Kill List (2011)

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHO ENDS UP KILLING WHOM)

[Now, at long last, for a bust of a movie currently on release that will terrify and mystify you in equal measure.]

Kill List (2011) is a British horror movie co-written and directed by Ben Wheatley, starring Neil Maskell, Michael Smiley and MyAnna Buring.

In the end, not only is ex-soldier Neil Maskell forced into the mercy shooting of his best friend and contract killing accomplice, Michael Smiley, but he is also tricked into murdering his own wife, MyAnna Buring, and their young son.


Simmering domestic and marital tension boils over between husband and wife, Maskell and Buring, during a dinner party they throw for family friend, ex-comrade-in-arms and current business partner, Smiley and his latest girlfriend, who mysteriously excuses herself partway through the meal in order to secretly score an occult symbol on the back of a mirror in the couple's upstairs bathroom.

Smiley eventually manages to broker peace between the feuding pair, once he has reassuringly put their worried son back to bed after their antics disturb his sleep.

Before the evening is over, Smiley discusses with Maskell in private the prospect of a well paid hit-man job for the pair of them, a possibility he had apparently already raised with Buring, which would solve the couple's money worries, one of the causes of their rowing.

With Buring's endorsement, Maskell is persuaded into the deal, which is sealed in blood when Maskell's hand is unexpectedly and deliberately lacerated by the mysterious lone client that he and Smiley meet in a suite of an eerily empty hotel in order to receive their instructions. The well dressed man seems aware not only of the pair's reputation as killers but also inexplicably of some traumatic incident in Kiev some eight months previously involving Maskell, which was the last time he had worked, the proceeds of which he and his wife have been living off since.

Much to the chagrin of the god fearing Smiley, the first of their three victims turns out to be a priest, whose body they dispose of in an incinerator after Maskell has dispatched him with a bullet to the back of the head in his vestry after morning service. Smiley is further unnerved by the priest's apparent gratitude for their actions, which Maskell explains away as some sort of release from a guilty burden.

What that burden might have been becomes clearer, when the pair break into a lock-up warehouse from which they see their second target emerging, and discover a collection of homemade dvds depicting what they take to be real scenes of such murderous sexual depravity that Smiley cannot bare to watch them and which tip Maskell into such a blind fury that when the pair catch up with their target at his home, he has no qualms about subjecting the so-called librarian to brutal torture in order to extract details of who else is involved in their production.

During a break in the man's ordeal, while Smiley is absent emptying the contents of their victim's safe, Maskell is perplexed to discover that the man is also aware of his exploits in Kiev and is not only an admirer but, like the priest, strangely grateful for what Maskell is about to do to him. Having heard enough, Maskell sets about him with a claw hammer, making sure that he suffers terribly before eventually stoving his head in.

Having been made to clean up the mess he was responsible for, Maskell is adamant that the pair of them should pay the person named under torture a visit without further delay. Despite Smiley's disgust at his friend's loss of control and misgivings about his desire to widen their remit, he reluctantly agrees to keep lookout while Maskell investigates the address they were given.

Wondering what can be taking his friend so long, Smiley, shotgun in hand, follows Maskell's route into the building site, on his way discovering a dead night-watchman and guard-dog before finding Maskell in the process of stoving yet another victim's head in against a brick wall, oblivious to the time he has so far taken.

Now seriously worried by his friend's unprofessional approach to their task, Smiley begins to doubt whether Maskell is fit to complete the job they have taken on and so delivers him back home to Buring, where Maskell discovers his wife entertaining Smiley's supposed girlfriend, whom Smiley claimed had dumped him and who Maskell thought he had spotted stalking the pair during their killing mission.

While at home, Maskell discovers that his lacerated palm has caused a widespread infection and is persuaded by Buring to seek medical attention from their family doctor. However, Maskell cannot understand why the replacement doctor he is forced to see is less interested in treating his infection and more interested in investigating his marital relationship while offering advice about forgetting the past and embracing the future?

Meanwhile Smiley is alarmed to discover that a file of documents he took together with the cash from the librarian's safe contains surveillance photographs of him and Maskell trailing their first victim. Wanting to have nothing more to do with the job, the pair try to persuade their client to accept replacement killers that they can arrange and personally vouch for. But the client, this time accompanied by heavies and a number of other smartly dressed associates, is adamant that the pair will fulfil their obligation or they and their families will themselves be murdered.

Unnerved by this turn of events, despite her military background, Buring decides to take their son to the safety of their holiday home in the country, while Maskell and Smiley finish the contract.

Gaining access via an underground tunnel to the grounds of the palatial country estate of the third target on their list, a politician, the pair set up a makeshift camp in some woods from which they intend to stalk their victim.

