A sexy killer indeed

Sexykiller is a lurid foray into gore, fashion and one woman’s agenda for reckless murder. Oftentimes over the top, director Miguel Marta has created a campy, irreverent world where death is delivered with style, in a senseless, yet calculated, manner.

The mood was festive at the Ryerson Theatre, where the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness program attracted students and refined movie-goers alike to the promise of blood and comedy, on Friday, Sept. 12. Marta and his lethal leading lady, Macarena Gomez, were both present at the world premier of Sexykiller on Ryerson’s campus. Gomez looked classy and sleek, and less like a killer than her on-screen persona, until she pulled a mock gun on her director and asked with playful flair, “Shall I do it?”

Sexykiller follows the reckless rampage of Barbara (Gomez), a Barbie-inspired Latin beauty who gets off on hacking heads at a medical campus in Spain, and then harbours the remains in her refrigerator. Her desire for revenge is insatiable, spurred by anything from unsatisfactory sex with a partner whose cock barely penetrates, to the unlucky woman who purchases the red dress she has her eye on.

You have to hand it to her, Barbara knows what she wants, and she goes for it. Mixing death and pleasure is her forte, in a field of expertise where women aren’t expected to wield a knife. In fact, the disbelief is raised by some of her male victims. But Barbara has no time for sexist attitudes. She declares to the shaking young man she means to kill, “You know what the problem with the world of serial killers is? Too much male chauvinism.”
She kills her victims with as much skill and precision as she dedicates to her beauty regime and accessories, and with deadly results. Using sexuality as another foolproof weapon in her arsenal, she litters the university with corpses, and takes the time to describe her precise chilling techniques to the audience with cooking show finesse. During a particularly educational segment she explains to the viewer that the three basic tools of murder occupy every household kitchen: masking tape, a handkerchief and a plastic bag. Watching her next victim hop hysterically around her apartment, blindfolded and suffocating inside plastic, it’s easy to appreciate the humour of the stylish and inventive murders that dispatch those who piss her off. The slaying spree thrives until Barbara falls hard for Tomas (played by Cesar Camino), a student who cuts up cadavers and invents a method for witnessing the final moments of the dead. She mistakes his penchant for blood as akin to her own, and gets wet at the thought of a kindred spirit in crime. But when Tomas discovers that the campus killer the authorities have been hunting down is his lover, and Barbara discovers he’s not a murderer after all, their twisted tryst ends. For Barbara, being tied down to a man would terminate her opportunities to tie down and mutilate others. And that isn’t about to happen any time soon.

Barbara isn’t your stereotypical horror flick female evildoer. She isn’t possessed and tied to a bed, or some demon who devours children in the dark, or some cursed woman crawling in a crablike manner down the stairs making unnerving creaking noises. Barbara stirs shit up, and those who stand in her way, whether they deserve it or not, are punished. Whether it’s death by stiletto or a being strung up by your ribcage, the merciless mamacita of this gag-filled comedy turns murder into a fatal fashion statement.

*Featured in Mutedmag.com