DVD review: 'The Killer Inside Me'

“The Killer Inside Me”

When Anadarko, OK-born pulp fiction writer Jim Thompson’s fourth novel hit the revolving paperback book racks of 1952′s drugstores, supermarkets and bus stations, it sold for 25

With twilit Oklahoma locations standing in for 1950s West Texas, Casey Affleck’s coolly unnerving portrayal of a deceptively pleasant country gentleman harboring monstrous, pent-up lusts, and Kate Hudson and Jessica Alba both playing brilliantly against type — the former as a longtime, love-desperate girlfriend and the latter as a fiercely independent bad girl with appetites to match the deputy’s — Winterbottom creates a love-triangle-from-hell scenario that bravely plumbs the darkest recesses of the human soul and is as heartbreakingly tragic and strangely touching as it is brutally shocking.

But most of today’s mainstream moviegoers still aren’t ready for Thompson’s style of startling and disturbingly truthful storytelling, due mainly to the film’s graphic depiction of furious physical violence, which garnered negative reviews and poor box office that were sorely undeserved. Maybe someday this superbly crafted and acted film will gain the same measure of cult appreciation that Thompson’s haunting book finally achieved.

— Gene Triplett