Wow! Such a good movie.

Too much of everything

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

If you have any perception of "Fantom Kiler" being a sexually explicit slasher movie, then think again. What we have here is 82 minutes of cheap home made pornography.There's no plot to speak of, just a succession of naked ladies. The entire thing is filmed as one massive masturbation fantasy. The few male roles are comedy toilet cleaners and police officers, who are dubbed with an audio quality that doesn't sound anything like the rest of the film's soundtrack! Oh yes, and the murders are fixated on the vagina and the anus. I can imagine the director getting into a froth of excitement over each drawn out scene of chase, stripping and sexually related death (all the women are directed to act as though sexually aroused during their murders). There are a total of 4 sets - an office, a lobby, a bedroom and a forest (which looks to be about 5 meters square and indoors). All the women in the film become naked and oiled up (?), sometimes within mere seconds of appearing on the screen. And there are plenty of extremely explicit close ups. Some of the film is based around two toilet cleaners who imagine what all the women who pass by would look like naked...cue lots of footage of women naked. We also spend nearly 15 minutes watching one of the cleaners stick a wooden spoon up some girl's butt.Take it from me, "Fantom Kiler" is pornography, nothing more. It's also not even Polish (which is what it's trying to look like, but they can't even do that convincingly). It's a film about naked women...everything else is an afterthought, in fact it's practically a waste of time trying to review it in the horror/thriller genre at all.

Fantom Kiler is a shot-on-video wanna-be modern Giallo where the storyline revolves around your stereotypical Giallo-type killer (black hat, trenchcoat, black leather gloves and mask) who stalks young sluts, stabs them numerous times and then vaginally mutilates them with a knife. Sounds great huh? All things considered it's an OK film - pretty low budget but it still looks decent compared to some of the other SOV films i've seen. There's LOTS of explicit (verging on hardcore) nudity and vag stabbin' which when coupled with an overall misogynistic attitude in general makes for some entertaining sleaze. A sub-plot involving a comedic relief team made up of a goofy slacker janitor (complete with fake mustache) and his equally lazy co-worker who work at the train station, hanging out leaning on their mops imagining what the women who walk by would look like naked. One scene involves the main janitor getting in a hot young assistant cleaner, one day out of the blue the young lady gets very aroused and asks him to force a wooden spoon deep into her @sshole handle first and then says she wants him to re-enact the King Arthur & Excalibur story and to try and wrench the spoon from her tight ass, it takes him a while he gets it out eventually. After a while it seems apparent that the janitor is the killer, as in one scene the killer f!cks one of the victims in the ass with a wooden mop handle and the janitor reads about the murders in the paper mumbling about how they got what they deserved.Some scenes are blackly humorous in the totally over the top and immoral way the women are treated: the killing scenes are deliberately over-long, as the camera lingers pornographically on the scenes of brutal multiple stabbings, vaginal impalement's and knife rape (although there's actually very little graphic gore on screen, just plenty of blood). As the killer doesn't actually penetrate his victims in the usual way, the kill scenes could almost be considered the money shots. Sometimes the victim even gets off on the assault and subsequent knife-f!cking (the ultimate orgasm the killer calls it), reaching her climax as she dies. The female stars all look like second rate porn stars, with fake tits, well oiled bodies and bad acting.A myth surrounding the film is that it is Polish and directed by one Roman Nowicki. In reality the film was shot in a warehouse in London, and then edited at home on his PC by Trevor Barley (aka Roman Nowicki). He hired Polish & Russian models / porn stars to act in it, dubbed the film into a mixture of Russian and Polish language then subtitled it back to English. Supposedly the cause for the deception was due to the directors concerns regarding legal trouble and distribution / censorship problems in the UK. He has also directed Fantom Kiler 2 & 3 under the same pseudonym.This film completely fails as a Giallo. There's no suspense, convoluted storyline, or really any cinematic value at all.. but it does succeed in terms of pure exploitation and anti-PC offensiveness. 6/10

*SPOILER ALERT* *SPOILER ALERT* I bought this DVD. I was watching too many straight to video flicks and needed a real nasty movie to bring my exploitation movie senses back to life. "Fantom Kiler" did not disappoint me."Fantom Kiler" is all about killing women. Some guy in a white mask and a big hat stabs a lot of naked women to death. The end. There's some vague attempt at giving this movie a plot with two detectives searching for the killer. "What do we know about the victims? They're all dead." But "Fantom Kiler" is really not concerned with such trivial things as plot. This is about naked women dying horribly. Mostly it's about naked women.Where did they find these women? All of the victims in this movie have incredibly hard bodies. They get naked for no reason at all. Two janitors are staring at women coming off the train and keep imagining them naked. Therefore, they must get naked. If a women walks through the forest, her clothes fly off when a tree branch barely touches her. This movie excels in the nudity department."Fantom Kiler" is really not that violent. I'm not saying that to be a wiseguy. It's just that the violent scenes are filmed so ineptly that they don't have much of an impact. However, "Fantom Kiler" is outrageously sleazy. Naked women are stabbed in their various sexual organs with pure maniacal delight. As far as leering at naked murder victims, "Fantom Kiler" delivers the goods. If you're an exploitation movie fan, you should see this movie immediately.Sleaze rating: 10/10 Violence rating: 6/10

I can't imagine what the other reviewers were thinking. They're knocking a movie that is so very obviously meant to be violent porn, as if they were deceived by the cover showing a knife wielding slasher about to tear up a naked surgically-enhanced bimbo. Do you always look for nudity and cutlery on the covers of movies where you expect to see high drama? If you're looking for naked Polish chicks, not just naked but spread-eagled and panting naked, then this is it. If you want a little humor and a bit of slashing thrown in, hey, this movie has it. Let's not pretend we were expecting something else, you're not fooling anyone that way.In it's own way, this movie has flashes of genius. The scene where the athletic contest is all about a janitor attempting to pull a wooden spoon from the hindquarters of a naked woman. That's not an event you'll see on the Summer Olympics! He only has one minute, will be get that spoon out? You have to wonder.All the girls in this movie are naked, and that's a recommendation all by itself, to me anyway. I make no bones about it, when I'm watching a movie with a lurid cover like this I'm expecting to see some naked girls, and this film delivered. Who are these guys who pick up a movie like this and get offended by naked women? Who are these guys who get offended by naked women, period? Methinks thou doth protest too much.There is some serious wit at work here, too. The excuses for girls to strip down are so transparent, so utterly without basis, that you just have to admire it. I only wish that I, a poor pretender to such genius, could come up with such obvious and successful reasons for women to disrobe. I bow before the director who accomplishes this and makes it look easy.Is it degrading to women? Only if you want it to be. The women in this movie are so definitely having a good time, and so obviously enjoying their power to make men slobber and act like fools, that a good argument could be made that it's degrading to men. Don't bother arguing with me, though, because I like a little degradation. I'm proud to slobber foolishly at the altar of female beauty.Jess Franco made pretty much the same movie, many times, and he is acknowledged to be a great film maker. I submit that Trevor Barley/Roman Nowicki is just as good, if not better. Fantom Kiler is certainly more coherent and better filmed than many of Franco's movies, if lacking the abundant charms of Lina Romay.So if you're looking for a slasher flick with explicit nudity and some humorous situations, grab onto this, you won't be sorry.