Fantom Killer (1998)

The Age of Commercialism

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Take a string of beautiful Polish women, all more than willing to go nude for their first film appearance; take the killer from Mario Bava's giallo masterpiece BLOOD AND BLACK LACE; take one amateur film-maker with aspirations to be Dario Argento and what you have is Roman Nowicki's abysmally bad FANTOM KILER. Never has a film been more offensive than this misogynistic rubbish, plot less drivel which is basically an excuse to showcase copious amounts of naked female flesh and indulge in Nowicki's perverse imaginings. Whilst the female cast members are undoubtedly attractive (obviously picked for their looks) none of them can act and their lack of skill shows throughout. The men are even worse, badly playing up stale caricatures of janitors and policemen. When half of the film's scenes consist of two such janitors imaging the women who pass through a railway station in the nude you know the people who made this are desperately reaching for ideas.Supposedly "artistic" direction consists of too many closeups of eyeballs, a laughable phone flying out of one in one bad dream scene, lots of wiggling cameras, and an overload of predictable music to accompany the action. The murders are all depraved (and ALL require the female victim to lose her clothing) but the fake gore effects - little more than a few splashes of fake blood - counter any real horror which might have come from them. The average murder lasts for about twenty minutes (!) so there's no room for any plot in between - just a couple of scenes of policemen discussing the murders. And the Polish humour which proliferates this movie - including some bizarre antics involving a wooden spoon - is definitely something that doesn't translate well to a foreign audience. Incredibly, many sequels followed, which disturbingly shows that there is a market somewhere for this garbage and somebody actually gets a kick from this trash. All discerning fans should avoid it like the plague.

Alright first off this film seemed to try and accomplish everything, humor, gore,and sex/nudity. However ultimately it only achieves one of it's goals and not very well. First off cause I know this is what you want to know, yes it's technically porn as a woman gets sodomized by a spoon and it's shown up close. I don't believe there was any actual penetration, although there could have been as this film goes back and forth to this sort of acid trip cheap look ,where it's difficult to make things out. The girls in Fantom Kiler are definitely good looking, and you see them in all there glory, but really there wasn't any overly hot scene to make this worth seeking out. This film boasts an annoying performance by a guy dressed as Charlie Chaplin, who nobody would want to see having sex, and wasn't funny for a second. This is no giallo, and the horror is really as tedious and inept as it comes. Fantom Kiler's ultimate sin, is teasing a lesbian scene between two beautiful women, and not following through with it. Therefore I have to rate this film a below average four, which it only gets for a couple good looking women. Stick with Seduction Cinema for your soft core fix, or rent an actual hardcore porn, that doesn't try to slap on a crappy stalker storyline that doesn't fit the film.

Good old Trevor Barley (hiding behind an alias, Roman Nowicki). Clearly spotting a gap in the market, he made this, an erotic horror about a serial killer murdering young women. Even though it was all made in the UK, fearing the authorities, Barley set it in Poland and hired Polish/Russian actresses who speak in their native tongue in the film, thus it's dubbed and looks like it comes from Poland. Clever!Anyway, the film itself is pretty unremarkable and technically inept - the killings are mysogny to a whole new level with buxom babes being stripped completely before being killed in cruel and unusual ways (one is raped by a knife!).How anyone can compare this to the works of Fulci or other great Italian directors is beyond me - this is a very cheap and nasty film that is only passable as entertainment and just not that shocking. The ideas certainly are, by the way its made dilutes it so much that you end just watching the screen for the sake of it.Best to borrow a friend's copy first and see what you think - you may enjoy it, but you may not. I for one, didn't really; it was viewable but could have been so much more with a little more time, effort and money.

SPOILERS INCLUDEDA nerdish, would be homage to the Italian giallo genre, with its titular killer modelled on that of Blood and Black Lace's. Fantom Kiler is less interesting as a film, and more for the farcical, labyrinthine manner the filmmakers have gone to protect their identities, and nationalities.Purporting to be from Poland, Fantom Kiler was actually made anonymously in Britain by a fringe figure in the underground horror scene who runs a small mail order business from where he clandestinely sells the film and its virtually identical two sequels. Embarrassment, or more likely worry over censor and legal ramifications, has caused director 'Roman Nowicki' to disguise the real locale by shooting the film on phoney sets adorned with signs written in Polish, having the dialogue dubbed (badly) into Russian, and then subtitling everything back into its native English. Even so- do people in Poland really drive around in cars with British number plates? And quite what Poland has done to deserve being associated with a film like this remains to be seen.The minimal plot concerns a series of killings that plague a small Polish village; the victims are all pretty women whose good looks and prima donna attitudes have offended the moronic, knuckle dragging male locals. With no clues to be found at the crime scenes the killer appears to be a supernatural figure that resurfaces every so many years. All this is explained to us via two nobody actors playing policemen (with a stunning lack of conviction) who chance upon naked dead bodies and offer crass commentary along the lines of 'she certainly left this world with more holes in her than when she arrived'. These scenes are brief and throwaway by nature, acting as little more than a hook to hang protracted scenes of starlets wandering around dry ice filled woodland sets and being stalked by the mysterious Fantom Kiler. By the time the women end up in the clutches of this masked murderer they've also ended up in a state of undress having lost their clothes to prickly bushes, doffed their tops in order to fix a fan belt, while in a surely unintentional homage to Lindsay Honey's video-era porno-horror film Death Shock one girl's encounter with a fence provides another clothes shredding excuse. Judging by his below the belt fixations director Nowicki appears to have a simultaneous career in the UK sex industry. As indeed do many of his female stars, ID's for low-level video porn actresses in their identical baby-oiled bodies and breast implants. Tellingly all these actresses also sport looks on their faces that suggest they wished they'd stuck to the day job. The gore effects in the film are minor, as if the budget couldn't stretch beyond spraying the actresses with a few bottles of Kensington Gore, but the killings are appalling nonetheless. In a dubious bit of psychology the victims are more aroused then terrified by the killer, rubbing their naked bodies up and down him like lap-dancers while he whispers sweet nothings in their ears about how they are about to be punished. For these scenarios butchery committed by knives, drills and a broom handle acts (often quite literally) as a substitute for hardcore scenes. Any semblance to credibility and logic goes the same way as the actresses' clothes when the film suggests a woman might receive a sexual thrill out of being stabbed in-between the legs. Fantom Kiler would no doubt leave a bad taste in the mouth were it not so thoroughly dull and repetitious. As it is, constantly portraying women as bimbos or cold hearted tarts as well as offering a mouthpiece to sexist red-herring male characters tends to just come across as a desperate, attention grabbing way of courting controversy. Well meaning as many commentators seem in calling the film offensive and misogynistic, a line of thought suggests that by using the voice of outrage they're only falling into the trap of helping the filmmakers build up the film's myth. A myth that in no way the film deserves. Seemingly oblivious to the assembly line nature of endlessly trotting out female victims and sexually mutilating them a few moments later, Nowicki fails to inject much personality into the proceedings. He tries to compensate with an over indulgence for pop-video techniques; no shot it seems is really complete without being tarted up by optical trickery. The overall effect is simply numbing, leaving many scenes needlessly incomprehensible, while any potentially suspenseful or nasty moments tend to also get sabotaged by this flashy approach. Not the greatest of diagnosis for a film centred entirely around chases through the woods and ugly shock value.A sub-plot involving a Benny Hill type imbecile caretaker fantasising about how various women would look without any clothes on, does provide some quirky moments, but -in case you're becoming curious- not remotely enough to make this worth watching.