Killing Car

In America, at least, any film that's not in English holds a certain cache. If it's in French, it's assume the filmmaker must be doing something different or trying to make some clever intellectual point. That's not the case here. This film is the French Plan 9.

It opens early in the morning in a junkyard where the owner gets shot. Rather than call the cops, his girlfriend pursues the shooter trading gunfire. Standard stuff, right? Wrong. Someone else is actually *working* in the junkyard. And continues to work as the two shoot at each other. The girlfriend runs into a forest...full of prostitutes. The shooter follows. The chase proceeds to a carnival that's getting ready to open. Bullets fly. And, again, the employees just kind of watch as one by one everyone is killed. No one even bothers to register the gun battle going on or the bodies dripping blood down the ramps of the rides. Again, fine, it's fiction. Really, really bad fiction.

But then it jumps the shark. This must be a helluva battle with unlimited ammo and incredible stamina because, suddenly, it's night time. It's not that the lighting just looks bad, the script literally has the actors saying it's night time. Why? Because they end up in a graveyard and graveyards are spookier at night.

That's the first ten minutes or so of the movie and it goes downhill from there until the final reel when the reason for all of this idiocy is revealed. And the reason pushes credibility past the point of no return. But not in a good way. Not in a way that makes you consider questions of human nature and revenge. But in a way that makes you wonder how this thing got greenlighted and why you can see kind of see why some Americans hate the French.

Jean Rollin's KILLING CAR, stars Tiki Tsang as "The Car Woman", one of the most enigmatic, eerily seductive characters in any film. She's ruthless, relentless, and lethal. The opening junkyard scene, involving attempted car theft and murder, is both absurd and astonishing. This leads to the fast, desperate chase through a carnival, where she engages in a running gun battle with prostitutes. The car secured, she continues her murderous rampage. It's obvious that anyone who comes in contact with this woman is doomed.

The police are baffled, finding a toy car at each of her murder scenes. Why is she doing this? When one victim asks, "Who are you?", she replies, "I am not.".

Ms. Tsang gives off an aura of exotic danger like no one since Tura Satana!

BEST SCENES: #1- The "barn fight", featuring a scythe vs. pitchfork confrontation! #2- The "photo shoot" scene! #3- The "art dealers" sequence! This is Tiki Tsang's only movie, and she carries it from start to finish!...

A beautiful Oriental woman embarks on a revengeful killing spree in Paris, leaving a small toy car at every murder scene. This could and should have been good but it seems that Rollin decided to make as bad a movie as possible. The first 15 minutes are taken up by the most absurd gunfight that I have had the misfortune to endure. The acting, script, continuity are all bad. Being a Rollin movie, however, means plenty of gratuitous female nudity. More of a thriller but the rumbling thunder on cue and a scene involving a scythe (a la Fascination) do lend KC some horror elements. Rollin is one of my favourite European directors, this effort sadly is a MASSIVE disappointment.

'Killing Car' (1989) sputters in rather enigmatically at the tail end of the 80s, while initially appearing to be quite some distance removed from, Jean Rollin's elegiac visions of surrealistic Gothic wyrd, I still found this starkly nihilistic thriller to be anything but the dour DTV misfire so many have claimed it to be. At this point in time it is pretty clear that, Jean Rollin is having some severe problems securing adequate finances for his exquisite phantasmagorical masterpieces as, sadly, 'Killing Car' looks decidedly sparse even by penurious Eurocine standards, all that being said, hopefully forgiving its severe budgetary limitations, what remains is some gloriously escapist Euro-crime schlock, supercharged with its very own oblique set of deliciously screwball B-Movie archetypes and their delightfully shadowy intrigues! Like fellow genre iconoclast, Lucio Fulci, some of the esteemed director's latter day films are often dismissed, with all too many 'critics' unfairly damning them as being cheap, demonstratively below par affairs, whereas, quite to the contrary, I can still readily appreciate the credible artistry abounding in these idiosyncratic, albeit far lower budgeted productions!

Writer/director, Jean Rollin's knowingly pulpy, pistol-happy 'Killing Car' is enjoyably ripe with, Dashiell Hammett allusions as his gun-metal cool, raven-haired avenging angel, 'The Car Woman' (Tiki Tsang) draws us uncomfortably close to her deadly odyssey deep into, Jean Rollin's crepuscular Parisian underworld. The lack of glossy production value fortuitously lends murky verisimilitude to her vengeful undertakings and to, Rollin's great credit, the bravura director effectively maintains this glacial existential milieu throughout the movie, which in lesser hands might simply be just another grubby exercise is gratuitously blood-squibbing, B-Movie revenge, and yet it is more than that, since there is an oblique suggestion of a supernatural, almost mythical gravitas to the beguiling Tsang's unflinchingly brutal slaying of all those nefarious, cowardly dregs that wronged her so egregiously.

For me, the inimitable filmmaker's doomy, dream-logic romanticism remains largely intact in this gritty, grossly maligned movie and, Rollin's rampant predilection for encouraging delectably nubile ladies to spontaneously disrobe is resolutely unbowed in his skewed approach to Godard's sacrosanct 'Girl & a Gun' filmmaking maxim! And it would be greatly remiss not to mention the truly exemplary score by previous Rollin collaborator, Philippe Bréjean which sonorously adds some much-needed burnish to the film's unlovely, rough-hewn veneer. 'Killing Car' is not quite the risible car crash some might have you believe, and I'm certain all those especially broad-minded grindhouse fans shall find the admittedly bumpy ride a remarkably stimulating one!

Killing Car (1993)

* (out of 4)

Extremely bad revenge flick about an Asian woman going around in an American car and killing countless people to she comes across. The woman doesn't speak a word and instead just goes up to her victims and shoots them. The police are baffled as to who is doing the killings and why. This French film is a really bad one and it's rather shocking to see something like this from someone like Rollin. That's not to say the director hasn't made some really bad films because he has but even his worse films at least contain some sort of style and that is missing here. The entire movie has a very cheap look and feel to it. The movie's budget appears to be just a few hundred and there's really not much of anything to recommend here. The reasons behind the murders is the main draw here as the director tries to keep the secret from start to finish and he does at least do this good. There are two twists at the end of the movie I think they both worked fine. It's getting to the twists that is the hard part. The movie features some of the worse acting this side of a homemade porn movie as all the performances here are really, really bad. Just check out the woman who is in her apartment building when the lights go out as she goes into a fit not knowing what's going on. This scene here was so poorly acted that I couldn't even get a laugh out of it. Tiki Tsang plays the killer and I'm not really sure what to think about her. She has the "look" of a silent killer but I wouldn't say that's enough to consider it a good performance. The movie contains some really ugly cinematography, a poor editing job and some really horrid death scenes that are so cheap you have to wonder what they were thinking. Fans of Rollin should skip this sucker all together unless you watch the first five minutes and then skip to the final five for the secret.