A Brilliant Conflict

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

"Kill Slade" is an obscure late '80s South-African action/trash flick that practically nobody has ever seen, or at least I assume so because mine is the first and only user-comment on IMDb. This either means that it's a worthless piece of rubbish that doesn't deserve to be available on DVD, or that I accidentally stumbled upon a genuine undiscovered gem! During the first 10-15 minutes, and particularly during the opening sequence, I actually started hoping that the latter was really the case! Somewhere in a dark and secret hangar, a photographer is taking shots of a variety of illegal activities when suddenly a criminal sleazebag (Danny Keogh) sneaks up behind him and slits his throat. This scene is quite brutal and shocking, so for a moment there I was wondering why "Kill Slade" is so unknown. The film remains fairly intriguing for another ten minutes, as it turns out that the murdered photographer was the partner of the ambitious journalist J.J and she's working on a controversial report about fraudulent business within the United Nations food-aid and charity collecting. The killer – Flannigan – asks his dumb pal Slade to kidnap J.J. and keep her locked up in her tent for a couple of days. As soon as the kidnapping took place, "Kill Slade" gradually turns into a dire and dreadful action/comedy, and you'll immediately understand why the film ended up in oblivion. The rest of the script exists of lame bickering between the journalist and her kidnapper, who by the way is the most pathetic action hero of the eighties. Patrick Dollaghan doesn't only look like an idiot; he also talks and behaves like one. During the climax there's another worthwhile sequence, involving a man being eaten by crocodiles, but then even this sequence is ruined when the victims suddenly re- appears again a little bit later. You just don't reappear after a croc- attack!