6.6 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 1.5 | |
Overall | 1.5 |
Welcome to the Killing Chamber - a high-tech bunker where captured international assassins are ready to do what they do best, just to survive. If they're going to break out of this concrete hell, they must duel each other, fight deadly ninjas, and battle against gangs of masked maniacs.
Starring: Johnny Messner, Chia-Hui Liu, Tim Man, Joe Lewis (II), Brahim ChabAction | 100% |
Martial arts | 58% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
English
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 1.0 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 1.5 |
Kill or be killed has been a staple of films from the earliest days of The Great Train Robbery through to The Most Dangerous Game. But over the past several years, a whole new subgenre has arisen that plops “contestants” down in a locked bunker and then proceeds to whip up a fair amount of violent drama as they whittle each other down to (usually) one “winner”. Such iconic (for better or worse) franchises like the Saw films are at least tangentially built around this conceit, but there have been other less well known films that really exploit this premise, such as an often riveting little film I reviewed here several years ago, The Killing Room. Kill “Em All is in fact quite a bit like The Killing Room, and even Saw in its own way, only without even the trace of nuance that even some of the Saw outings provide, and with certainly not one iota of the frankly silly political angle that hobbled The Killing Room. No, this is a film resolutely without any ambitions other than to lurch from set piece to set piece, most of which involve hand to hand combat between various professional assassins who have found themselves locked in an immense building where they’re manipulated by an unseen voice who is monitoring their activity on camera (gee, how original). The film devolves from being ludicrous to being actually lamentable by the time it stumbles to its final act, when a supposed “revelation” puts one character’s exploits into ostensibly clearer context, but which only adds to the teetering pile of improbabilities that have already been stacked as high as the bunker like setting Kill ‘Em All is located in will allow.
Kill 'Em All is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. There's precious little technical information floating about concerning this outing (which doesn't look like it had an official theatrical release, at least from what can be gleaned online), but this certainly has the look of having been shot on HD video. That smooth, textureless quality that's so redolent of this format is well on display here. The film actually starts out looking pretty spry, with some great shots of Bangkok, good color and contrast and well above average fine detail. But once the bulk of the film settles down to the interior bunker elements, things get pretty drab and lifeless (no pun intended) in a big hurry. Contrast is noticeably poorer in this much longer segment of the film, fine detail tends to evaporate in the murky lighting, and shadow detail is often negligible. Colors may not have been graded especially aggressively, but there's a very curious pallid quality to just about everything in the interior segments of the film, with no bright primary colors of any kind (not even true reds for the blood) to offset the oppressive browns and beiges.
Kill 'Em All features a very nicely aggressive lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix that from a technical standpoint is probably this film's best selling point. Surround activity is surprisingly effective, especially given the fact that so much of the film takes place in relatively small, crowded and confined spaces. Foley effects are very well placed around the soundfield, and once we move on from hand to hand combat to the use of guns, there's a lot of ear shattering LFE on tap as well. Dialogue is clear (though some of these actors are clearly not native English speakers and their accents are rather thick, to say the least). Fidelity is excellent throughout the track and dynamic range is extremely wide.
If you've ever wanted to spend an hour and a half or so watching a bunch of people beat the living crap out of each other, Kill 'Em All is your go-to film of the year. The fight sequences are undeniably visceral and extremely well staged, but that's about all there is to this outing. You won't care one whit about any of the characters, for the simple fact that you know next to nothing about any of them, and even when they do reveal something (as one character does toward the end of the film), it's so laughably inane that it only makes the film seem even sillier than it was to begin with. Kill 'Em All starts with an overused and now pretty trite premise and then squeezes what little life there was left in it completely out, leaving nothing but a trail of bodies.
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