Review: KILL LIST

Jay is a former soldier turned hitman. He served in Iraq and is sad, because it gave him the dreaded PTSD, and also, it was not even as good as world war two, commonly thought of as the best of the wars. After being a soldier, Jay was or is a private military contractor, like so many a BlackRock, in a very secret way, like so many Bonds, except, of course, he is just a little slob, looking a bit like the late great Wayne Rooney, that utter horse of the stadia.

He is the main character in KILL LIST, a film, by Ben Wheatley, which is a horror film from 2012.

Jay has not worked private military contract in eight months, not since a job in Kyiv, in the Ukraine, which now has lost its ‘the’, like so many of its cities, went badly wrong in ways he seems traumatised by. But Jay never says what actually happened on such a bad job.

Of course, latterly revealed in the canonical cinematic universe of real life, was that the main CIA and MI6 base for mucking around in Russia was in the Ukraine. How clever a film this is, for thinking, of course, he would be working in Kyiv, I wonder what Ben Wheatley, and his lovely wife, whose name I forget, did know, of such spying and other secret activities such as blowing up pipes.

Jay lives in a big suburban cul-de-sac new-ish build house somewhere in near-London England, maybe Essex, or maybe Home Counties, with his wife Shel — a bizarrely attractive Scandinavian lady (more on this later) — and their son Sam. 

We must note, of course, for legal reasons, in England, all land is owned by the Crown, eye eee, the King, Charles, though of course, back then, it was the Queen, Elizabeth: 2. 

When you “buy” a house in England, you buy an estate — a bundle of rights to use the land. 

But this land itself belongs to the Crown. 

The legal term, legally speaking, is “doctrine of tenure,” which was birthed, in a manner of language, from the Latin tenere: to hold. Not to own. To hold, temporarily, on behalf of someone else.

Jay holds his house. He holds his wife. He holds his life. But poor Jay, this slob, this hooligan of the screen, does not own any of it.

Here begins, as they say in bad old France, ‘le horreur’.

Shel organises a dinner party. Jay’s old partner in private military contract work, Gal, arrives with his new girlfriend, Fiona. Gal is played by Michael Smiley — known and beloved as the mad bicycle rider Tyres in Spaced. 

(A flawed sitcom which, honestly, I do like a lot. I would like to cast Nick Frost one day, perhaps in a version of the film, The Wrestler, with alcoholic man, with estranged daughter. Except, this is about darts player, instead of a wrestler. Played by Nick Frost. But I digress, it could be called, The Darts Player. And this Tyres, funny and warm and likeable in the way that your best mate is likeable, I believe, not having had such a thing as ‘best mate’. But I digress.)

Fiona, this new girlfriend of Tyres, more on this later, has big and frightening eyes, she is truly a very scary woman. She excuses herself to go to the bathroom, where she carves a strange symbol on the back of the mirror and collects a tissue with Jay’s blood on it.

More on this later!

After the dinner, when they are all drunk, as adults are wont to do at such parties such as dinner, or house, there is a throwaway Jimmy Savill impression made by the Tyres character. It is a joke about being a peedoe and a creep.

The film came out in September 2011. The ITV documentary that exposed Savill being a pedophile aired in 2012. Operation Yewtree began after that. But everybody already knew, I have been told, I was very young at the time, apparently everyone basically knew this to be the case, that Jimmy Savill was a notorious pedophile. And also a nonce. 

Hence the documentary by the notorious moron Louis Theroux, who goes to visit very sad things like the young girl who has to work as prostitute because no money otherwise. Or old people who have to be swingers because no excitement otherwise. And Louis Theroux, the odious fish, in his old documentaries, says: hmmm. Hmmm, have you thought about, how you look a bit silly, with all your human needs, like money for being alive, or enjoyment of life. Let me do a puzzling face like the utter spastic I am.

I despise this clown, Louis Theroux. But I digress.

The dinner party is where Gal talks Jay into taking a new job. Because here he has a proverbial, and indeed titular, kill list. And this is the job for which they can be paid, killing the blokes on the list. Indeed, there are three blokes to kill on the kill list. 

