Normally, I wouldn't waste my time commenting on swill like Hollywood KILLS but since no one has yet to review it, as a public service, here goes: Recently I discovered that my Time-Warner cable service had added a new channel to its lineup entitled "Chiller". Fair enough. Horror films and thrillers (even junky ones) have always been one of my favorite genres. My first sampling on "Chiller", a 2006 gem entitled "Hollywood Kills", certainly had a promising premise: four young hopefuls are lured to the empty studio of a once-well-known filmmaker with promises of fame and fortune after they "audition" for him. Enough said. The IMDb lists the budget of this cinematic turd as $200,000. An extremely low budget? Yes, but I still would like to know: where did the budget go? Certainly not on the director (the worst), the actors (inept and repulsive), the script (or was this monstrosity improvised?), the production (if you're longing for those bottom-of-the-barrel cheapies cranked out in the 1940s by such poverty-row studios as PRC and Monogram, "Hollywood Kills" is for you!), etc. I would venture to say that, since this thing was made in 2006, it was an attempt to cash in on the mercifully short-lived popularity of such garbage as the "Saw" series, "Hostel" and "Vacancy", which by any stretch of the imagination could not even be called thrillers or even slasher flicks, but a disreputable genre known as "torture porn" that focused ad nauseum on revolting closeups of the torture and dismemberment of its protagonists. However, even on this despicable level, "Hollywood Kills" is a boring disaster. I doubt if I shall ever again sample the wares of the "Chiller" channel, which is so putrid it makes me take back every negative comment I've made about the Sci-Fi channel (whose mostly self-produced monster-on-a-rampage epics at least provide amusingly tacky CGI special effects, fairly generous budgets, and employment for once-popular actors like Dean Cain and Christopher Atkins). Summing up, please don't waste one minute of your time on imbecilic junk like "Hollywood Kills" or, for that matter, the "Chiller" channel. Cable TV, with its plethora of channels aimed at specialized tastes, was a wonderful idea in concept. But the fulfillment of its potential has been, so far, entirely another matter!