Taking cover for the night, the pair's sleep is disturbed by the sound of chanting, which they discover is coming from a procession of torch bearing individuals passing close by, a few of whom are naked, the rest being mostly in white robes, the majority having their faces hidden behind masks made from straw.

They track the group at a distance through the woods to a temporary gibbet set up on the far side of a lake, where one of their number, a woman wearing a dress made from bank notes, proceeds to hang herself for the entertainment of the applauding onlookers.

Appalled by proceedings, Maskell opens fire on the crowd with a high powered rifle. But instead of fleeing, the crowd advances threateningly on the pair's position despite being mown down by gunfire, forcing Maskell and Smiley to bolt for cover.

Hoping to make their escape through the tunnel that lead them into the grounds in the first place, the pair find that their exit has in the meantime been bricked up. While Smiley uses his shotgun to hold off their pursuers, Maskell breaks through the blocked tunnel, only to have to deal with yet more occultists attempting to outflank them.

Having secured an escape route, Maskell returns for Smiley, only to find his friend has been overwhelmed and mortally wounded. Realising there is no hope for him, Smiley begs his friend to dispatch him, which Maskell reluctantly does.

Fleeing to the sanctuary of his holiday home, Maskell realises too late that he has only lead his pursuers to his wife and child.

With the tyres of their vehicles slashed, the couple find themselves trapped. So while Maskell sets out into the night to bring the fight to their enemy, Buring loads up a pistol and prepares to use all her military skills to protect herself and their son.

Maskell does his best in the dark, but is eventually knocked unconscious.

He comes round to find himself corralled by applauding occulists who reveal themselves to include, amongst others, the client, his associates and the dead Smiley's weird girlfriend.

A blade is thrust into Maskell's hand and he it pitted against a knife-wielding cloaked hunchback, who he dispatches to the delight of the crowd.

Only then does Maskell discover with muted shock that he has in fact killed Buring and their son, who had been strapped to her back under the cloak.


If this plot bust seems to end a bit abruptly, it is only because that is exactly how the film ends. And whereas it is always a good idea not to reveal too much and leave your audience asking questions and wanting more, it is another thing entirely to leave them so completely in the dark that they come out of the cinema (as they did on the night I saw the movie) asking "Is that it? Is that all there is?"

At one point during proceeding the client reveals that the motive for the contract killings is to precipitate regime change, which suggests that some sort of power struggle is occurring within the occultists' group. And the awe in which members of the group seem to hold the Maskell character seems to suggest he is to become their new 'angel of death'. But really, the plot is so loosely tied up, it is not hard to be left wondering what on Earth you have just been watching.

Having said that, the performances are never anything less than totally convincing. The dialogue is razor sharp, and the fact that the script does not rely on some supernatural creature or force to effect its horror, which is at times truly horrific, is to be commended. Rarely has British horror, or, for that matter, that from the States, been so convincingly realistic and terrifying. Just don't expect to understand exactly what any of it is about.

Source(s): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_List

The King of Comedy (1983)

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHO DISCOVERS WHAT?)

[Now for a bust that resulted from trying to explain one of the many cultural references that the animated show Family Guy made in the episode Barely Legal.]

The King of Comedy (1983) is an American black comedy directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott and Sandra Bernhard.

In the end Robert De Niro discovers that the only way to break into television is from behind the barrel of a gun.

Middle-aged living-at-home-with-his-mother stage-door autograph hound, De Niro, plays an aspiring stand-up comic with obsessive ambition that far exceeds his actual talent.

A chance meeting with famous comedian and talk show host, Jerry Lewis, leads De Niro to believe that there is a place on Lewis's show for him if he really wants it.

However, De Niro's attempts to collect on Lewis's apparent offer are continually rebuffed by the show's production staff.

Along the way, the wanna-be star indulges in ever more elaborate and obsessive fantasies where he and Lewis are colleagues and friends, until finally, Lewis is forced to shatter De Niro's dreams, after De Niro invites himself and his would-be girlfriend, Diahnne Abbott, to stay at Lewis's weekend retreat.

Nevertheless, convinced that he is destined for greatness, one way or another, the humiliated and frustrated De Niro hatches a kidnap plot, with the help of obsessive Lewis-stalker, Sandra Bernhard.

The ransom is for De Niro to be given the opening spot on that evening's show (guest hosted by Tony Randall), and that, before Lewis is released, the show must be aired nationally, as usual, so that Abbott can see that De Diro wasn't just some crazy fantasist.

To the surprise of the show's producers and the police, De Niro's exaggerated autobiographical stand-up routine goes down well with the audience. Even his confession that he is only there because he has kidnapped Lewis gets a laugh.