Jay does not want to do the job, because he is either lazy, like so many a reclining chair with cupholder, or traumatised, or both. But not enough doth Jay resist, and eventually, agrees to job, because, fack it, shel, we need da benjamins! 

Jay and Tyres meet the client — a wealthy, well-spoken, upper-class man who makes them sign the contract in blood and refuses to explain why. Jay and Gal do not ask any questions. They know not to.

In the Arthurian Grail legends, the knight Percival visits the Fisher King. The Fisher King is the King. He is wounded in the penis, and slash or, balls. The Fisher King’s penis, and slash or, balls, are responsible for reasons unclear for how green England is. And so, because the Fisher King has hurt such genitals, England is in an absolute state. 

The Fisher King can be healed in the penis, and slash or, balls, by simply asking him, are you alright my King. Unfortunately, this knight, Percival, has been taught, it is impolite to ask questions of such a King. He does not like this, to be bothered about his dick and balls!

Because this moron Percival fails to ask the king, how are your balls, the land remains a total waste of a land, and the king remains having a terrible penis. 

In England, this - the story of the King with the terrible penis, and the knight who is too polite to ask about it - is one of the most important myths about the Holy Grail. Yes, a story about being too polite to ask about a hurt penis, or other sensitive subject, in England, is a main story about the Holy Grail. Dear reader, you did not read this wrong. It is politely ignoring hurt penis and, slash or, balls, all the way up. 

But I digress.

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The list of blokes that Jay and Gal must kill has three targets, as I said above. Such targets are presented as title cards in the film: The Priest. The Librarian. The Emm Pee.

The Priest is straightforward enough. Jay and Gal stake out a church, and Jay kills the priest. But something strange happens. The priest says “thank you” before he dies. Jay and Gal don’t understand it. Neither do we. They move on.

Along the way, they stay in a Travelodge. Jay threatens with a violent and horrific death some Christians who are being most annoying, botherers not only of God, but of their fellow diners, playing acoustic guitar in the restaurant. It is one of the funniest scenes in the film to see Jay threaten them so violently.

Back home, Jay also reads his son a bedtime story. It is an old war story set in a foreign land, which he names Baghdad-istan. This too is very funny, because, it is like Danny Dyer, that pint-sized Pinter, delivery. And we love when man say confidently stupid thing, because, honestly, who cares which it is, Afghanistan or Baghdad or Keev, it is all just one big Kill List, ironic.

But I ask you this, can you imagine how many a film, speaking of peedoe conspiracy and squaddie who goes on kill list to kill many a nonce, would paint the ‘stupidity’ of such a character saying such a thing as Baghdadistan? 

Not just British cinema that doth doff the proverbial sneer at working class men, but American also, it is very Guardian or the dreaded Times of New York to sneer at such a man, and an easy path to good reviews from such papers of so-called record, to be sure.

This absence of sneer is the film’s most, to use a skateboardly tone, radical quality.

We must remember Bazanne, that French horse of the magazine, God love him, who said: The camera is the eye of God. And yet so few filmmakers remember such a thing, and go ahead and do the work of judging. Which, as so many a tattoo knows is wrong, for Only God Can Judge.

Yes, it is true, Andre Bazanne believed the camera should observe without judgement — that the role of cinema was not to impose meaning but to witness reality and allow the audience to find meaning for themselves. Which I think not enough people remember, truth be told. By me. 

Wheatley films Jay this way just like Andrea Arnold does film everyone, God rest her soul, unless she is alive, in which case, Good Health To Her, and her strange brother, “hey”.

Wheatley, named for the field of politician, and indeed Prime Minister, Theresa, does not judge Jay for his violence, his stupidity, his “Bagdadistan.” 

But The Librarian, the next bloke on the list of blokes on the blokes you have to kill list, is where the film turns, as so many a Larry David might say, pretty, pretty bad. 

Jay and Gal break into this absolute nonce’s secret hidden lock-up. In the lock-up, the design of the set is, from memory, exactly as one of the lockups found in the Dutroux case in Belgium, about a notorious peedoe. Belgium, that twin of England both in latitude and in genocide, and in such a warehouse, also in this film, as in the canonical universe of reality, Jay and Gal discover a collection of videos depicting child abuse of the sex nature. 

