Though brash, bright and energetic there is just no way to quite shake the feeling that Miguel Marti's Sexykiller is a film trying just a little too hard to pander to the cult audience, a film that takes what would have been a brilliant short film concept and stretches it beyond what it can bear to try and make a feature of it. There are moments of good, bloody fun, certainly, but the joke falls flat well before the film comes to a close and it commits the cardinal sins of simultaneously being a slasher that consistently cuts away from the kill shots and a t&a film that provides minimal t&a beyond the opening sequence.
Barbara is a medical student in an exclusive Spanish university. She is young, beautiful and attractive, surrounded by the best and brightest that her country has to offer. Barbara adores fashion, compulsively consumes Cosmo, and is a man-eater par excellence. She is, in essence, the culmination of the American dream: beautiful, sexy and with nowhere to go but up. But Barbara also has a dark side. When not in classes or out shopping she is a brutally violent serial killer carving her way through the university population, students and faculty alike. The police are at a loss. Assuming that the killer must be a man they have no chance of ever catching Barbara, no chance at all until a pair of students in school on research grants develop a brain wave analyzer with the ability to project the last images to be imprinted upon the brain ...
Sexykiller comes out of the gate with a bang with an instant burst of sex and violence before shifting into a stylish opening sequence and establishing a technicolored, quirky world for Barbara to live within. It's so brash, in fact, that it's hard to imagine how Marti will maintain the energy and while he tries gamely to do just that by piling kill upon kill and dialogue laced with quick asides addressed directly to the audience the energy starts to flag right around the end of the first act. There's just not enough here in terms of character for the audience to care about any of the people Barbara is carving her way through and not enough substance to Barbara herself for her character to carry the film throughout. Marti could get away with this, really, if he were able to overcompensate by laying on the sex and blood that the title promises - this is, after all, what the audience will be paying to see - but for whatever reason - I'm guessing a combination of budget and rating concerns - the violence is rather tame and the sex limited mostly to rather skimpy costumes.
There's no great mystery to what is required to make a film like Sexykiller work. You need a sharp premise, which this film has. But if you're going for shock value then you really need to go for shock value and turning in a 14-rated film just isn't enough to do that no matter how many supposed cult goodies you load in to the script.
She does have a topless scene in the first five minues of the film but that's the end of th nudity right there.
Well, alright...I'll give it a shot.