mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s
is relatively unadorned with bells and whistles, even austere at times. As with Des Morts, the soundtrack cues are few: an opening synth jam that is presumably the work of credited soundtrack authors W. Michael Lewis and Mark Lindsay (formerly of Paul Revere and the Raiders), the clichéd cueing up of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” to the introduction of a section on Vietnam, and prowling the Sunset Strip to the tune of punk band 999’s “I Believe in Homicide.”
Largely intended for the Japanese market, Te Killing
of America received an American premiere at the Public Teatre in New York, where it was reviewed in the New York Times by Janet Maslin, whose Pecksniffian piece condemned the “inexcusably fine detail” that the film brought to chronicling “the violent history of the last 20 years” as well as the manner in which “unrelated episodes [were] jumbled together” for a result that was deemed “exploitative and incoherent.” Even if you object to the film’s implicit proposition that the Kennedy assassination somehow opened up a Pandora’s box of American violence that hadn’t previously existed, there is something overwhelming in its steady accumulation and enumeration of physical evidence, both familiar and obscure: a hotel balcony in Memphis; George Wallace crumpling to the pavement in Maryland; the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles; coroner’s photos of Charles Whitman; security camera footage of a thrill killing at a convenience store; a teary elementary schooler recounting being shot by 16-year-old sniper Brenda Spencer; the Manson girls skipping and singing on their way to the courtroom; the excavation of human offal from Corll’s mass graves; Kenneth Bianchi cruising through photos of his victims, fingering the “broads” he’d killed; Ted Bundy hectoring the bailiff in a Miami courtroom: “I’ll rain on your parade, Jack. You’ll see a thunderstorm.” Tere’s no way to “add up” the jumble of numbers
neither/nor
that the film pummels you with in the course of its 89 minutes—“100 million guns by 1970,” “Five women and two children,” “900 Americans,” “an IQ of 138,” “Twice in the back of the head”—any more than it’s possible to make sense of the arbitrary nature of the violent episodes described, though in its call for stricter gun laws, the film is nothing if not coherent, and prescient.
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