The Hot Spot / Killing Me Softly Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

The Hot Spot / Killing Me Softly Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 11, 2013

Shout! Factory is starting to release some double features on Blu-ray which pair tangentially related films together. Releases like this are almost always a hit or miss proposition, and that turns out to be the case with the two-fer offering varied but problematic modern noirs. The better of the two films on this release is undoubtedly Dennis Hopper’s 1990 opus The Hot Spot, a kind of fetid ménage a trois with Virginia Madsen essaying the kind of femme fatale role she seemed fated to play at that stage of her career, Jennifer Connelly as an apparently innocent young teenage girl who might nonetheless not be as naïve as she seems, and Don Johnson as a used car salesman who finds his libido torn between the two women. Killing Me Softly is a fitfully ambitious but ultimately abysmally failed English language outing by legendary Chinese auteur Chen Kaige, who attempts (pretty much completely without success) to infuse the noir genre with a heaping dose of metaphor and an almost soft core porn ambience. Heather Graham portrays a woman in an unhappy relationship who more or less stumbles into a tempestuous affair with a mountain climber played by Joseph Fiennes. Their incendiary interaction leads to a quick marriage, at which point the man’s troubled past starts rippling out into both of their lives.

For detailed comments on each of these films, please click on the following review links:

The Hot Spot Blu-ray review

Killing Me Softly Blu-ray review

The Hot Spot / Killing Me Softly Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Video comments for each of the films are available by clicking on the above links.

The Hot Spot / Killing Me Softly Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Audio comments for each of the films are available by clicking on the above links.

The Hot Spot / Killing Me Softly Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are offered on this Blu-ray disc.

The Hot Spot / Killing Me Softly Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

This is at best a rather tangentially related double feature, and like double features of yore, it's a hit and miss affair. The Hot Spot is arguably the better of the two films, but part of that may be due to the fact that the bar is set so awfully low by Killing Me Softly. Fans who haven't seen either or both of these films and who have some sort of interest in them may want to check out this bargain priced two-fer.