Killer Joe

Directed by William Friedkin
FACT Picturehouse
From 30th June 2012

Reviewed by Colin Serjent

If you like violence, sex and violent sex-related simulation, using a chicken drumstick, this film is for you.

It is based on a play by Purlitzer Prize-winning Tracy Letts. It must be noted that Tracy is a guy, because very few women writers would portray their gender in such negative and dismal ways, as represented in this movie.

Friedkin, who directed The French Connection and the highly overrated The Exorcist, piles on the misogyny, served up with dollops of depravity, throughout Killer Joe.

Matthew McConaughey, as big bad psychopath Joe Cooper, holds centre stage as the lawman, who, in his spare time is a hired killer.

Dope dealer Chris (Emile Hirsch), a member of a trailer trash family, is in debt to a local druglord, and, as you do, devises a scheme to have his mom slain by Joe, for a fee of $25,000, in order to collect her life insurance money and thus pay off his pursuers.

Inevitably things do not work out to plan and Joe, feeling somewhat aggrieved at not being paid, wreaks his revenge, including re-arranging the facial features of Chris's step-mom and whore Sharia (Gina Gershon).

Killer Joe has received the notorious NC-17 classification film rating in America. Wow, that's a surprise.

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