In the meantime, between the show's recording and broadcast, left alone with her idol duct-taped to a chair in her parents' Manhattan townhouse, Bernhard attempts to seduce Lewis.

But the seduction only allows Lewis to escape, just in time to catch the end of De Niro's routine in which he explains that "Tomorrow you'll know I wasn't kidding and you'll all think I'm crazy. But I figure it this way: better to be king for a night, than schmuck for a lifetime."

And perhaps he had a point, because a news report covering his eventual release from prison, featuring shots of storefronts piled high with his "long awaited" autobiography, King For A Night, reveals that De Niro now has an agent with whom he is considering several "attractive offers" one of which turns out to be an apparent live TV special in which an excited announcer introduces him to an equally enthusiastic audience.


Scorsese has made a career out of depicting madness in it various forms. De Niro's celebrity obsessed fantasist is perhaps the least dangerous of his many creations. And the movie is a wonderful exploration of the dangers of the modern cult of celebrity, and a welcome break from the usual corruption and brutal violence that perfuse so much of his output.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_of_Comedy_(1983_film)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Guy

http://familyguy.wikia.com/wiki/Barely_Legal

The Chumscrubber (2005)

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHETHER UNRESOLVED GRIEF LEADS TO FURTHER TRAGEDY)

[After a very extended busting hiatus, now for a bust that out Darko's Donnie. Possibly one of the smartest and most misunderstood-by-reviewers movies or recent years.]

The Chumscrubber (2005) is a darkly comic American film, aimed at a Resident Evil/Left 4 Dead audience, conceived and directed by Arie Posin, starring Jamie Bell, Camilla Belle, Justin Chatwin, Lou Taylor Pucci and a host of Hollywood a-listers, it explores the problem of youth disconnect in the Californian suburbs, where both teenagers and their parents rely on different forms of chemical medication to deal with life's problems.

In the end Jamie Bell comes to terms with the suicide of his best friend and class-mate neighbour without the crutch of prescription drugs.

When loaner, Bell becomes the first person to discover the suicide of his class-mate and supplier of happy pills to their high-school, not only does his celebrity psychiatrist father see it as an ideal opportunity to further publicly analyse his son, but the main high-school dealer and resident bully, Justin Chatwin, sees him as a means of acquiring the pill stash of his former supplier, the suicide victim.

To this end Chatwin initially recruits Camilla Belle, Bell's attractive and rebellious classmate, to sweet talk him into recovering the pills on their behalf.

However, when Bell refuses to cooperate, Chatwin and his drug dealing footsoldier, Lou Taylor Pucci, hatch a plot to kidnap Bell's younger brother as a bargaining chip. But their plans fail at the first hurdle when the hapless pair grab the wrong boy, the son of the local sheriff who is persecuting his ex-wife's new fiance ahead of her remarriage.

Despite not having Bell's brother, Chatwin figures he can still be persuaded to recover the drug stash to ensure the boys safety. Indeed among a sea of self-obsessed and self-absorbed adults, Bell is almost the only person apparently interested in the young lad's whereabouts or safety, although Belle, who was only reluctantly drawn into the plot to begin with, is increasingly protective of their young hostage.

It is her concern that eventually persuades Bell to recover the drugs hidden in the wall of the summer house, in his neighbour's back garden, where he originally discovered his class-mate's body. However, his efforts to exchange the haul for the young kidnap victim are sabotaged when his actual younger brother, secretly swaps the drugs for vitamin pills that their mother peddles as a new life system. The ensuing fight between Chatwin and Bell lands Bell in the sheriff's custody, where once again the adults totally fail to understand what is really going on.

Realising that the drugs are now lost to them, Chatwin and Pucci decide to bring their scheme to a murderous conclusion by stabbing the young boy to death. But in the ensuing struggle, Chatwin has one of his eyes slashed, and on staggering half blinded into the street is run down by the sherrif, at last desperately searching for his missing son, and momentarily distracted by the sight of his ex-wife in her wedding dress. Chatwin at last achieves his life's ambition of becoming a fly-boy as his body is flung high into the air by the impact, only to have his fall back to earth broken by the hood of the sheriff's patrol car.

In the aftermath of this near fatal tragedy, Bell at long last realises how much he misses his best friend, and regrets not recognising the signs of his impending suicide, while his friend's mother (brilliantly played by Glenn Close) finally accepts that her failure to get to know her son better may have been the real reason for his suicide.


The greatest hurdle to appreciating this movie is the inclusion of the Chumscrubber video game narrative device, which probably only appeals or makes sense to the gamer generation. The device does little more that provide a title and narrative bookends for the movie. The decision to include it may have simply been an attempt to differentiate it from other movies dealing in the same stock, like American Beauty (1999) and Donnie Darko (2001), the two movies against which it is most often measured.

