Killers

Director: Mike Mendez
Screenwriters: Dave Larsen, Mike Mendez

Institute History

  • 1997 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Mike Mendez’s film is a completely delirious excursion into the genre that chronicles the exploits of killers. With the fascination for showcase trials and murderers as its backdrop, this truly inspired lunacy will have the audience alternately laughing and jumping out of their seats.

The brothers James, two of America’s most media-oriented killers, have escaped from San Quentin’s Death Row. In the midst of a fierce storm and pursued by law-enforcement officers, they find sanctuary by bursting in on and taking hostage the ideal American family, or so they think. After they discover that the daughters are two of their biggest fans, the mother isn’t quite what she seems, and the father is perhaps more than their equal, the killers realize the cops are the least of their worries. And as the rain pours down and the dragnet moves closer, the question that emerges is, “Will the killers ever see the light of day’?” Intermixing genres, part parody and part fantasy and fabrication, Killers arcs into the stratosphere of a netherworld of death, lust, and outrageousness. With his terrific visual sense and real cinematic technique and literacy, Mendez has added his name to a list of filmmakers who will be heard from in the future.

— Geoffrey Gilmore

Screening Details

Credits

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