Crap Film Club Review: Killer Sofa
Last month’s film came to us all the way from the far-away land of New Zealand, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. For the second time in the history of this little club, we have come across a surprisingly fun film with a heart and soul. However, let’s not get too excited! This is still a bad film with a confusing plot and the most stilted lead actor I think we’ve ever had. Regardless of that, I had a good time and didn’t need a chemical bath to cleanse the experience from my mind.
The plot follows a few characters:
A young dancer named Francesca who buys a reclining chair that’s possessed by a Dybbuk.
A pair of detectives trying to solve a string of murders, of which the victims were all Francesca’s exes.
A disgraced rabbi and his voodoo sorcerer wife who are trying to find the Dybbuk, work out why it’s killing people and destroy it.
If that all sounds like a lot for a film that’s barely 90 minutes long and made on a budget of what felt like £100, then you’d be right. The film’s pacing feels erratic and all over the place, and besides the main plot line with Francesca and her friend, the rest of the film feels half-backed. For example, the two cops stumble around their investigation, looking at multiple murders wherein every victim is connected to one person, and that one person is never a suspect? And the old disgraced rabbi popping up from time to time to have strange visions or dreams and then spend ZERO time doing any research? He just watches one YouTube video on the matter and calls it a day.
I will give the film some credit. It does win the award for most stilted main protagonist that we’ve ever seen in Crap Film Club (and that's really saying something). Francesca is so wooden that it’s hard sometimes to work out what the character is thinking as she has the same reaction to finding a dead body as she does to her boyfriend making breakfast in bed. She's not the only bad performance in this film by any means. The two police officers say their lines so quietly that it’s hard to make out what they're saying sometimes, and when you can hear what they say it’s with all the emotional range of a confused looking rock. As for the disgraced rabbi, he only has a few minutes of screen time and yet he was by far the best performance in the film. Sadly, this isn’t saying much as the bar for what a good performance is in this film isn’t very high, but credit where credit is due. The rabbi and his weird voodoo wife are definitely the most interesting characters. It’s just a shame that most of their scenes are used as exposition dumps and shoehorned into the film, making them feel random and out-of-place.
However, with all that said, I enjoyed my time with Killer Sofa. It was a surreal time I won’t lie, and it has its flaws. But the parts I liked weren’t ruined by the parts I didn’t like and the fact that the titular killer sofa isn’t a terrible CGI monstrosity, but an actual physical prop elevated this film above most of the crap we’ve watched. Would I recommend this film? Only if you were drunk and had some drunk friends to watch it with, otherwise I wouldn’t bother.
I give Killer Sofa a rating of “I need another drink”/10