Director – Tony Krantz, Screenplay – Erik Jendresen & Thomas Schnauz, Producers – Steve Ecclesine, Tony Krantz, Dan Myrick & John Shiban, Photography – Thomas Yatsko, Music – James S. Levine, Visual Effects – Comen VFX (Supervisor – Tim Carras), Production Design – Frank Bollinger. Production Company – Warner Home Video/Raw Feed.
Cast
Bostin Christopher (Otis Broth), Daniel Stern (Will Lawson), Illeana Douglas (Kate Lawson), Ashley Johnson (Riley Lawson), Jared Kusnitz (Reed Lawson), Jere Burns (Agent Ralph Hotchkiss), Kevin Pollak (Elmo Broth), Tarah Paige (Kim), Tracy Scoggins (Rita Vitale)
Plot
A small town in New York State is being terrorised by what is referred to as the Kim Killer. The killer is socially nerdish pizza delivery guy Otis Broth. Otis abducts teenage girls and imprisons them where he insists that the girl’s name is now Kim and that she enact a fantasy of being a cheerleader and he a football player and they going on a date. He even calls the girl’s parents to ask permission to take “Kim” to the prom. However, when the girls refuse or try to escape he kills them. Teenager Riley Lawson becomes the latest girl abducted by Otis. Her parents become determined to find her.
Otis was the second film as director for Tony Krantz. Krantz is better known as a producer and has been behind films and tv such as Mulholland Dr. (2001), Frankenstein (2004), tv’s 24 (2001-10), Dracula (2013-4) and Outer Range (2022- ). Krantz had previously directed the surreal hospital horror Sublime (2007) and would go on to the non-genre film noir The Big Bang (2010), as well as to create the tv series Wu Assassins (2019). Krantz has also collaborated and produced several films with Daniel Myrick, co-director of The Blair Witch Project (1999), who is one of the co-producers here.
From the opening scene with Tarah Paige held a prisoner, chained up in the basement as Otis (Bostin Christopher) administers electric shocks and demands she be referred to as Kim, the film heads for an admirably twisted place. Bostin Christopher plays the role of the big, sweaty nerd to perfection as though he really lived the part. The film seems promising and gives the impression it is going to push the envelope in a big way. However, at the same time as you watch this play out, it also feels as though you have seen much of it before.
Bostin Christopher as Otis Broth
About mid film, Otis turns into something different. Through various contrivances, imprisoned girl Ashley Johnson makes an escape at the same time as her parents Daniel Stern and Illeana Douglas have set out to track her down. Things go wrong whereupon the film heads into the realm of Horror Comedy. It sort of becomes a comic take on The Last House on the Left (1972) with even a comedy scene where the family tortures Otis’s brother (Kevin Pollak). However, the film lacks the subtlety to reverse or subvert its clichés in any particularly clever way and all that we end up with is unsubtle farce.
One thing that should be complemented about what is fairly much a B movie is that it has a killer soundtrack with choice tracks from A Flock of Seagulls, Talking Heads, Blue Oyster Cult, Devo and The B52s.
