Some Guy Who Kills People (6/10)

December 30th, 2011

There’s murder afoot in a small town and it’s pretty obvious who’s committing the e-VIL act. Ken Boyd, fresh out of a mental hospital, was teased, tormented and tarnished by a group of lads back in his high-school days, and one by one they’re ending up dead. Directed by Jack Perez (last movie: Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus), here’s a black comedy that, while it’ll not blaze any trails, will generally please those who enjoy a little comic-book morbidity with their giggles.

Thirty-four and working in an ice-cream parlour, Ken (Kevin Corrigan, a laid-back Alan Arkin type) doesn’t have a lot going for him. Still, what do you expect when you’ve only just been released from the booby hatch, eh? His sleeps are punctuated with nightmares of that time, many moons ago, when his high-school buddies tied him to a chair and taunted him. Boy, what he wouldn’t give to get back at them.

Two girls enter his life. One, a standard love interest, is of no great significance to the plot or to us but the other is infinitely more relevant. Her name is Amy (Ariel Gade) and she’s his daughter. She only found that fact out a day or two before but now here she is, all cutesy and perky, standing in Ken’s living room, talking to his ultra-sarky mother (Karen Black). Ken, who redefines taciturn at the best of times, clams up like a shell. Amy’ll grow on you like a fungus. Initially chirpy, we’ll see that she has more in common with her rediscovered dad than he could have thought.

The first murder occurs, and the sheriff (Barry Bostwick) is called in. (He’s also sleeping with Ken’s mother, which makes breakfast conversation a bit edgy, to say the least.) The killer is an artistic type, we can tell, with tell-tale clues as to the reason for the murder left at the scene. Ken gets fidgety and draws more blood-filled cartoons in his scrapbook. It’s such a shame. Ken’s trying to bounce back in life, his daughter’s discovered him after all these years, but it’s pretty clear he’s wreaking his revenge on his young adulthood bullies.

The first movie that came to mind while I was watching Some Guy Who Kills People was So I Married an Axe Murderer, which you might remember starred Mike Myers and Nancy Travis. Black comedies treat death and murder as just another reason to have a laugh and there have been many over the years that have tried it. Not many were financially successful (even Myers’ movie flopped) but, with a small budget, this isn’t a bad attempt at all, even if it falls a little short at times. Saying that Some Guy Who Kills People comes off as a lesser Axe Murderer shouldn’t be taken as too much of a criticism. The Myers movie was pretty funny, after all. Here the jokes aren’t quite as rib-tickling, but the appearance of Black and a daffy Bostwick as a Colombo-type bumbling cop-with-a brain-make it one for you to jot down next time you’ve got some spare credit on your VOD account.

R-rated for language and a little cartoony violence that includes a severed head and a skull-full of hatchet, there are still enough laughs to satisfy. One person’s review said ‘I laughed my throat raw’, which might be stretching it a bit; mercifully mine’s still in good working order. It’s always a tricky business, declaring whether a comedy is funny or not, simply because people’s tastes in comedy vary so much. It’s not like horror or sci-fi, for example, where basically if you like one you like ‘em all, so it’s with some hesitation that I say that I laughed a few times, and when I did, they were decent guffaws. It would have been nice if there had been a few more, perhaps, but on the whole this is a pleasant enough romp around one insular man trying to rebuild his life...and erasing a few memories as he goes.