KILLER WEEKEND (REVIEW)
Dir. Jamielyn Lippman
Reviewer. Martyn Wakefield
The world of dating has changed. Now those seeking love are using online apps to seek their dates and take out the chores of playing the field. But what if those apps became a different type of playing field, where the rich men seek vulnerable girls and young girls seek sugar daddies willing to pay for their time. A two way transaction that works like an open contract. Well, that's where KILLER WEEKEND pitches itself and sees the predators on both sides.
With such an interesting concept and early promise, Jamielyn Lippman sets out to exploit the grey areas of each player and instead of using the old trope of the final girl instead works to bring fresh ideas to the screen. The main focus here is Marina (Kaitlin Keats) who uses the app to support her lifestyle seeking older men to help her needs however there is a trail of death that follows her but all is not as it first appears.
The unfortunate part of KILLER WEEKEND is the promise it teases but the execution misses the bar. There's an interesting pace to the film that plays more like a soap opera than a gripping thriller. Despite there being many deaths, it all feels subdued to the point where they become irrelevant to the emotional arc of the central character and this may be how the film was written but the motives and drive of a character should not be at the expense of the engagement with what is meant to be more shocking within the film.
Even the closing scene which finally has so much teased sense of horror is too brief and as a result, behind a well written character, there's very little to really draw a second viewing and while the Marina has a lot of depth, the surrounding cast are painfully under exposed with no chemistry to really connect with Keats' demons, even a coalition of sorts near the end is unconvincing which is the driving point of the film especially after the traumatic events that lead to that event would have you screaming at the screen asking how?
As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of promise here from the original writing however the execution, mostly affected by the limited budget, leaves this film being more of a forgettable weekend rather than a killer one.
