Rodriguez’s penchant for wasting nothing, the filmmaker responded to the wild popularity of that tongue-in-cheek trailer by dusting off a mothballed 1993 script and giving us a full-out Machete, a sort of brutish but decent modern-day Zorro who wields not a whippet-like rapier but instead swings a mean, meat-cleaving machete.

The story is mainly boilerplate stuff (with some sly satirical digs at so-called immigration reform and U.S. schizophrenia toward migrant workers from south of the border).

Machete is hired by a shady political hack (an oily Jeff Fahey) to assassinate the bloviating Texas state Senator McLaughlin (Robert De Niro in a wink-wink performance), who’s advocating an electric fence all along the U.S.-Mexican border.

But quickly Machete finds himself double-crossed and on the run, accused of the failed assassination attempt. Soon he’s caught up amid the sexy wiles of a pursuing ICE agent (Jessica Alba), the underground schemes of a fiery Hispanic revolutionary (Michelle Rodriguez), the dastardly conniving of a cruel Mexican drug lord (Steven Seagal in the blackest hair-dye job imaginable) and the political chicanery of the crooked McLaughlin and his murderous border vigilante cohort (Don Johnson sporting prison-warden shades).

Another Rodriguez regular, Cheech Marin, shows up to earthy comic effect as Machete’s ally and brother, a profane, shotgun-slinging Catholic priest. Also, Lindsey Lohan turns in a good-sport appearance as the pampered, petulant daughter of wealth who goes from stark naked to a nun’s habit in the wink of eye.

Throughout, Rodriguez (along with co-director Ethan Maniquis and co-writer-cousin Alvaro Rodriguez) keeps the camera focused on the hulkish but oddly likable Trejo. And he paints the whole thing in garish, comic-book hues, packs it with pithy-campy dialogue and punctuates it with ultra-violent set pieces featuring shootouts, gang rumbles and grisly killing effects (how about those multiple decapitations or a zinging machete blade through a skull?).

It’s all offered up with the darkest, most mocking fanboy brio. “Machete,” with its cynical humor and zestful urge to shock, might not find a mainstream following. But among comic-book fans, youthful hipsters and admirers of Rodriguez’s maverick methods, this will certainly be cutting-edge stuff. Characteristically, Rodriguez ends the film with teasers for two supposed sequels – “Machete Kills” and “Machete Kills Again.”

- Dennis King

“Machete”

R
1:45
2.5 stars
Starring: Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Don Johnson.
(Strong bloody violence throughout, language, some sexual content and nudity)

Danny Trejo

Austin-based Robert Rodriguez has earned his reputation as a maverick, do-it-all filmmaker who makes the most of every resource at his disposal. Give him left-over chicken gizzards, he’ll make a tasty chicken soup.

He was, after all, the guy whose first breakout hit, 1992’s “El mariachi,” was made for the Mexican video market for a paltry $7,000, part of which he reportedly earned by working as a test subject in medical science tests.

Since establishing his Troublemaker Studios in his Texas hometown, Rodriguez has gone on to much bigger things, but always with that hand-made ethic that often sees him serving on his films as director, producer, writer, editor, musical composer, cinematographer, sound technician, visual-effects artist, electrician, actor, production designer, miscellaneous crew and more.

So it’s not surprising that this style of using everything but the kitchen sink to make his movies comes to the fore in his newest picture – the over-the-top actioner “Machete,” an amazing amalgam of low-budget, B-movie panache and big-time Hollywood star power.

The overarching gag about “Machete” is that it’s the classic example of the tail wagging the dog; it’s a feature-length movie drawn from one of several “fake trailers” included in Rodriguez’s and Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 exploitation double feature, “Grindhouse.”

Apparently, audience buzz for the “Machete” trailer was so strong that Rodriguez decided make a “Machete” movie for real. So he dusted off an unproduced script he’d written in 1993, after he’d first cast Danny Trejo in “Desperado.” Then, recycling footage from the fake trailer, casting Trejo in the lead and adding star power with a surprisingly potent cast that includes Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Don Johnson and Lindsey Lohan, Rodriguez gradually built a “Machete” that 20th Century Fox elected to release as a late-summer theatrical feature.

“Machete” will screen at the 67th Venice International Film Festival on Wednesday (Sept. 1) and open nationwide in the U.S. on Friday.

Oddly enough, this is not the first time a trailer has created a sensation that turned the fate of the movie it was previewing.

When Warner Bros. was prepping Kevin Costner’s “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” for its 1991 theatrical release, a preview trailer was released months in advance to whet audiences’ appetites. The trailer featured a cutting-edge, digital arrow-cam shot that followed an arrow from the archer’s bow as it zipped through the forest and thudded into the trunk of a tree. The shot was not originally included in the film. But the buzz created by that remarkable digital sequence persuaded director Kevin Reynolds and the producers to include a similar arrow-cam shot in the finished film. It became the movie’s signature image.

See? The tail wagging the dog.

- Dennis King

Kate Hudson and Casey Affleck

As he strolls the streets of Central City in his sharp Stetson and crisp white shirts, deputy sheriff Lou Ford projects an image mildly suggestive of Andy Griffith. Clean-cut, ramrod straight, soft-spoken and scrupulously pleasant, he is in the vernacular of this dusty West Texas burg a classic good ol’ boy.

But as we probe deeper beneath the surface of this rustic rube – as we detect a hard glint behind his polite “Howdy, ma’am,” as we watch him sit home nights brooding to the music of Mahler and Donizetti, as we witness the stash of pornographic photos tucked away in his Bible – it dawns on us that a terrible sickness festers beneath Lou’s calm, upright exterior.

