The Killer Inside Me

I know, I know. I've been away for a pretty darn good little while. What can I say. Writing blogs for other people keeps me pretty busy. But I recently sat down for this utterly disturbing movie set in the west Texas landscape and I just had to scratch my blog itch.

It's Saturday night and the Kentuckian and I have entirely too many movie options at our disposal. More is not always better, folks, sometimes it's just more. Between OnDemand and Netflix Instant Streaming to the XBox, we can easily spend an hour trying to decide what to watch, especially when he's in one of his moods, God bless him. On this particular night, he was in the mood for something bloody and scary. When we read 'WARNING: Graphic sex and violence' in the description for The Killer Inside Me, by golly we were sold.

The Killer Inside Me stars Casey Affleck as Lou Ford, an anti-hero of epic proportions hiding a taste for brutal violence and murder beneath the exterior of a soft-spoken southern gentleman. He poses as a tender-hearted deputy sheriff in a 1950s west Texas town, but really he has a "sickness." He's a serial killer, see. When he has the chance to avenge the death of his adopted brother, he suffers a flare-up and the results are truly nauseating.

Lou's crimes are sloppy and brutal. I had to avert my eyes. Bloody, yes, but hardly in the style of your modern day horror flick. Lou's style of murder is just plain sickening. I won't soon forget those moments. That's just it: this is not a horror flick, even though it is terrifying. The story is based on a classic piece of noir fiction from Jim Thompson, a major player in the hard boiled cannon, if there is such a thing, and I promptly added to my list of books to be read int he near future.

Kate Hudson is charming with a little extra flesh on her bones (The Kentuckian pointed this out) and Jessica Alba is surprisingly believable as the town prostitute with nothing but love in her heart for the homicidal lawman. Affleck's understated performance as the manipulative, unraveling lunatic of a protagonist is pretty spot-on and the script is surprisingly humorous at times. And then, of course, there's Texas. The unpretentious backdrop, dry and unforgiving, and ever present. I can't say if I really loved the movie--or just the scenery.