The Killing of America, a US-Japanese production shot on location (primarily) in Los Angeles, is a bit of a crime oddity that purports to be a hard, no-holds barred chronicle of America's evolution into a violent, ugly culture, although the filmmakers shoot themselves in the feet by postulating how everything in the U.S. was perfectly fine and headed for a grand Liberal future until Lee Harvey Oswald and an accomplice blew apart John F. Kennedy's head – footage the filmmakers play in slow, ghoulish detail to maximize the symbol of what America lost.

Afterwards, there's a rapid series of brutalities catalogued up to 1982 (the film's production date) which collectively signal the country's slide to a land where private citizens go bonkers and shoot, maim, kidnap, rape, torture, and murder ever-so-slowly neighbours and completely innocent strangers to glorify their egos, and achieve stardom outside of the Hollywood system, and achieve some historical infamy by exacting the worst level of human degradation until the next evolutionary successor further pushes the envelope.

Produced by and co-written by Leonard Schrader (with wife Chieko Schrader), Killing seems to come from an earnest concept of showing a progression of cultural violence and self-destructive behaviour via authentic newsreel footage, audiotapes, and interviews; and with minimal narration, creating a document that leaves nothing to the imagination.

Directed by writer/documentarian/industrial filmmaker Sheldon Renan, the film opens with police shooting and killing a man named Sam Brown as he quietly raises the gun he's been using to pick off innocent drivers and passersby. The mindlessness of his actions - which the doomed killer attributes to interstellar influences – introduce the film's key motif of individuals and paired murderers who simply snap or become involved in desperate situations that, for the most part, don't end well for the perpetrators and victims.

A catalogue of murderers follows, and thematically the doc moves from the distanced, clinical killings of frequently suicidal snipers to more hands-on killers who indulge in vengeful physical metaphors – Ed Kemper exacting hatred for his mother and women on college girls & their severed body parts – and sexual torture, as with Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Wayne Henley.

What sets the doc apart from other efforts that chronicle the evolution of murderers as cultural and media-hungry personalities is the graphic material that's used to emphasize the ugliness of this modern trend: wide-lensed but gory autopsy footage, crime scene snapshots of murder victims (nude, bloodied, and humiliated) and perpetrators (alive, and bullet-riddled after a police assault); collectively they're probably the key reason why the film hasn't been broadcast on TV and remains officially unavailable on video in North America as of this writing.

Images of gore also pop up in clusters, including the infamous Vietnam newsreel execution of a man (here showcased in colour, as the man dies on the ground with a red geyser gushing from his head onto the street), and various crime scene shots of assorted head trauma (the most grisly and surreal being an apparent self-inflicted gunshot to the head, parting the cranium in half like a peeled banana).

The newsreel material – much of it from local stations – is admittedly fascinating for its raw, ‘live' preservation of men gone cuckoo. Most pungent is a magnum-wielding guy who takes the crew of a local TV station hostage and maintains a disturbing nonchalance and bravado during a live interview until he admits to killing his longtime girlfriend. Then the coffee cup is lowered, the impact of his insanity starts to sink in, and he orders the camera switched off so he can wait for the police to storm the building.

The final outcome is somewhat different than what he had planned, but the archival footage captures a disturbed and desperate man that wanted to be immortalized as a kind of folk hero. Ultimately, he became a new hybrid that, as the recent Virginia Tech massacre evidences, continues today: a killer who's cognizant of the media's power to reach the masses (via contemporary enhancements like cellphones, videotaped messages, and the knowledge that somebody will air footage because that's what draws viewers, delivers ratings, and guarantees attention).

Just as surreal is a pissed-off bar owner who takes his moneylender hostage, and wires himself to his victim and the shotgun trigger, in case either component is separated by police intervention. After three days, the trio end up surrounded in what appears to be a government office, where the victim is forced to read an itemized rant, after which the kidnapper thanks the few who've vocalized their support, along with next-of kin. Unfolding like a Best Actor speech, it's a bizarre transposition that effectively emphasizes what such an event can offer a deranged loon: a forum to vent and interact with fans on a national scale.

The resolution of that hostage taking ends up being a kind of non-event, and perhaps illustrates the doc's key problem: amid all the fascinating archival materials and interviews – vintage footage of Sirhan Sirhan, Ted Bundy in court, massive Ed Kemper in his jail cell articulating the stressors that turned him into a serial killer, and audiotape of Reverend Jim Jones urging his flock to consume cyanide-laced Kool-Aid at gunpoint – the doc lacks a decisive point.

Although valid to their thesis of America's self-destructive slide, the lengthy opening segment on JFK's assassination and the closing segment on John Lennon's death with NYC mourners are manipulative efforts to lard what's basically another graphic entry in the exploitive mondo genre.

The bookends cheaply trigger pre-experienced and preserved personal memories among specific viewers, and attempts to affix meaning to the film's inconclusive statement; and the final caption before the end credits - “While you watched this movie, five of us were murdered. One was the random killing of a stranger” – may have been intended as a minimalist epilogue, but it's no different than the related factoids mondo filmmakers slapped over their films to mask their exploitive productions as documents of note.

Moreover, serial killers, sexual crimes, assassins and gunplay captured by early media outlets existed prior to JFK's assassination, so the suggestion that all present-day ills began in 1963 is absurd. While serial killers and assassinations are feted and integrated into pop culture more avidly in America is apparent in the steady stream of documentaries, books, films, and cheap ephemera (like trading cards); but there are other kinds of crimes, obsessions, repressions, and cultural warts that uniquely affect other countries. The American media just knows how to spin their own shockers into entertainment, though it's no longer the only country capable of exploiting its own issues into provocative films.

As a document of what's become commonplace, Killing totally succeeds, but the filmmakers make no effort to find any solution to the problem, nor allow for any hope. Life is cheap, you may be next, and it's gonna get worse is the governing view. If Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Jeffrey Dahmer are added to the doc's grotesque tally, the filmmaker's nihilistic statement manages to resonate, and chillingly.

Aside from his participating in The Killing of America, Leonard Schrader also directed Naked Tango, and was involved in the stories and/or screenplays for The Yakuza, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and brother Paul Schrader's Mishima. Incredibly, director Sheldon Renan later wrote the script for Lambada!

For another take on this film and this British DVD release, check out this assessment at DVD Maniacs.

© 2007 Mark R. Hasan