CAPTURE KILL RELEASE. (2016) DIRECTED BY NICK MCANULTY AND BRIAN ALLAN STEWART. STARRING JENNIFER FRASER AND FARHANG GHAJAR. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
'A shocking blend of sadistic horror and suburban drama...'
'Till Death us do part...'
Now this is a good, tight well-made horror movie, and the fact of its being low-budget just goes to show you what you can achieve even when you're strapped for a few bob. It'll certainly make you think twice as well about your neighbours and the people around you.
Is the man you say hello to on the train every morning planning to do away with his wife? Are the nice married couple you see pushing a trolley around Tesco every Saturday keeping a sex slave out in their garden shed, like in the movie ROOM, based on the book by Emma Donohue? Does your cousin, the one you only meet at your Nan's house every Christmas, secretly crave the taste of human flesh?
Does the harassed Mom with the messy hair and glasses you nod to as you pass each other on the street write filthy-dirty sex books in her spare time? That last one was me, by the way, lol. You see, you never really know your neighbours and you never really know people, even if you think you do.
The young married couple in CAPTURE KILL RELEASE are both perfectly normal-seeming and ordinary-looking on the outside, but privately they have a secret. A secret that's going to turn out to be a real killer for one unlucky soul...
Let us begin at the beginning, dear readers. Jennifer and Farhang are an attractive young American couple living in modern times. Farhang seems to have a good job, the kind where you have to wear a suit to work. They have a lovely home and Jennifer has just bought a pricey new video recorder so that they can record a little project they've been mulling over for a while now. I bet you can guess what the project is...
Yep, Jennifer and Farhang are planning to kill someone and record it for posterity. They don't have a victim in mind yet. It doesn't really matter who the person is. All that matters is that they kill someone, just to see what it's like. Just to experience the feeling of killing, just once, just for the hell of it.
It's a bit like Brandon and Philip in Alfred Hitchcock's superb movie ROPE, who murder their college mate David Kentley at the start of the film just to prove their own superiority. They are justifying their heinous act by maintaining that certain superior beings should have the right to murder certain 'inferior' ones. And just where did they pick up this mad idea? You may well ask...
Throughout the rest of the movie, James Stewart's college professor Rupert Cadell tries to figure out what has happened to turn Philip, in particular, into a cat on a hot tin roof all of a sudden, and in what way it's all connected to the missing David Kentley. This movie was based on true events, incidentally, and I really doubt if this was the only time in history that such gruesome happenings took place.
In CAPTURE KILL RELEASE, Jennifer is most definitely the driving force behind the couple's idea to kill a random person and film the murder as well. She's the one who buys the camera and who says that it's time they started acting out their ideas instead of just talking about them.
They go to a hardware store and buy the kind of stuff that would have been in the back of Ted Bundy's little Volkswagen Bug when he went off on one of his merry little jaunts back in the
day. You know what I mean, right, guys...?
They have an hilariously inappropriate conversation about which people are 'okay' to kill and which are off-limits. Farhang doesn't want to kill any women because it'll make him look like a 'rapey sex-killer,' he says. Probably he had Ted in mind when he said it...!
The couple decide jointly not to kill any children because, well, you know, they're children. Jennifer, by far the most gung-ho of the pair, also allows that 'handicaps' should be untouchable also because, well, 'their lives are shit enough.' Gee, thanks Jen, you stone-cold bitch. I bet that any 'handicaps' in the vicinity are down on their knees right now thanking their lucky stars that their disability disqualifies them from 'death by Jennifer...'
It looks like it's gonna be an adult male who gets 'chosen' for an untimely exit from our little vale of tears. Jen goes out with her camera one day (does she not have a job? If she had a job, she wouldn't have time for any of this 'random killing' shit. It's certainly true that the Devil makes work for idle hands to do...) and meets two men on the same day.
One is an obviously rich businessman type who calls Jennifer a 'c**t' when she accidentally jogs him with her camera and causes him to spill his coffee on himself. I wouldn't kill him just for calling Jen a c**t. She's a total c**t, the c**tiest bitch I've seen in cinema for a good long while. My God, what an absolute c**t. I've never even seen such a c**t. I'd give him a c**ting medal, lol.
Jen follows the businessman in her car (again, hello, does she not HAVE a day-job, then?) and discovers that he has a wife and a big fancy house, and a hot blonde mistress living in a second posh fancy gaff. This seems to be to Jennifer proof positive that Mr. Businessman is a cheating lowlife scumbag who- you guessed it- deserves to die.
The second guy is a lovely cuddly bear of a man called Gary. He's bearded, homeless and agrees readily when Jennifer asks him to 'star' in her 'film.' Is this documentary the kind that might one day turn up at the Cannes Film Festival, or is it the other more private film, the one that she and Farhang have been discussing excitedly together for a while now...?
Jennifer is one hundred percent committed to their 'project.' She's the driving force behind it. But to what extent is the 'project' just something to fantasise about in bed for Farhang, and what percentage of him actually wants to go through with the real-life killing?
It's hard to say. One minute you think he's genuinely disgusted by the whole crazy idea. The next minute, he's cutting up slabs of meat in the bath with a saw to practise for when he actually has to cut up a body. Like I said, it's hard to know. There's no doubting Jennifer's leadership, though, and her ability to boss Farhang around and get him to do her bidding.
The couple remind me of other serial killer couples like Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, who abducted and rape-murdered mostly teenage girls, I think. In the one film I saw about them, Paul was portrayed as the real killer while Karla was forced to go along with the abductions and rape-murders and also to help cover them up, but some people didn't believe her side of the story and she did go to jail for quite a while for her part in the crimes.
Anyway, CAPTURE KILL RELEASE is out now on DVD from EUREKA ENTERTAINMENT. It's already won a ton of awards from prestigious Horror Film Festivals and you should definitely buy it if you don't want to be, like, the last-to-know type of thing.
Do me one favour though, will you, after you watch the film? Take a longer look at your neighbour when you both meet at your cars in the morning. Pay more attention to the weird muffled noises you hear coming from his shed sometimes. Don't dismiss them as 'just rats.'
If you see him buying a million rolls of duct tape and a length of rope at your local hardware store on a Saturday, actually ask him what they're for. He might think twice about keeping a sex-slave in a box with air-holes in it in his garage if he thinks you're on to him.
Oh, and finally, if you happen to bump into the harassed Mom with the messy hair and
glasses who writes the filthy-dirty sex books in her spare time, give her your number. She's single...
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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