THRILLKILL

THRILLKILL (1987)

If you happen to like INTERFACE, you might just find this amusing as well. As a matter of fact, I think it would be a great idea to sell this film in one of those multi-pack DVDs with it, and perhaps ACCESS CODE or MINDWARP. THRILLKILL is a low-budget 'cyber thriller' long before there was ever such a term invented by marketing people. For this reason, it is sort of ahead of its time, as cheesy as it may be. It has less than stellar acting, but a kind of plot that you never know what's around the next corner, which keeps you wondering.

A female computer software designer and hacker has been skimming bank accounts, and has stolen 3.5 Million dollars while working on a videogame called "ThrillKill." She has placed information about where the money is within the game, but don't get too excited, it isn't like people playing the game can find out where the money is, the game is actually nothing but a hiding place, so trailers and synopsis' which make this movie sound like its all about this videogame called "ThrillKill" are misleading. The game, "ThrillKill" is actually a 'MacGuffin' and there's nothing to it, though the 'graphics' of the game are pretty silly, but fun to see. The plot has more to do with various people who know about this money, and how they try to get it. The hacker is killed, and her sister is caught up in this intrigue between a psychotic lady who thinks she's in a noir thriller, a black guy with a shotgun who owns an arcade, and a foreign sounding guy with a cane who seems to be the head of a software company, and the employer of the software designer, and a detective named Gillette who is the most charming character of the bunch. (The actor who plays him was a Canadian TV Weatherman during the 80s) The hacker's sister, Bobbie is chloroformed, mugged, threatened, tied up, tortured, among other things throughout this movie, and usually in her living room. She is an airline stewardess who just happens to come home with her stewardess friend at the wrong time, in the middle of this shady plot to steal 3.5 million dollars and these crazy people trying to scam each other.

You have to understand this movie is probably another Canadian film, which I suspect was filmed in the same location as THE TOWER. It isn't a truly bad movie, the plot does tend to move a little bit slow, and characters aren't that bright, but it all does lead to a shootout and it does offer some twists and turns which I'd have to say aren't necessarily really anything you've seen in other movies. Believe it or not this film inspired a porno take-off. I only recently discovered this movie, and never heard of it before a few weeks ago. I have no idea if it really ever had an audience, but I can imagine that it wasn't necessarily panned or rejected when it came out, even if it was a straight to video release. The acting could certainly have been better, and seems to be a very 'independent' movie, and so whoever made this did a fair job with what they had. I wasn't ultimately disappointed with this movie, but then I was expecting it to get worse and worse, and it didn't. It is a B-movie, there is some heavy duty cheesy-ness going on, and you have to be the sort of B-movie fan that can watch INTERFACE and really be amused by it, you have to have the nostalgia, or curiosity to watch old movies which have bizarre premises to be entertained. The story is certainly believable, though like all B-movies, you're dealing with highly dubious production values, but for some, this is all part of the charm of digging these things up.

This movie is along the same lines as BLACK MOON RISING, only with no-name actors. If you happen to like BLACK MOON RISING, not because of the actors or the car, but to look back at the 80s, and experience the tone of such films, this movie is kind of worth looking at. My main problem is that it is only available on VHS, and the sound is really not all that great, it certainly doesn't have the quality we have today, and sometimes you just don't get what people are saying as the dialog audio track is kind of low sometimes during the film. It would be nice if they released this on DVD at some point, and if they can't sell it to a 'mass audience' which most likely isn't going to really run out and buy it, I think it would be a great Echo Bridge release. The only problem with Echo Bridge is the incredibly cheesy title menus, and not-so great quality transfers, but at least they're better than these dollar-store DVDs which sometimes are the only available form of some of these old forgotten cheesy B-movies. Echo Bridge needs a serious overhaul on their marketing and graphic design plan, they have something to sell, and they're doing a little better job than these stupid dollar DVD companies that produce crap, but they need to rethink the way they're packaging this shit. They do get ahold of some 'decent' quality 'crap' movies if that makes any sense, and sometimes the transfers aren't all that bad, but often the covers, the title menus and the 4-packs just have some really irritating flaws. I am one of the few people that think that the 4-pack DVDs are a good idea, however, cramming multiple movies on one side of a disc, together with what are possibly the shittiest title menus in history pisses me off, because as supposedly bad as some of these movies are, they deserve better than this. They just need to invest a tiny little bit more in quality, and they could have themselves actual collectors' items, even though they call them 'collector's sets' which they only are to a select few people. The 1980s offers quite a few B-movies to fill collections of these sorts, and many of these titles are rather entertaining, and interesting to watch, for various reasons. What they're doing however is hit and miss, cramming a bunch of bad SyFy Channel movies on one set which looks freaking terrible, and then putting a couple half-way decent titles on one set, with godawful amateurish cover art. Anybody could do better than this. I don't know if it is because they do not have the rights to the original VHS cover-art or what, but the fact there are literally hundreds of VHS cover-art sites should tell them something. There are hundreds more sites where people make and design their own covers because the DVD covers are so bad. People will obviously download the movies from the internet for free because nobody wants to even pay $5.00 for crap movies on DVD, when they can get better quality VHSRips from torrents and filesharing sites.

Seriously, if they released a "Sci-Fi Collector's Set" with THRILLKILL, INTERFACE, ACCESS CODE and any other crap movie, it would have a certain audience, and value. They're not paying attention to who could be buying this stuff, and who could be buying this stuff tomorrow. They seem to be mimicking, or attempting to mimic the marketing strategies of WalMart multi-packs with like Wesley Snipes movies or something. These are not mainstream action films with those kinds of fans or enticements, these can be sold with the sort of 'cult film' aura, but they need to understand what that is and where it comes from. Calling them cult films on the cover doesn't do it. Well, hopefully some of these people read this blog and are beginning to learn. THRILLKILL deserves a good release, and I know that none of the major companies are ever going to release it, it does have value, and with these new DVD Collections Packs, it could definitely make its way out there and find its audience, but less and less people are looking at any of these 'DVD Collectors Sets' as anything worth anything, not because the movies on them suck so bad they're unwatchable, but because they keep seeing shit dvds over and over again. The movies on those collections often are shit, but also in shitty quality boxes, discs, and transfers. There's no reason to watch many of them because some of them are worse than youtube video quality. Some of these 10-Movie collections and more, are repeats of many of the same shitty movies in shitty quality, with scarcely anything unusual or interesting. Now that we are entering the era where movies from the 80s, 90s, and even from this decade are ending up on these collections, they need to consider just what the hell they're putting in these packs, and the quality of what they're doing. It's either a get-rich quick scheme invented by idiots who most certainly aren't going to get rich at all but mass produce a lot of garbage that will end up in the landfill, or morons who have absolutely no imagination whatsoever, and not even the slightest thought of how the hell to market anything at all. Somebody's going to figure this shit out sooner or later, and they'll come out the winners.