Much as I hate to admit it, “Saw 2” pretty much aced the concept of the strangers waking up in mysterious circumstances scenario that’s become so prevalent in modern horror. Directors Chad Archibald, and Gabriel Carrer don’t even seem to try with “Kill,” which is just another variation on the premise from “Saw 2,” except “Kill” is filled with so much more inconsistencies. Not to mention the cast is filled with terrible actors portraying obnoxious characters that literally do nothing but bicker and argue from the first moment they wake up in a mysterious house.
A group of people wake up in a house that’s been boarded up and barred down. They soon realize they’re being terrorized by a mysterious entity watching them, and proclaims that in order to survive and make it home to their significant others, they have to kill each other. Nope, this isn’t “Battle Royale,” although I’d bet the parallels aren’t a mistake. The surviving member of the group gets to go home. I think. Why are the victims awoken in white clothing? Who knows? What is the relevance of the connection that inevitably rises to the surface in the middle of the terror? I wasn’t sure, and I immediately stopped trying to care. What do the tiki men signify? What’s with all the imagery of knights and medieval drapery? And what are the TV’s even for?
Details and plot devices are brought up and abruptly rendered invalid moments later, and there’s just no plot progression until the final twenty minutes. There are even stunning moments of sheer stupidity, like when one of the characters confirms one of the victims has a pulse, prompting another character to ask “Is he alive?” And you have to enjoy how the characters break free from the house while a character screams “Stop! This is someone’s house!” The production is pretty poor as well, with bad editing, and really dicey direction that never fulfills the intended illusion of claustrophobia and paranoia. One of the most distracting elements of “Kill” that tore me out of the narrative was the bad sound.
I don’t know if the rooms on the sets echoed, or if there was ambient sound dripping in to the movie set, but every piece of dialogue sounds canned. So much so that you could almost swear the movie was dubbed. There’s a lot of really ambiguous plot elements brought up and featured with no real clarification, and truthfully I never cared to ponder what I’d seen. I was just happy it ended. “Kill” is terrible because it feels incomplete, rushed, and incredibly half hearted. Almost as if the directors just made points up as they went along. I’m also assuming the directors thought they’d lay the ground work for a follow up. I don’t think there’s any kind of material available for another droning ninety minutes of pointless violence and a script that’s one note and with zero narrative.
