GOTH KILL

(A.k.a. GOTH KILL ... THE SOUL COLLECTOR)

GOTH KILL opens in the woods where a group of religious nutters in black hoods gather in a makeshift circle to chant an indecipherable prayer. Overseeing them is Nick Dread (Flambeaux), a Mohawked maniac who professes to be their "master". He rewards their good deeds - claiming many souls on his behalf - by gunning them all down in cold blood.

Dread is promptly arrested by New York's finest and thrown into a cell on death row. It's while Dread sits in his cell that he's visited by a sexy black-haired female aide. Flashbacks reveal that he has quite a history with her - he first met her a few centuries ago, when he was an Inquisitor and she was his prisoner, suspected of witchery.

Dread narrates as we watch the aide leave the prison and promptly get killed by a car driven by Father Connelly (Frank Dudley). It transpires that hundreds of years ago, Dread renounced God and pledged his soul to Satan after discovering that some of the "witches" he'd burned at the stake were in fact innocent.

Since then, Dread has traversed the world slaughtering likely souls in the name of Satan. But now, forsaken by his own master, he's locked up and his aide on the outside is dead ...

Enter Annie (Erica Giovinazzo), an attractive 19-year-old who escapes the prying eyes of her protective mother one afternoon to go shopping for revealing black attire with her rock-chick sister Kate (Eve Blackwater).

Dread is hung in prison, and disappears into a black abyss repeatedly screaming "This is not the end!". Indeed it is not, as Dread's narration continues as we observe "the scum of society" (his words) - an assortment of Goths and fetishists, including Annie and Katie in their freshly-bought clothes, entering a Goth club. Cue lots of red-filtered lighting, semi-nudity, dour-looking clientele who appear to have no concept of either 'sexy' or 'scary', and monotonous sub-L7 music spun by the admittedly hot DJ Demon (Anastacia Andino).

As we get to meet a few of the motley locals - the Tarot Card Reader (Vlad Marco); DJ Demon; the ludicrous Bad Bob (Tom Velez) - Dread addresses us from his abyss dwelling, berating the club-goers as phony. He mocks their notions of evil and questions not only their self-conscious garb, but also their silly stage shenanigans (women cavorting amateurishly upon crucifixes; bad magic acts; bad musicians; sexless go-go dancers ...). It's difficult not to warm to the chap, really.

To make a short story shorter, a handful of revellers who call themselves The Scorpion Society decide to heighten their fun in the club by engaging in a ceremony that attempts to resurrect an evil soul. This involves drugging Annie and Kate, and carrying them through to the back room where they can be offered to Satan as part of the ritual.

The upshot of this tomfoolery is that the ritual provides a portal back into the real world for Dread, who arrives in the body of the cute Annie. And now he's more demented than ever ... so, let the bloodbath commence!

The latter half of GOTH KILL does provide a good amount of butchery and splattering gore, albeit with minimal use of actual special effects (this is mainly of the "blood squirted against walls"-type gore). Having said that, the occasional primitive throat-slashing may be enough to pacify the less demanding gorehound.

Elsewhere this is a brisk, tightly penned and competently edited low-budget debut from writer-director JJ Connelly. The flashbacks are handled deftly and add an ambience of style to proceedings, while the Goth club scenes are colourful, polished and suitably noisy.

Bare breasts and women in fetish gear both feature heavily during the Goth club scenes, which should please many. And while these sequences of the film do admittedly draw visual comparisons to the SATANIC SLUTS' output, GOTH KILL manages to be infinitely more enjoyable simply because it has a brain and a sense of humour.

It matters not that the acting is consistently horrible across the board. Similarly, Connelly's cheesy script is not of concern. This is a high-energy romp that shows artistic merit despite it's obviously meagre budget, while never forgetting it's limitations: it's trash through and through, and it knows it.

GOTH KILL is undemanding, short sharp fun with a healthy body count for those that stick it through, and an occasionally rousing score from Lyris Hung.

Benefiting further from the respectable cinematography of Jarrod Kloiber and Kirk Larsen's canny art direction (the latter also handled the special effects make-up), Connelly's film is an aesthetically pleasing, satisfyingly cruel pastiche of the far-too-serious New York Goth scene.

The film is presented in a decent non-anamorphic 1.78:1 transfer. Colours and blacks are solid and grain is minimal. Images are relatively sharp, and minor ghosting was so infrequent as to never be problematic.

English audio is proffered in 2.0 and provides a consistently clear and clean playback throughout.

Menus are extremely colourful static affairs, graced with agreeable excerpts from the film's pounding soundtrack (which sounds so much better in bite-sized portions).

A scene-selection menu allows access to the film via 5 chapters. For a 70-minute film, I suppose that's passable.

Extras begin with a video commentary from Connelly, Flambeaux and Blackwater. When chosen from the 'extras' menu, this plays the complete film with a rectangle in the right-hand bottom corner of the screen (much like the Picture-in-Picture function on some Blu-ray discs).

Within the rectangle, the threesome sit watching their film while we watch them on video camera. They eat, drink and laugh a lot. Seemingly self-conscious of the camera to begin with, this looks to be an awkward venture for a few minutes but then thankfully turns into a slightly more worthwhile proposition.

I say "slightly worthwhile" because unfortunately, as likeable and sincere as Connelly appears to be, the other two - Flambeaux in particular - are a tad overbearing. It's nice to see them in such high spirits, but it's a shame when the one with presumably the most by far to say - the director - is sat furthest away from the camera, and at times can barely get a word in edgeways.

Next is a short feature entitled "Goth Kill Live Performance Chronicle". This begins with a text introduction by Connelly recounting how the film's premiere public showing (a sneak preview of a rough cut) in a 50-seat room in the back of a New York bar in the early hours of Halloween 2008. Since then, the text tells us, the film has played in many theatres, clubs and bars, developing a cult audience along the way - some of whom are even prone to turning up "covered in blood, shooting fire and just having fun sharing in all the fucking evil".

It's a nice lead into a couple of minutes' worth of footage from a few of these screenings, showcasing scantily clad Goth chicks and flame-eaters dancing in red-hued clubs while some decent punk bands kick out the jams on various stages. Presented in anamorphic 1.78:1, this featurette runs for just under 3 minutes.

A "Q&A with director JJ Connelly" follows. Shot in New York in October 2008, this is a jovial 7-minute shot-on-video piece that finds Connelly beaming from ear to ear while eliciting friendly laughter from his off-screen audience. This featurette is presented in 1.33:1.

Four galleries of behind-the-scenes images ensue, offering 88 crisp photographs from the set over the course of 7 minutes. The first section focuses on the girls in the film, and then we get a portion devoted to Flambeaux. A literal "Behind The Scenes" section is third, and is possibly the most interesting to traverse. Finally, there are 20 stills representing the live Goth Kill experience.

A short trailer rounds the extras off.

Perhaps it's a little too cheap for some tastes, but those who do try their luck with GOTH KILL may just find that it's actually a lot of fun.

Review by Stuart Willis