Among Stanley Kubrick’s early film output The Killing stands out as the most lastingly influential: Quentin Tarantino credits the film as a huge inspiration for Reservoir Dogs and just about any movie or TV show that plays around with its own internal chronology owes the same debt. This sort of convoluted crime caper had really kicked off with John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle in 1950. From then on, nouveau noir scripts kept trying to find new ways of telling very similar stories. Here the novel Clean Break is adapted for the screen in a jigsaw-puzzle structure that caught Kubrick’s eye. With a dry narration we’re introduced to the key players in a racetrack heist as it’s being planned, but the story bounces back and forth between what happens to each of them during and before the big event. All of this keeps the audience guessing as to exactly how it will go wrong, while the downbeat telling, the unsympathetic characters and the excessively dramatic score clearly foretell that it will go wrong from the start. The denouement is comically daft no matter how many times you see it.

On the DVD: The Killing is a no-frills DVD transfer, in 4:3 ratio and with its original mono soundtrack. Criminally, just one trailer is all that’s been dug up as an extra. –Paul Tonks

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Amazon.co.uk Review
This is the movie that made John Waters famous, and quite possibly the film that made bad taste cool. Yes, Virginia, a large transvestite actually eats dog faeces as a kind of dizzying denouement to this frequently illogical and intentionally disgusting movie, but by the time that happens, you’re already numb … and you’ve possibly laughed to the point of losing bladder control.

The plot revolves around two vile families laying claim to the title “The Filthiest People Alive”. You’ve got pregnant women in pits, you’ve got grown men getting sexual satisfaction from chickens, you’ve got people licking furniture to perform trailer-park voodoo and you’ve got classic lines like: “Oh my God! The couch … it … it rejected you!”

Waters, who went on to direct genuine pop-culture classics such as Hairspray and Serial Mom, made this celluloid sideshow with one aim–to make a name for himself. It worked. He does have a genuine eye for filmmaking (when the trailer burns down, you feel the white heat of Divine’s pain and anger). On the other hand, you won’t notice any disclaimers about stunt doubles and animals not being mistreated. There weren’t, and they were. Welcome to the filthiest film in the world. –Grant Balfour

Pink Flamingos

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