Spend twenty minutes on the Internet and you can find a video entailing just about anything the imagination can come up with, with a few exceptions of course. One of those exceptions involves yours truly singing the national anthem with a mouth full of bugs, and another involves serial murders. Distribution company Well Go USA is trying to change the latter of those, as they’ve acquired the North American rights to the Indonesian horror thriller Killers from the devious Mo Brothers, Timo Tjahjanto and Kimo Stamboel.
Killers, the directors’ first full feature since the bloodstorm that was 2009’s Macabre, had its world premiere recently as a Sundance Midnight feature, proving the duo are capable of weaving tense drama and suspense into their hyper-violent narrative. The story is split between two men: Bayu (Oka Antara) is a struggling journalist who uploads a video of his fatal form of self-defense, only to have it attract the attention of Nomura (Kazuki Kitamura), a Japanese killer who aims to suss out Bayu’s inner demons for more extreme murderous performances. The two then play a one-upping form of cat and mouse that eventually pits them against each other, which will no doubt make people think of Kim Jee-Woon’s excellent thriller I Saw the Devil.
While this isn’t the kind of film that is always immediately picked up for a theatrical U.S. release, Killers was executive produced by The Raid: Redemption director Gareth Evans, who worked with Tjahjanto for their masterful co-directed short "Safe Haven" in the horror anthology V/H/S/2. Tjahjanto also directed the "L is for Libido" segment in The ABCs of Death, and will work with Evans again for the thriller The Night Comes for Us, which RADiUS-TWC preemptively picked up a couple of weeks ago.
According to TheWrap , Well Go USA plans on giving Killers a theatrical run in the fourth quarter of 2014, which makes sense as this isn’t exactly sunny summer material. Another international horror film, Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead, was also picked up recently by Well Go USA, and will see a February release. Hopefully these films will be successful enough to continue bringing these kinds of films into theaters, instead of just shoddily packaged Blu-rays and DVDs.
Check out the English-dubbed trailer below, which may possibly gear you up properly for the extremely NSFW trailer on the bottom, but it probably won’t.