Jay loses control. He takes a hammer to the Librarian’s knee and then, head. Again, the Librarian says “thank you” before he dies.

That shit scary, mane.

From his window at a Travel Lodge, or similar such hotel, Jay sees scary girlfriend of Gal, waving at him. 

And now, the carved symbol, the family cat turning up all dead, and she is waving at him in scary witchy dress.

But this witchy woman does not look like traditional witch, scary as she is. You can picture, if you will, dear reader, this odious woman driving around in such a car as a Ford Car, and when she waves to main character from this Travel Lodge, though she is indeed wearing scary witchy dress, but she is standing not in big old witchy field, or forest, like so many a Blair of Maryland, but right in the middle of basically a moronic dual carriage way! Or off ramp! Or slip road! 

Yes, “Kill List” dresses up everything as nothing except exactly what it is. Truly, this is a wonderful portrait, or portrayal, which is short hand for: portrait of betrayal, of England. 

Under English law, the Crown has dominion over all land as “lord paramount.” This is not a historical curiosity. It is the current legal framework, restated in the Land Registration Act 2002. There has been no allodial land — land that someone truly, absolutely owns — in England since 1066. The entire country is a leasehold. Every Barrett home, every suburban lawn, every Travelodge car park exists at the pleasure of the Crown. If you die without heirs, your land escheats — returns — to the Crown, because it was always theirs.

The English are tenants. They have always been tenants. William the Conqueror cucked the entire nation, and the legal system has maintained that cuckolding, continuously, for nearly a thousand years. The cuck parade is not a metaphor. It is the constitutional arrangement of England.

And cuckolding is the great English anxiety. If we are to return, dear reader, to aforementioned King Arthur, being sucked is the engine of Arthurian legend. Lancelot, Arthur’s best knight, sleeps with Guinevere, Arthur’s wife, and this betrayal from within destroys Camelot. It is the engine of Shakespeare also — Othello, The Winter’s Tale, the Merry Wives. It saturates the national literature like so many a flood, but not of rainfall or river, but of the politely hidden tears of the cucked English man.

I do not feel this - being cucked being so central, as they say in France - is true of many country’s canonical origin story.

The French have their revolution. The Americans have their frontier and also their revolution, God bless them. But The English have only the suspicion that someone, somewhere, is having them over. Arthur is of course cucked. The Fisher King is wounded in the dick, and slash or, balls, and sits useless while his land dies. 

The English national story is one of endurance and suspicion and the knowledge that you are a tenant in your own life.

In Kill List, Jay is the ultimate cuck. He is cucked by the army, which broke him. He is cucked by the economy, which has left him broke. And he is cucked by the cult, which has been operating inside his own life — through his wife. Through his best friend. Through the dinner party in his own home. 

The film ends in darkness and subsequent day. Jay and Gal go to deal with (or, should I say, kill) the final target — the MP — (who, much like the proverbial Mandelson, they are unable to actually kill) and find themselves in a torchlit procession of masked, naked cultists in the woods. 

They are performing ceremony to sacrifice a young (but adult-looking) woman, who is wearing a dress of twenty pound notes. 

The sight drives Jay finally around the proverbial bend. He opens fire with a PHAT machine gun. This part is sick.

However, there are loads of cultists, and Jay and Gal get chased into a network of secret tunnels that are under the home of the MP, who is definitely in a cult, performing ritual to money to save economy from the ‘credit crunch’, it seems, and may also be a nonce. This does not seem to matter, because the noncing, ultimately, is a display of ultimate and unchecked power of the wealthy.

British people have always known that the wealthy do this. Hence why, early in the film, Gal makes joke about Jimmy Savile being pedophile, even though we didn’t actually know for sure when the film came out. And yet, we don’t ask, hello, it seems like you are pedophile, might you explain? We just say, oh, alright then. You were at Woking Pizza Express, not noncing child, well. 

I know that is obviously not true, and the country is permadying, but I’m a bit too busy right now. 

What with becoming small-time landlord of land I am renting from your mother myself to risk anything to change this. I simply cannot hurt my property portfolio which happens to belong to your mother. No further questions, your majesty. 