Whereas Donnie Darko, with its time-travel theme, is a modern fairytale, Chumscrubber shares more in common with the real world based modern morality tale told from a middle age perspective, that is American Beauty.

In contrast Posin presents an archly distorted view of reality, where children behave like adults, and adults behave as children. Whether you prefer its approach to that of American Beauty largely depends on whether or not you buy into this distorted view, which in turn, no doubt, depends on whether you are closer in age to teenagers or middle aged adults.

That the movie succeeds at all in exploring the twin problems of teenagers being ignored by adults, and adults increasingly behaving like children, in a chemical fix dependent society, is down to the very imaginative script, some very well conceived conceits and performances from both young and old that are pitch perfect.

But there is no doubt that the movie suffers from having a conveniently pat ending, and from rather stumbling over probably the most dramatic scene in the whole movie; where Chatwin in accidentally blinded. Had these problems been addressed either before production started or later in the final edit, Chumscrubber might have garnered the plaudits it almost deserves.

Personally, I am very grateful to the person who brought this movie to my attention, because had I relied only on review hype, I might never have sampled its quirky pleasures. Which is exactly the point of these Movie Plot Busts.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chumscrubber
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donnie_Darko
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Beauty_(film)

Motivation of a Plot Buster

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHO DID WHAT)

You may be wondering why anyone would want to attract the sort of abuse that some kill-joy standing up at the start of The Crying Game (1992) and shouting out, at the top of their voice, "The girl's a dude, man!" would do? (I was actually in a theatre once when just such a thing happened!)

I love movies. And the last thing I would want to do is spoil someone else's enjoyment of them.

I enjoy seeing movie trailers, reading movie reviews, seeing movies on both the big and small screens.

And I enjoy discussing movies with my friends afterwards, and seeing what Web forum contributors think about movies they've seen. And sometimes I'm inspired to contribute my own thoughts online.

Sometimes what people say about a movie is "I haven't a clue what was going on. It had me completely lost."

Unfortunately, very often when they admit this online, and ask for help, the responses that they receive are, "why don't you just look it up on the Net."

The problem with such advice is that almost exclusively what's available on the Net is derived from publicity material that was produced for the movie's release.

And of course, the problem with publicity material is that it doesn't tell the whole story. And, worst still, it has "very occasionally" been known to mislead the audience.

So if you weren't supposed to understand the movie by reading its publicity material beforehand, how can it possibly help you to understand the movie to read it afterwards?

I have occasionally been known to take pity on these innocent victims under such circumstances, and provide a short Plot Buster as best I can.

However, the more of these that I have produced, the harder it is to keep track of them. And in some cases so much scorn and vitriol is poured on the poor asker, that they have decided to delete their question, and my efforts are wasted.

So as much as anything this blog is somewhere safe for me to collect my forum contributions together, as and when I make them.

Please don't be too disappointed if you can't find your favourite movie Busted. It just means that no one else has failed to get it, yet. Or, at least, no one's prepared to admit that they didn't get it:)


So, Movie Plot Busting isn't supposed to help decide whether or not to see a certain movie. It's an autopsy performed after the event, so that you can understand what it was that you either enjoyed or didn't enjoy.

Without further ado, let's get on and Bust some Movies:)

(One very last note. I am dyslexic. So if you spot some mistakes, try to be kind:)

Welcome to the Jungle

When there's something strange / In your picture house
Who 'ya gonna call? / Plot Busters!

Welcome to Genuine Jon's Movie Plot Busters, an occasional foray into the sometimes twisted world of motion picture story lines.

With apologies to Andy and Larry Wachowski...

Friend, sooner or later, you're going to realize, just as I did, that there's a difference between seeing the movie and understanding the plot.

I don't know if you're ready for what I have to show you, but unfortunately, your choices are limited.

Let me tell you why you are here.

You have come because you want to know something.

You're here because you know that there is something wrong.

You don't know what, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

The hype. The hype is everywhere, it's all around us.

Even now, in this very blogosphere.

You can see it when you go to the pictures or turn on your television.

You can sense it when you read the paper, or when you go to the mall, or when you listen to the radio.

It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

The truth. That you are a slave, friend.

Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside the prison of publicity that you cannot smell, taste, or touch.

A prison for your mind.

Unfortunately, no one is ever told what the hype is. You have to weed it out for yourself.

This is your last chance. After this, there is no going back.


You take the blue pill. The story ends. You go back to your reviews and believe whatever the publicists want you to believe.

You take the red pill. You stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.


Remember... all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.