Sexykiller, morirás por ella

SEXY KILLER is a one-of-a-kind Spanish production that tells the story of the titular character, a female serial killer who goes around bumping off everybody who falls foul of her. The story is told in a light-hearted and jokey way despite the copious amounts of spraying bloodshed and gore, with the star frequently breaking the fourth wall of cinema by turning to address the viewer.

It's a simplistic tale but a madcap one, packed with high energy. The narrative is jiggled with so that various parts are told in flashback, perhaps to hide what would otherwise be a predictable tale. The main issue I had with it was that I found chief actress Macarena Gomez's acting to be a bit lacking and her character to be entirely unsympathetic; if they'd somehow managed to make the killer a likable creation then this would have been a lot better.

Still, things do pick up in the second half, with a twist in the story bringing zombies to play, and then we get some BRAINDEAD-style mayhem in the big climax. Horror fans will enjoy the many and frequent references to classics of the genre, but make no mistake, this is a simple black comedy done up to look like more than it is.

What starts off as a slasher parody ends up as a zombie movie going through a morgue and Re-Animator phases. The first couple of minutes of Sexykiller are quite charming as a slasher threatens a campus. Early on we find out that the slasher is a girl named Barbara, a medical student. Her dog is names Jason- just one of the many horror movie references- and when the dog is run over, she grabs the driver and proceeds to tell us how she ended up being a killer. At that point things go downhill quickly. The parody is piled on exaggerated strokes, the cast starts breaking out in song, there are infomercial parodies, it goes on and on, we find out a bit about her childhood and teen years. Cops arrive to investigate the crimes. Two other students created a device to visualize people's dreams and also serves to show what a victim saw during their last minutes. They hope to be able to catch the killer that way.

Barbara and one of these guys fall in love but don't express it till later. Meanwhile, the guys realize that their device when used on the dead, brings them back to live and turns them into zombies. Throughout the movie no one realizes that Barbara, who is not all that subtle about her murderous inclination, is the killer. Fortunately the parody elements slowly fade away and the movie becomes more of a good comedy with serious horror elements.

Overall, the script is smart, the parody is not all funny though. It becomes a bit funnier once it settles for comedy. The movie is gory though, and if this crew would have gone for a straightforward horror movie or a mild horror comedy, they could created a pretty good movie.

Barbara is a university student who enjoys killing people even more than she enjoys sex, and as the bodies pile up the hunt is on for the Campus Killer. The opening scene spoofs Scream in a girls' changing room, good start. Sadly it soon went downhill for me when she starts narrating a series of flashbacks to her next victim. Later on a bunch of zombies get added to the mix, making this a slasher/zombie spoof. It does get rather silly and the film tries to cram in too much. It is quite fast paced, being Spanish language I found it a little hard at times reading the subtitles and trying to see what was happening at the same time. The comedy side does get too much at times but there is plenty of gore to help balance it out. I won't be giving it a second viewing.

Having overheard him talking about cutting up bodies, sexy serial killer Bárbara (Macarena Gómez) gets the hots for pathologist Álex (Alejo Sauras), believing him to be a kindred spirit. Álex, blissfully unaware of the lovely lady's true nature, is more than happy for the attention, but his life gets a whole lot more complicated after he tests his experimental brain impulse decoder on Bárbara's victims in an attempt to discover the killer's identity: the machine has the unfortunate side-effect of bringing the dead back to life as ravenous zombies!

Sexykiller, from Spanish director Miguel Martí, definitely doesn't have any lofty pretencions: it simply wants to be a whole load of schlocky fun for the midnight movie crowd—and in that it mostly succeeds. From opening immediately with a changing room scene full of hot Latino girls in various states of undress, to breaking the fourth wall by having sexy psycho Bárbara talk to the viewer, to impromptu song and dance routines, to the sudden switch from serial killer flick to zombie movie, to the copious amounts of gore, there is plenty here to lend the film cult appeal. Director Marti does seem to be trying just a little too hard to please at times, some of the morbid humour and absurdist elements feeling a bit strained, so the film is probably best watched with a few cervezas in the belly, when it's easy to be more lenient about such things.

The opening scene in this film gives a pretty good indication of the philosophy of the film-makers. In it we have a group of hot semi-naked young women in a changing room, while an ominous character in a Scream mask looks on from a secret location; it ends with the tables being turned and the intruder being killed by one of the cute girls. The reason that this scene indicates what this film is all about is that it ridicules clichés of the horror genre while simultaneously celebrating them. This Spanish horror-comedy is a film that resolutely does not take itself seriously. It feels a bit like Pieces (1982) meets Re-Animator (1984) with a female serial killer. The story revolves around a series of university campus killings carried out by a medical student called Bárbara. But that's only half the story as it also includes a development later in the story where a new serum is introduced that has the ability of bringing back the dead, meaning that all the killers victims return as flesh-eating zombies. So, it would be fair to say that this one certainly tries to cover its horror bases that's for sure.

The lead is Macarena Gómez who gives a good performance here. The role is one that offers a fair bit of fun with the character frequently breaking the fourth wall to tell us her story. The jokes are sometimes very good too, my favourite one being the fact that some male zombies can only be dispatched by shooting them in the penis rather than the traditional target of the head on account of the fact that 'some men only think with their dicks!' The combination of a slasher movie with a zombie flick is one that is of course completely absurd but it essentially works here in a film that is wilfully ridiculous from the outset. It's a fast-paced and amusing movie which at least tries to come up with something new, even if it does just mash genres up in order to do this. Definitely an entertaining film though and one which seems to have gone under the radar somewhat which doesn't seem right and, ultimately, you can't go too wrong with a premise involving a hot girl serial killer.