Some Guy Who Kills People

Family drama, romance and horror comedy collide in this odd, but perfectly watchable, feature from the director of Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus.

Superbad's Kevin Corrigan stars as Ken Boyd, a survivor of traumatic teenage bullying which eventually sent him into a psychiatric hospital. He's just adjusting to life in small town Green Oaks, and working at a fast food restaurant, when his long-lost daughter Amy (Ariel Gade) walks into his life, fleeing from her fundamentalist mother and new stepfather. She's 11 and incredibly precocious, but she's also incredibly supportive – giving Ken advice and encouragement about his wannabe-romance with English divorcee Lucy Davis (AKA Dawn from the British series of The Office).

But Ken is also a suspect in some recent murders. Several of his former high school contemporaries, are now being slaughtered in gruesome ways. However, with a bumbling, shambolic sheriff (Barry Bostwick) leading the investigations, and a lack of real evidence pointing to a killer, there are going to be a lot of these corpses, and a lot of blood spilt, before the murderer's identity is revealed.

Perhaps encouraged by the cult success of Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, director Jack Perez has attracted a pretty good cast here. Seventies survivors Bostwick and the wonderful Karen Black (who plays Ken's mother) light up their scenes with a humour of almost neon-like ferocity, whilst Lucy Davis brings something earthy and poignant to her otherwise sketchy love interest role. Kevin Corrigan holds it all together with a brooding, anxious performance.

Elsewhere, the film pinballs between tones and emotions before reaching, in spite of itself, a surprisingly satisfying conclusion. It doesn't quite hang together until this final act, thanks to some pretty clumsy plotting and some oddly judged black humour (which in itself is funny, but is ultimately not entirely in keeping with the rest of the film).

Perhaps biting off a little more than it can chew, this is subsequently a mixed bag, but it's worth it for Bostwick, Black and Davis and for an unusual mixture of themes and approach to the revenge horror .