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Apr 06, 2015Nursebob rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
Packed to the rafters with illicit sex and bone-crunching violence William Friedkin’s trailer park tragedy, based on Tracy Letts’ play, splashes across the screen in what can only be coined White Trash Gothic. Set in the butthole of Texas the story opens with Chris Smith, a chronic loser whose luck has just taken another turn for the worse. His mom sold the stash of cocaine he was hiding in order to have her car repaired and now he has to pay back seven grand to his supplier or face being buried alive. Seeking the advice of his clueless father (Thomas Haden Church) and overly-mascaraed tart of a step-mother (Gina Gershon sporting a big bushy merkin) Chris’ desperation hatches an ingenious plan: find a hitman to murder the old lady and then collect the life insurance. Enter Killer Joe Cooper (a reptilian Matthew McConaughey) a full-time police detective who moonlights as a hired assassin. Although he prefers to paid upfront Joe agrees to do the job on spec providing the Smiths offer up a little unspeakable collateral. Things go swimmingly until a couple of unforeseen double-crosses lead to one of the most dysfunctional family dinners ever filmed—you’ll never look at KFC the same way again. Shot in dusty shades of brown and blue beneath a sky constantly ripped by lightning, Friedkin’s tawdry tale of greed and retribution makes excellent use of its mobile home locales and honky tonk background noise. Terribly inappropriate and wielding the blackest wit, "Killer Joe" is something Shakespeare could have written had he been born a psychopathic sharecropper. Y’all have been warned.