Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on June 12, 2007 and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The DVD landscape has become so glutted with both teens-in-a-cabin slasher films and true-serial-killer chillers that any movie promising to pull a few twists on the stalker formula can only be approached with a certain amount of optimism. That hope is somewhat fulfilled by Delivery (Polychrome; pictured above) and outright dashed with Kill House (Trinity); while neither movie pays off on the full potential of its premise, the former, at least, can be appreciated for its good intentions. The latter, on the other hand, is an example of genre filmmaking at its most deeply and insultingly cynical.
The Florida-lensed Delivery, written and directed by Jose Zambrano Cassella, is perhaps the first movie ever made about a homicidal pizza guy, specifically Montgomery Goth (Matt Nelson), a bear of a man who nonetheless allows himself to be the doormat of his world. He’s subjected to abuse by his boss, his customers and especially the grotesque woman at the lot where his car gets towed after he runs out of gas late one night. The one respite from his life of misery is Bibi (Tara Cardinal), a lovely young artist he meets on his route, and with whom he begins a romantic affair. But—oops—turns out her brother is not only a big jerk but also Monty’s pie-delivering competition at his job, and he sabotages the budding relationship. Top that off with a heaping helping of nightmares about his traumatic past, and it’s clear Monty is destined to snap, and in the most violent way possible.
It’s so clear, in fact, that after a while you wish the movie would just get on with it. Nelson, who had never acted before this project, invests Monty with a certain amount of sympathy, but the characterization and the movie itself keep hitting the same note for nearly an hour before he’s finally allowed to cut loose and get some payback. Once that happens, Nelson gratifyingly doesn’t overplay Monty’s psychosis, and there’s a macabre wit to some of the death setpieces (particularly his Rube Goldberg solution to the problem of how to off a houseful of snooty sorority sisters) that adds a modicum of necessary surprise, given that his rampage is such a foregone conclusion. Still, Cassella has marshaled his budget of only $5,000 into a movie that doesn’t feel like a cheap knockoff, since he’s clearly committed to the material and resists the urge to camp it all up for cheap laughs. Delivery only sporadically delivers, but it should be interesting to see where Cassella goes from here.
On evidence of Kill House, however, writer/director Beth Dewey might be advised to seek another line of work, pronto. This wannabe horror/satire is as shrill and obnoxious as movies get, and for quite a while seems to forget it’s supposed to be a slasher picture. The gimmick here is that the mayhem takes place in the world of real estate, opening with the bloody murders of both a realtor and a woman squatting (and bathing) in an apartment she’s showing off. The story comes to center on a particular San Francisco house where the teenaged (read: played by actors in their mid-20s or so) kids are left behind while their parents are off on vacation, even as the place is being shown to potential buyers. Another slaying or two occurs, and the movie toys with a couple of potential red herrings: daughter Lucy (Toni Breen) doesn’t want to move ’cause she’d have to part with her beloved horse Anthrax (?!), and the caretaker (E. Shepherd Stevenson, looking like Greg Nicotero gone to seed) is an ex-con.
About half an hour in, however, the culprit is revealed to be…Dewey herself, playing conniving middle-aged realtor Sunny. She and her co-workers at Conner Realty would, ahem, kill to score a sale, and way too much of the subsequent running time is taken up by their snarky shenanigans until Dewey finally remembers she’s making a fright film, whereupon Sunny starts randomly killing anyone within striking range. Most of this is thuddingly unfunny and unscary, and some of it is worse, reaching its nadir in a tacky and pointless scene in which Sunny kidnaps three young girls off the street and forces them to pose as her daughters. The actors all seem to have been directed to be as dislikable as possible, the tone is all over the place and, despite assorted gore spatterings and nudity from women of all shapes, sizes and ages (including Dewey herself), even cheap thrills are few and very far between.
Both movies were shot on prosumer video equipment (though Kill House appears to have had a somewhat higher budget than Delivery) and as such look pretty polished in the widescreen transfers on their respective DVDs, with decent 2.0 audio on each. Delivery includes commentary by Cassella and Nelson, which reveals that the movie had its origins when the pair were both working behind the scenes on Andre the Butcher, and the former realized how perfect the latter would be as a screen villain. Belying the stern demeanor he carries throughout his performance, Nelson proves to have a ready sense of humor as he and Cassella chronicle the cash-strapped production, shower praise on their collaborators and give shout-outs to fellow Floridian filmmakers and their productions. At one point, Nelson admits he only read the script once before starting the shoot, and he recalls a squib-gag-gone-wrong that nearly set him on fire, a moment captured amongst a modestly amusing collection of bloopers. There’s also a “behind the scenes” supplement comprised entirely of still photographs.
Kill House (Trinity) has rather less to offer—just a collection of 10 deleted scenes of very little consequence, and a rote behind-the-scenes featurette. We find out here that, as opposed to having to shoot on all actual locations as Cassella and co. did, Dewey and her team had the comparative luxury of working on sets, albeit fairly cheap ones. And the fact that these low-cost constructions pass convincingly as real home and office interiors is probably Kill House’s most significant accomplishment.
