Sexykiller (5 Stars)

I have a large collection of DVDs and Blu-rays. It's slightly above 2000 films. 748 Blu-rays and about 1500 DVDs. I keep a list in an Excel spreadsheet, but I can't tell you the exact number of DVDs because of a stupid blunder. Every few years I clean out my collection, giving away the films I no longer want, but I don't delete them from my spreadsheet. Silly me. I keep telling myself I ought to go through my list and put it right, but it would take me a whole day in which I could be doing better things... like watching more films.

I don't have an unlimited budget, so my purchases are planned. I try to avoid buying films that I'll want to give away later. I buy films from the following categories:

1. Films that I've seen and enjoyed in the cinema.

2. Films that I wanted to see in the cinema but weren't shown.

3. Films strongly recommended by friends.

4. Films that seem good based on trailers.

In my early years of buying DVDs, 2003 to 2010, I often made random purchases. I looked through the racks in shops and picked up films that looked interesting. That was silly. There were a lot of turkeys among them, but you won't know what they are, because those were the ancient days before I wrote my blog. I avoid random purchases now, with one exception:

There's a big entertainment store called Saturn opposite my regular cinema. If I arrive too early for a film I visit Saturn's film department. I don't look at the regular releases, I rummage in the bargain bin. I tell myself that if a Blu-ray costs less than five Euros it's worth the money to watch it once and throw it away. Sometimes I find real gems in the bargain bin, such as films by Fred Olen Ray or his son Christopher. Other times I buy a film purely at random. The usual price is five Euros each or three for ten Euros, so after picking two that I want I get a third free.

That's where "Sexykiller" comes in. I pulled it out of Saturn's bargain bin months ago. I don't know exactly when. It was at least six months ago, probably longer. Despite the cover attracting my attention, I was in no hurry to watch it. I had more important films to watch, such as my top 100 countdown. I didn't forget it. Films that I buy and haven't watched yet are placed on a shelf next to my computer, so I see them every day.

This is the cover of the "Sexykiller" Blu-ray box. You can probably guess why it appealed to me when I saw it in the bargain bin. Today I pulled it off my shelf. Wow! If I'd known it was so good, I wouldn't have waited so long.

The film actually has two stories which run in parallel. The first story is about a teenage girl called Barbara who's studying medicine. She doesn't intend to graduate. She's only there to find a rich husband, and she'll drop out as soon as she finds one. Her hobby is killing. Every girl needs a hobby. She slaughters men and women in and around the campus. We only see about a dozen murders – I started to count, but I gave up – but we're told that she's killed about 30 people. The police don't treat her as a suspect, because they assume that only a man could have committed such violent crimes.

The second story is about Alex, a forensic scientist at the university hospital. He's invented a device that projects the images of memories onto a computer screen. This works perfectly while a person is still alive, but it can also show the images from the brains of dead people, though it's only reliable shortly after death, while the brain is still warm. Despite the lack of previous testing, it's used on the victims of the campus killer, and there's an unwanted side effect: the dead people come back to life as flesh-eating zombies.

The two stories are also connected by a romance between Barbara and Alex. It's a romance based on a misunderstanding. Alex tells Barbara how many bodies he's cut up this year, so she assumes he's a serial killer like her. She doesn't realise that he's only been examining corpses for the police.

It's not just about the story. The film's style makes it a masterpiece. Loud music breaks out at random, usually at inappropriate points in the film. Barbara frequently talks to the viewer, explaining her thoughts while she's killing someone, trying to win the audience's sympathy. Overall, the film is brilliant. That's the only word to describe it.

I should dig through Saturn's bargain bin more often.

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