Sexy Killer

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.

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.

This movie materializes the ultimate definition of a crowd-pleaser. I watched "Sexy Killer" in a practically sold-out theater at the Brussels International Fantasy Film Festival and the whole audience literally went out of their minds with enthusiasm and delirium. This is a pleasantly deranged, no-barrels-held, unscrupulous and 100% original miscellany of bloody horror and vulgar comedy; easily the most flamboyant movie of its type of the last 10 years or so. Many movies ambitiously try to mix horror and comedy ingredients but miserably fail, whereas "Sexy Killer" succeeds without seemingly too much efforts. I won't claim all gags and comical references are equally triumphant, but generally speaking this Spanish movie from director Miguel Martí ("Fin de Curso") and writer Paco Cabezas ("The Appeared") is a genuine winner and I hope it will find popularity and distribution outside of the Festival circuit as well. The main trump of the film is undoubtedly lead actress Macarena Gómez and her unique depiction of the eccentric yet lovable protagonist character Barbara. She's a medical student with the vanity and obnoxious ego of Paris Hilton and the homicidal tendencies of Ted Bundy. Barbara addresses to the camera and explains in great detail how she commits the murders and why (kind of like in "Man Bites Dog" but even sillier) and she considers herself to be a very normal twenty-something girl with normal needs and desires. She doesn't even need to cover up her serial killing crimes, because who would ever suspect a cute, fragile and cherubic looking student like her? But then our serial killer queen falls in love, and her brainiac-boyfriend just invented a device that brings all of Barbara's murder victims back to life as vengeful zombies. Will she be stolid enough to kill them all again and live happily ever with her boyfriend? Miguel Martí and Paco Cabezas are obviously two completely horror-obsessed geeks, as they processed a massive number of tributes, inside jokes and references towards several classics of the genre into their screenplay. The fact they couldn't decide to make a serial killer movie or a zombie flick and then simply combined the two themes into one demented movie should already say enough about their devotion to the world of horror. "Sexy Killer" is an unceasingly entertaining movie, with colorful characters and typical horror clichés that are deliberately magnified to emphasize the comedic effect. There's the stalk-and-slaughter scene at the girls' locker room at the beginning (with a fantastic twist), the zombie resurrecting sequence at the morgue, the fraternity house party turning into a bloodbath near the end and much, much more! The gore effects are explicit, the sleaze is gratuitous and the humor is often crude and tasteless, but yet this movie remains accessible and hilarious at all times. See this film, if possible with friends and a truckload of alcohol and you will have a guaranteed blast.