What it is

The Drive In Reviews website is primarily concerned with the cinematic phenomenon of the “quality kill”; that moment in a movie when a death is filmed in such a way that the moment transcends its context and becomes an event unto itself. The phenomenon is fueled to a large extent by technology. We now have the ability to not only reproduce any hideous disaster we might imagine but we can do it in slow motion and dwell endlessly on any aspect we deem entertaining. Ironically, in the never ending quest for action and thrills, filmmakers have set themselves a pace that does not often allow for leisurely cinematic exploration or even good exploitation. So while the mayhem, murder and violent acts have escalated in our films, they have themselves become the victims of our endless search for excitement. They happen but they happen so fast and so relentlessly that we no longer notice or care.

A Quality Kill is the exception. The filmmaker, for whatever reasons, has decided to dwell on a single lethal act and has brought to bear the technological resources and aesthetic vision to create a spectacular moment in the film, a moment that achieves such resonating power that it transcends the movie and becomes its own event. That power, however, is not exclusively the work of technology. The quality kill in Andy Warhol’s Bad achieves its distinction through sheer intellectual repulsion. It could not be more unacceptable and our moral sensibilities could not be more offended as we watch a young mother throw her screaming baby out a high rise window, the camera following its plunge to the pavement where it splatters, getting sniffed by a stray dog looking for a decent meal. And yet, somehow, the infant-killing mother, in less than 30 seconds, has managed to lay some claim on our sympathies. Our righteous outrage is mitigated and our emotional response suddenly confused and disturbing. Klaus Kinski offers us the death of Nosferatu with nothing more than a few well timed twitches and not so much as a disintegrating corpse. At the end he just lies there dead. But somehow its…yes, it’s awesome.

The quality kills in the Museum are some of my personal favorites and are by no means intended to represent anything other than some of my personal favorites.

Buzz Kilman