By JAMES DAWSON
Front Row Features Film Critic
The vulgar, violent and sometimes just plain vile “Killer Joe” is so irresistibly nasty it’s finger-lickin’ bad. And that’s good.
A combination of white trash characters and vicious black humor puts this fitfully funny film noir somewhere between a depraved John Waters farce and a Coen brothers crime caper. In the first scene of this very wrong-side-of-the-tracks tale, 20-something loser Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) bangs on the door of a house trailer in the rain. When the door opens, he finds himself at eye level with the naked nether regions of his slutty stepmother Sharla Smith (a deliciously trampy Gina Gershon). When Chris turns away in disgust, Sharla blithely excuses her semi-nudity by saying she didn’t know he was the one knocking. (The rest of this story available only to frontrowfeatureswire.com subscribers. For subscription information, contact petergonzaga@gmail.com.)
