'Killers'

Japanese-Indonesian co-production "Killers" starts off all too predictably for a torture-porn film. We get about a minute's worth of a nude young woman shagging an unseen male, then once she's been sufficiently eroticized, we see her tied to a chair, suffocating inside a plastic bag as a masked sadist delivers the "money shot," splitting open her skull with a hammer.

"Killers" attempts to be something more than just another grisly quasi-snuff flick. It contrasts the above thrill-killer Nomura (Kazuki Kitamura) — a Tokyo pretty-boy who seduces women and then uploads videos of their gruesome murders — with a crusading Indonesian journalist, Bayu (Oka Antara), who murders in self-defense and then develops a taste for vigilante killing, which he also videos; the two eventually cross paths online.

Perhaps there's a statement here about murders we feel are justified versus ones that we don't, but I'm sorry to say that I had to bail at the 30-minute mark. After watching another young woman forced to fellate a baseball bat which is then rammed through the back of her skull, followed by Nomura gnawing on bloody sashimi of her flesh, the urge to puke was overwhelming. Distributor Nikkatsu bills this as "entertainment," but anyone who views it as such should probably seek psychiatric help.