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GothKill
[Wild Eye]
2009; color
Directed by JJ Connelly
Starring: Flambeaux, Erica Giovinazzo, Eve Blackwater, Julie Saad, Michael Day, Anastasia Andino, Tom "Misfit" Velez & Mistress Juliya
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Shot with a minimum of cameras and a minimum of sets, GothKill manages to tell a relatively original story and deliver a few buckets of blood on the side. The story centers on one Nick Dread, a medieval Catholic priest and inquisitor who turns on the Church after learning all it's really after is the land and money of the supposed witches it roots out rather than the genuine followers of Satan they're supposedly trying to suppress. He gets burned at the stake for his heresy and, as he's dying, makes a pact with the Devil. All he's gotta do is personally dispatch 100,000 corrupt souls and he gets to reign over them in his own little private corner of Hell. Unfortunately, after he hits the 100K mark a few hundred years later and is hung in a New York City prison for his final 40 or 50 murders (in a scene which totally made me think of Hans Moleman questioning the legality of his imminent execution in the Springfield jail), he finds himself tricked by Beelzebub and reigning over a whole lotta nothing in a big empty room. Back in the land of the living, AKA Manhattan, his girlfriend dies rather suddenly and accidentally as she's on the way to finding a new body for Nick's soul to come back and inhabit. The Satanic prayer book she's carrying is grabbed by a homeless guy and it looks like all is lost. Until we meet Annie and Kate. Annie is an innocent 19 year old who's just moved to NYC and is living with her best friend, Kate. Kate's been in the city for a while, is substantially hipper than her pal, and also way into the Goth scene. As she's taking Annie around to buy cool clothes, she gets slipped an invite to a private club event held by the mysterious Scorpion Society, a group of uber-hip and cool uber-Goths and "vampires." That night, as they party with the 'cool kids,' they're introduced to the Society's leader, Lord Walechia. (Who looks like a Goth Pagliacci.) Walechia holds an initiation ceremony for the two, and both girls get slipped Mickeys. While Kate is unconscious and strapped to a chair, Annie is laid out on an altar and Walechia and a handful of his followers recite a chant from the previously mentioned Satanic prayer book (Which he happened to have bought from a street vendor.) Little do they know they book and their chant are the real deal and, before they can say 'nightclub full of slaughtered Goths,' Nick Dread is back from the dead (in Annie's body) and racking up a body count at an unbelievably rapid rate. In the end, he not only spares Kate, but relinquishes control over Annie's body so both girls survive. And what does he get in return? A kingdom of corrupt souls to rule over and torture for eternity. So everybody ends up happy. Except, of course, the unlucky club-goers who got slaughtered. While GothKill might not be the next House Of A Thousand Corpses, or even the next Frog-g-g, it's probably the kind of film Andy Milligan would make today if he was just getting his feet wet in the film industry; and that ain't bad at all.
—the Kommandant
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