If my best friend dared to wear a fall-foliage shirt around me, I might be so inclined to murder him, too. In Tim Ritter’s gore-rific Killing Spree, however, at least Tom Russo has a few more compelling reasons on top of that.
The lanky, wild-eyed Tom (Asbestos Felt, Girls Gone Dead) has a cute and sexy wife in Leeza (Courtney Lercara, Slaughterhouse), a former stewardess who now stays at home. But Tom also has an inability to let go of the past — specifically, the pain lingering from being cheated upon in his first marriage; therefore, he’s paranoid over what — or whom — Leeza does while he toils away at his blue-collar job.
When he finds written evidence that Leeza laid his closest pal, Ben (Raymond Carbone, Ritter’s Truth or Dare?: A Critical Madness), despite the guy being grossly overweight, old enough to be her grandfather and all-around repellent, Tom loses his shit. And I mean loses it. Okay, so maybe the 40% pay cut at work is partly to blame, but pissed is pissed, so Tom wreaks vengeance on Ben … but only after separating the head of Ben’s new teen girlfriend (fellow Truth or Dare alum Rachel Rutz) from her torso and tossing it his way.
While that should put an end to things, alas, it’s only a warm-up. Tom keeps finding new diary entries: the electrician who came to fix the ceiling fan, the TV repairman who knows karate, the Mexican drapery deliveryman, the dopey lawn-care dude in the Pretenders tour T. At one point, our hero hilariously freaks out by screaming what we’re all thinking: “Why is she writing all of this down?”
Infidelity is a bell that can’t be unrung, and as Tom grows more and more unhinged and untethered from reality, Felt takes his character gloriously over the top, back ’round the planet, and over the top once more. As the man’s name conveys, Felt is something else; he devotes his all — novelty thong included — to the part. Without him, Killing Spree still might be a hoot to watch, but that’s an alternative I don’t wish to picture. When Tom goes into cuckoo-cuckold mode, Ritter assists his leading oddball with the simplest and cheapest of special effects for 16mm film: flipping the switch of the red lightbulb to saturate the room. It’s like the True Value version of the Dario Argento gel.
It’s also a fine example of Ritter doing what he can with what one assumes was a sack of spare change saved from a month’s worth of cigarette runs to the Circle K. Although transparently cheap as Bazooka Joe bubble gum — and even less nutritious — the direct-to-VHS Killing Spree is never not deliriously, deviously and devilishly entertaining. —Rod Lott