Ironic indeed. But I digress.

Gal is stabbed by the cultist a whole lot of times. Jay puts him out of his proverbial misery, and Gal, like the cultists, says “thank you”. 

Did the witchy woman get to him too?

Probably, it must be said.

Jay fights his way through to a final confrontation with a figure in a hunchback costume. He kills it. Underneath, he finds his wife and son, strapped together. 

He has murdered them with his own hands. Or, indeed, his own knife.

The cult crowns him. They put a wreath on his head. He is their cucked king now, dick and ball-less in an eternally drying and dying land.

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As I mentioned, Gal, Jay’s Lancelot, says “thank you” when Jay kills him. Shel may have been part of it from the beginning. 

The betrayal comes from inside the house, just as it always does in English stories.

I think maybe Kill List knows this thing. That we are always renting, we are always sort of tenants of a crown, maybe it is this, whose feet it is do not matter, and there is the eer(ingerland) of so many a travelodge to such a country, this parade of cucks temporarily inhabiting, though we throw up so many a Barrett to create illusion of permanence. And aspire to be landlord of the cuck parade by owning other Barrett home, but of course, we know in back of mind that next week, or next month, or one fine morning. Here will come another Norman.

There is a standard reading of British horror that says something pagan lurks beneath the surface of modern England. The Wicker Man, Midsommar. The  Green Man, that mossy rapscallion of the pub. 

But this is wrong, or at least insufficient. The Wicker Man’s Lord Summerisle literally tells you that his grandfather, a Victorian gentleman, invented the whole pagan system to control the islanders. It is not ancient religion. It is a management technique dressed in harvest festival costume. It is wealth saying, hello, look at me, I am definitely a tradition.

Kill List doesn’t pretend. Its cult has no theology, no coherent belief system, no ancient lineage you can trace. Just a moronic and lame symbol and a lot of twenty pound notes and even more violence. The cult is just there, in the woods behind the houses near the school. Like they’ve always been.

Yes, we are a country of cucked tenants. 

For though some feet walked here in ancient time, they or we, we did not ask to be catholic feet. This is romance language nonsense, it is not English. Or Prott: This is german nonsense. And, indeed, much worse than catholicism, which I like, I might add, because protestantism is made up by some german. 

And yet they are both of the same importance in the same way, in the end, that the land registry is, because we are really just a bunch of slobs, who are endlessly ordered and reordered by doctrine of some moron from the EU.

This is what haunts England. Not paganism, not Christianity, not the ghost of a specific system — but the accumulated weight of people having lived here, trudging moronically across this land, century after century, under one imposed system after another, none of which we or they chose. 

Catholic because Rome said so (God love them). Protestant because Henry VIII’s dick and balls said so (God bless them). Democratic in theory because some baronic morons forced King John One to sign a contract, which Jay Z later famously referred to in titular album: Magna Carta and Holy Grail. 

None of it native, none of it chosen, all of it just there, like the rain that keeps the lawns green.

And, to digress, has any film shown the greenness of English lawn such as Kill List? No, we import Lynch sprinkler lawn green, which is a different colour to rain lawn green. 

Props once more to filmmakers of Kill List, for capturing the true green of English land!

But yes, to get back on the proverbial tack. What would we English be without these imported systems? 

We sense we were something once. 

But nobody facing remembers, do they, gunner? 

What did we do here? To whom did we answer, in ancient time?

When football fans sing Jerusalem, as I mentioned in last review. And pronounce England as Eer-ingerland, as I mentioned in last review also, they are channelling this. 

It is patriotism and it is cucked, all at once. It is religion and it is not religion. It is the territorial howl of the sitting tenant.

For we know some slob’s feet walked all over our pastures the whole time, ancient or otherwise, whether they be us, or Anglo, or Saxon, or Viking, or Norman, or Roman. Or indeed mud person with blue paint on face like so many a Braveheart, slash modern Scottish person.

And this is the uncanny thing in Blake. And in Kill List. England as not pagan, I think, but almost, England a country not as a country, but a place passed through endlessly by the Cuck Parade. This is England: A slob continuity.

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George Dumberly-Ape is the creator of the Taken V Predator franchise, and writes about film from London.