You are currently displaying English
殺人曲 (2001)
Killing Skill


Reviewed by: mrblue
Date: 04/17/2007

Killing Skill is really bad even by low-budget Hong Kong movie standards. Wait, let me rephrase that. Killing Skill is really bad even by Phillip Ko's "shot in the Phillipines for the price of a 12-pack" standards -- and that's saying a lot.

If you don't get the above reference, then you should consider yourself lucky -- it means you haven't been subjected to Ko's "movies" (and I use that term for his schlock very loosely). He's known for shooting films on the cheap and getting even cheaper results.

Case in point here: not only was Killing Skill obviously shot back-to-back with another Phillip Ko effort, Final Edge (since it re-uses much of the same cast and locations), but the plot itself is shamlessly ripped off from Robert Rodriguez's Desperado.

And by "shamelessly", I mean "totally", even down to cribbing certain scenes word for word. The film-makers must have balls the size of watermelons, because not only do they try to claim that this is an original script by crediting a screenwriter, but they have a huge copyright warning at the end of the movie.

Despite this, Killing Skill just might have been a decent girls-with-guns revenge flick if Ko actually knew how to put a movie together. Even though it only runs at a scant seventy-nine minutes, it feels much longer than that because every other scene is of Lily Chung walking in slow motion, driving in slow motion, boating in slow motion, or simply looking off in the distance... in slow motion.

Normally, the action scenes in Phillip Ko's movies save them from being total-bottom dwellers, but the ones here fall flat to say the least. Not only could this production not afford squibs (so the bullet hits produce no blood), they couldn't even afford blanks, so the actors just pantomime that they're shooting guns while the exact same looped foley effects play.

At a site that has reviewed some of the worst of the worst the Hong Kong film industry has produced, Killing Skill stands out. It's not quite as bad as the William Hung stinker Where is Mama's Boy?, but it's pretty damn close. It's an obvious ripoff that looks terrible while doing it. Worst of all, it's just boring. And this reviewer can take an awful lot of things, but boring is most definitely not one of them.

[review from www.hkfilm.net]

Reviewer Score: 1