Kill Katie Malone (2011)
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Starring Masiela Lusha, Stephen Colletti, Lil J, Dean Cain, Nick Hogan
Directed by Carlos Ramos, Jr.
Kill Katie Malone is one of those not very good, not very bad horror movies that’s really only good for a few (mostly unintentional) laughs. If you’re looking to be scared, you’ve picked the wrong movie. It very much plays like the kind of cornball teen horror flicks direct-to-video outfits like Trimark and New Republic Pictures released on a regular basis back in the early to mid-Nineties. If not for a few references to modern technology, this could pass as a holdover from that era. It’s no Amityville 1992: It’s About Time, but it is certainly cut from the same wheel of cheese.
A clique of photogenic college friends come across a listing on eBay for a ghost in a box. Jim gets the rest of his close-knit group to help chip in and buy it for him as a lark. The box arrives. He opens the box. The spirit of an abused 18th century Irish immigrant girl named Katie Malone begins killing them.
The moral of the story is never buy anything from Dean Cain. The ex-Superman cameos as the previous owner of the box, and his character knows first-hand the bad things that can happen when you’re the de facto owner of an Irish slave girl’s angry spirit. By selling it on eBay, he has more or less resold the girl into servitude to this college dude. She’s not a very obedient slave, that’s for sure.
The other moral of the story is to always listen to the Goth chick. She knows what’s what when it comes to dealing with matters of the paranormal. All that dark clothing and black make-up isn’t just for show, ya know?
Katie Malone’s motivations puzzled me a few times. She’s a homicidal, schizophrenic, yet family-oriented ghost, if that makes any sense. I did fully understand why she supernaturally disintegrated Hulk Hogan’s punk son, Nick – who wouldn’t want to do that?
It’s the little moments of silliness that count in a movie such as this. When the ghost crashes a Halloween party and partygoers begin getting randomly tossed up in the air; when the girlfriend gets bodysurfed down the hallway by the ghost; when the screen goes black for several minutes and we can only hear what’s going on outside of a few sporadic flickers of a lighter, those are the moments that break up the monotony of what is, otherwise, a rather mundane movie that very much needed a tighter script.
This is also one instance where an R-rated movie should have been PG-13. Very little blood, no nudity, and tweeners are obviously the target audience; you’d think the producers or distributors would have insisted on a PG-13 release. Kill Katie Malone is about as tame an R-rated horror movie as you’ll ever see these days.
SPOILER TIME!
How do you get rid of a murderous ghost-in-a-box you bought off of eBay? Sell it back on eBay to some other poor soul, of course. You almost have to admire a movie whose finale has the audacity to try to mine suspense from having the lead character race against time to quickly sell this evil spirit on eBay to someone else before it kills his remaining friends, only to have the buyer’s credit card get rejected. The horror! How many lives were lost because of one man’s stubborn refusal to use Paypal?
2 out of 5
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