TRANSAMERICAN KILLER

Jamie confesses to her boyfriend that she has discovered she is a lesbian, but the boy beats her and forces her to run away from home. After many months, Jamie has rebuilt her life in Las Vegas, where she lives with her new girlfriend and works as a stripper in a nightclub; but soon a killer with the features of a trans person begins to kill the girls at the local where Jamie works. The idea behind "Switch Killer" is only one: to create a scandal! And the clumsy director and screenwriter Mack Hail thought of making a clumsy thriller/horror with strong erotic connotations that talks openly about homosexuality, in all its forms. The idea, which is certainly original, is however poorly exploited, because it manages to address the topic with a disarming superficiality that often ends in ridicule and focuses exclusively on nude scenes and murders. The psychological aspect of the story, which could have been easily addressed by a film with a similar plot, is immediately set aside and we immediately move on to highlighting the voyeuristic aspect of the story, with insistent long takes of female striptease and abundant shots of female anatomical parts that really leave nothing to the imagination. Setting aside Mack Hail's desire to direct a film for "Penthouse", we move on to the horror component, which focuses on the numerous and bloody murders and the grand guignol ending that features a loud chainsaw. Incredibly successful and really impressive is the aesthetic representation of the killer, who appears as a sort of Marilyn Manson with a suave and wicked voice, played by the debutant Eric Bishop. The entire production of "Switch Killer" is clearly of very low level, due to an underexposed photography, a crude and incompetent direction and an overall very poor acting. To all this is added a really ridiculous duration (1 hour and 10 minutes) that keeps "Switch Killer" just within the limits of a feature film, in fact, the meager duration seems to have been forcibly achieved thanks to an unnecessary and annoying sequence of images inserted at the end that summarize what had been shown during the film, a device clearly used to allow the film to win the label of feature film. Despite the incommensurable ugliness of the film in question, "Switch Killer" is not entirely bad, in fact it is quite entertaining and capable of giving some goliardic shouts of enthusiasm on the part of the spectator fan of the sex & gore combination. Curiosity. It is amusing to note how "Switch Killer", produced in 2005, manages in one sequence to anticipate an event that occurred here in Italy last October: the trans killer enters the women's bathroom of a public place, but is brusquely reprimanded and attacked by a woman who catches him in the act of relieving himself. This sequence cannot but make the spectator smile, reminding him of the scandal that occurred in a bathroom of the Parliament and that had as protagonists two well-known parliamentarians, familiar faces in the world of show business and belonging to opposing political factions.