Classic Horrors Club

With the exceptional quality of horror movies independent filmmakers are churning out these days, it must be tough going for creators in other genres. I imagine it’s harder to get good actors that can deliver the material while making it seem… genuine. Also, counterintuitively, it must be more difficult for simple settings to look and feel realistic.

15 Killings (2020) has some compelling moments in its flip-flopping of scenes in the past where serial killer, Norris (Steve Bongeorno), takes home young men from the bar, and scenes in the present where the now convicted serial killer meets with neuroscientist, Dr. Kentyl (Maria Olsen) in prison. She’s working on finding consistency among brain patters in serial killers and wants to scan his.

She has an hour to convince him, and he’s not buying it. This is the biggest problem I have with the movie. She spends that hour (and then an additional 30 minutes that Norris is able to later obtain) teaching him a simplified lesson about the functions of each part of the brain. She points to a diagram, says what it looks like and why it’s named what it is, and then describes what it does.

Her plea began more interestingly. Instead of brain parts, she recited common characteristics of serial killers; you know, early behavioral problems, grandiose sense of self, pathological lying, etc. After each characteristic, we’re shown Norris demonstrating it while he’s retrieving victims and strangling them in his apartment.

She doesn’t mention a desire to be caught, but Norris seems to have that, too. At one point he mentions, “When they take me away…” And he’s careless about body disposal, hiding them under the floorboards until the stench causes him to be evicted.

Only then does he try to properly get rid of them, cutting them into small pieces that he burns in a fire pit or flushes down the drain. The latter method is worse than the smell, though. It causes toilets in the building to overflow and plumbers to find rotting flesh in the sewer. One states the obvious, “Somebody’s doing something wrong here.”

That’s not as distasteful as the way he treats his poor dog, verbally unleashing his rage upon it. And, if you wonder what happens to your dog when you go to prison, that’s the final note 15 Killings plays. It’s as if writer-director I. Drakos didn’t think the movie was dark enough and needed a stinger at the end. It didn’t.