Killer Joe
***
Smutty and twisted.
FILM: The no under-18 age restriction is not just a sop to someone’s conscience – this film is violent and lurid and by the end of it you’re wondering “why?”
It gives us some nasty people doing terrible things to each other and it ends with no good reason to feel sorry for trailer trash.
Emile Hirsch plays Chris, a not too bright 22-year-old who persuades his father to help him hire a hit man to kill his mother for the insurance money.
Since he doesn’t have money to pay the assassin upfront – who turns out to be a cop named Killer Joe (Matthew McConaughey) – Chris offers his sister as down payment.
McConaughey is both repellent and mesmerising as the sadistic killer, totally killing any residual baggage of charming Southern gentleman anyone may still be harbouring somewhere in the back of the brain.
Juno Temple hits an interesting mix of naïveté and downright stupidity as sister, Dotty, while Thomas Haden Church is a total sad sack of a dysfunctional dad.
It’s nasty and that scene with the chicken leg will not do Colonel Saunders any favours.
SPECIAL FEATURES: None. – Theresa Smith