SYNOPSIS:
For 20 years, mousy Dorine Douglas (Carol Kane) has worked as a lowly copy-editor for Constant Consumer magazine, which has just suffered its latest round of corporate downsizings. Like several other long-serving employees, Dorine will now be working from home, when she's not caring for her crippled mother (Alice Drummond). One night, when Dorine is summoned back to the office to work on an urgently-needed article, she causes an electrical accident that has deadly consequences. The shock triggers Dorine?s latent madness, and she embarks on a series of bizarre murders of the bitchy co-workers who have always mistreated her.

"I can see why this never got a cinema release. It?s strictly a curiosity item, one you watch with almost total detachment: there are various points of interest but nothing that draws you in. I?m only slightly familiar with Cindy Sherman?s work as a still photographer, but presumably her fans will be interested in the stiff, curdled compositions and the way various horror-film clich?s are stylised to the point of Warhol-like affectlessness. Everything is a transparent quotation ? including the flashbacks that supposedly explain the heroine?s psychosis. Any liveliness is supplied by the gruesome jokes about decaying corpses, and by the eclectic cast, themselves ?quoted? from various sources (what is it recently with Molly Ringwald and dodgy horror films?). Sherman?s fantasy of making a Hollywood genre exercise remains, unfortunately, a fantasy: even if this kind of gory horror were currently in vogue (which it isn?t) Office Killer is far too flip, mannered and arty to work for a popular audience. I know the flatness is supposed to be the point, and the film?s bitchy, numbing surface is actually a pretty good depiction of what working in an office can be like, but you expect more from a movie than this kind of enervated knowingness ? even on video."Jake Wilson

[ http://www.urbancinefile.com.au/home/vi ... &s=Reviews ]

I SCREAMED three times, and I laughed a lot more often. If screaming is a sign that a horror movie is a success, then laughing suggests that "Office Killer" is more than your standard horror flick. The debut film by photographer Cindy Sherman, who at 43 maintains her status as the leading American visual artist of her generation, is a wry and intellectual romp through B-movie cliches - without stinting on the gore and mayhem.

Sherman fans - and they are legion - will not want to miss her first essay into moving pictures. After all, she came to prominence in the late '70s for her "Untitled Film Stills," a series of black-and-white photographs that explored film's language from a post-modern, feminist perspective, and she is extraordinarily well-prepared to tackle the real thing.

But even those who have never heard of her might enjoy themselves - as long as they don't come to it with Hollywood standards in mind. This is a low-budget production that flaunts its cheapness without apologies. And those Sherman virgins who get the film's funny but subversive messages might want to check out Sherman's oeuvre.

[ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... ND9886.dtl ]