OK, this is NOT FOR EVERYONE. Here’s a movie that will either thrill or disgust you. Either way, you sure ain’t gonna be bored.
It’s William Friedkin Week at The Movie Gourmet, and we’re looking at three of the director’s more overlooked films. We’ve covered the neo-noir thriller To Live and to Die in L.A., and the psychological horror movie Bug. Today’s Friedkin classic is another neo-noir, that paragon of perversity, Killer Joe
In Killer Joe, Thomas Haden Church, Gina Gershon and Emile Hirsch play a white trash family with a get-rich-quick scheme. They give a hit man (Matthew McConaughey) the teen daughter (Juno Temple) as a deposit. They’re all as dumb as a bag of hammers, so what could go wrong?
Killer Joe was directed by William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) and shot by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Right Stuff, The Natural) in just 20 days. These guys know how to tell a story, and Killer Joe pops and crackles.
Killer Joe is rated NC-17 for good reason and Friedkin accepts the rating without complaint. Indeed, Killer Joe has its share of Sam Peckinpah-style screen violence and an unsettling deflowering scene. But the piece de resistance is an over-the-top sadistic encounter between McConaughey and Gershon involving a chicken drumstick, at once disturbing and darkly hilarious. But Sam Fuller and Quentin Tarantino would have loved it, and so did I. Nevertheless, some viewers will feel like they need a shower after this movie.
The cast does a good job, but the picture really belongs to McConaughey and Temple. McConaughey was recalibrating his career a la Alec Baldwin – he had just started his move from playing pretty boys in the rom-coms to taking meatier, more interesting roles. He is both funny and menacing as Killer Joe (and I liked him in Bernie and Magic Mike, too). Killer Joe preceded his roles in Mud, The Dallas Buyers Club, True Detective and The Free State of Jones.
The movie slowly makes Juno Temple’s character more and more central, until she takes command of the denouement. Temple is always sexy (Kaboom and Dirty Girl), and here she is able to ratchet down her intelligence to play a very simple character, always exploited by others, who is finally empowered to take control.
I saw Killer Joe at a screening where Friedkin said that the screenwriter (famed playwright Tracy Letts) saw Juno Temple’s character as the receptacle for all feminine rage. Friedkin himself sees it as a Cinderella story – just one where Cinderella’s Prince Charming is a professional killer. That’s all pretty deep sledding to me – I see Killer Joe as a very dark and violent comedy – kinda like In Bruges with twisted sex.
Killer Joe is available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Hulu.