That sickness comes to vicious, visceral fullness in “The Killer Inside Me,” director Michael Winterbottom’s bold, brazen and mightily controversial adaptation of Jim Thompson’s savage pulp novel, that teases us slyly with “Andy of Mayberry” then plunges us deeply into an “American Psycho” abyss.

Since the late Thompson was an Oklahoman and Winterbottom shot the film in and around Guthrie, Oklahoma City, Enid, Tulsa and Cordell, there’s naturally much anticipation of the release in the Sooner state. But the bleak, brutal nature of the material, as well as Winterbottom’s blunt, unflinching handling of its violence, have rendered the film a virtual orphan in Hollywood’s distribution system.

Having been roundly booed at the Sundance Film Festival and struggling to find a footing in art-house circles (it played for two weeks then quickly disappeared from New York City screens), the film has become something of a pariah. It is available in Oklahoma City only on pay-per-view TV and will run at Tulsa’s Circle Cinema starting Aug. 20.

Clearly, this is rough, disturbing material, and in the folksy, feral performance of Casey Affleck as Lou, in his sadistic-masochistic encounters with itinerate prostitute Joyce (Jessica Alba) and wholesome, hometown fiancée Amy (Kate Hudson) – both actresses plumbing some harrowing, humiliating territory – the film often feels like a very dank slog through a slough of despond.

As Lou’s violent escapades escalate – from the highly publicized pummeling to death of Joyce with his fists through more homicides, double-crosses, sexual depravity, misogyny, botched blackmail schemes – Winterbottom and screenwriter John Curran attempt to capture Thompson’s matchless gift for pitch-black wit, for sweaty prurience versus outraged moralism and for fearlessly probing evil’s most fetid recesses.

But what works so well in Thompson’s hard, artful prose doesn’t always translate so well on screen. Too often, Winterbottom’s version lacks the rising pitch and morbid exhilaration of Thompson’s best writing. The British filmmaker skillfully recreates Thompson’s sordid, dusty, sun-parched world but doesn’t manage to muster its assorted characters effectively or wend his way through the author’s intriguing plot turns with sufficient clarity. And efforts to reveal the pathology of Lou’s sickness just get bogged down in murky exposition.

Much here is artfully done. There are deft, brief supporting turns by Ned Beatty and Simon Baker, puzzling appearances by Elias Koteas and Bill Pullman, and sly musical punctuations here and there like Spade Cooley’s “Shame Shame on You” and Little Willie John’s “Fever”.

But unlike the best adaptations of Thompson’s works – Stephen Frears’ “The Grifters” and James Foley’s often overlooked “After Dark, My Sweet” – this version feels somehow off, like a film influenced by Thompson but not of Thompson (count among the former “Blood Simple,” “Blue Velvet,” Chinatown,” “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” – not bad company).

For sure, “The Killer Inside Me” is a film of raw daring and honest artistic intention that will intrigue some, deeply offend others and raise a feminist outcry among many. But anyone who knows Jim Thompson, knows not to enter his domain expecting a placid landscape of mental health. This is jagged psychological terrain and Winterbottom explores it with a certain admirable intrepidness.

- Dennis King

“The Killer Inside Me”

R
1:49
2 stars
Starring: Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Simon Baker, Bill Pullman, Ned Beatty
(Disturbing brutal violence, aberrant sexual content and some graphic nudity)

BY GENE TRIPLETT

“The Killer Inside Me” has quietly stolen onto pay-per-view television.

The controversial $13 million feature film that was shot in and around Guthrie, Oklahoma City, Enid, Tulsa and Cordell in May and June 2009 will also open Aug. 20 for a week-long run on the big screen at Tulsa’s Circle Cinema Theatre, marking the first time the movie has been shown theatrically in the state where it was filmed.

“It’s opening up that Friday, it’s going to get a full week run and maybe longer if it does good,” theater office manager Chuck Foxen said.

Meanwhile, local movie fans who can’t wait to see what all the fuss has been about can pay $5.99 to watch it on their home screens right now, if they have access to Cox Communications’ On Demand cable television service.

Bruce Berkinshaw, director of product management at Cox, said “The Killer Inside Me” began running on pay-for-view in Oklahoma City and Tulsa on July 6, and will probably be available on the service through October.

The film is still playing on 14 theater screens around the country, and had racked up a total of $146,444 in domestic ticket sales as of last Sunday. It had its official U.S. opening in New York on June 18.

“‘The Killer Inside Me’ is currently in limited theatrical release and gradually expanding its market,” said Jill Simpson, director of the Oklahoma Film and Music Office, which was instrumental in bringing the movie’s production crew to the state last year.

“It’s not uncommon for a little film to start in the major cities and they roll it out and they build screens up,” Simpson said. “I was a little bit surprised when I saw the On Demand, but I know that there’s all kinds of models now for distribution that are not like they used to be. It’s kind of the way it’s going to be in the future, where these schedules are collapsed and it’s available at home as quickly as it is in the theater.”

No theatrical run has been set for Oklahoma City. The film will be released Sept. 28 on DVD.

“The Killer Inside Me,” directed by Michael Winterbottom (“A Mighty Heart”) with Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson and Jessica Alba in the lead roles, is based on a 1952 paperback novel by Anadarko-born pulp fiction writer Jim Thompson. Set in a small west Texas town in the mid-1950s, it centers on a seemingly mild-mannered deputy sheriff (Affleck) whose repressed homicidal urges are unleashed by a beautiful and defiant prostitute (Alba) who likes to play rough.

Scenes of graphic violence in “The Killer Inside Me” reportedly shocked many audience members during its premiere screening at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and at the time some critics and industry observers predicted the film’s producers would have a hard time landing a major distributor for it.

But IFC Films stepped in during the final days of the festival and paid about $1.5 million for the North American distribution rights to the film.