Thomas Walton’s rape-revenge thriller They Turned Us Into Killers appears to be well-intentioned. It seems like he is telling a story about people who have been sexually assaulted taking back their lives and getting even with bad guys. That’s a good aim, but unfortunately this film doesn’t succeed at everything. In fact, it falls short in many different ways. Despite having a talented cast, the acting often leaves something to be desired, the script is rough around the edges and the story is needlessly convoluted. Because of these flaws, however, it never becomes immersive.
The movie starts with Karma (Lauren Francesca) being introduced to hard drugs by her boyfriend B.J. (Bryce Draper). Once she is rendered helpless by them, he takes advantage of her sexually. This traumatic event sets Karma off on a path that ultimately leads her to kill herself. After Karma dies, her best friend Star (Scout Taylor-Compton) seeks revenge against those who hurt her.
My biggest issue with They Turned Us Into Killers is that some of its creative decisions are just plain confusing. For example, in one scene Karma sits in her room and uses a hunting knife to scoop up a serving of drugs as she rocks back and forth, looking mildly catatonic. The whole thing comes across as melodramatic and unnatural. Then in another scene she takes a bump of the white powder that she and B.J. love so much, slams it against her nose and doesn’t even seem to ingest anything; most of the powder ends up on her face instead. Stuff like that is hard to overlook and there’s plenty more where it came from too; every sequence involving a character under the influence of any kind of illegal substance feels like it belongs in an anti-drug PSA made by middle school students.
The picture’s strange imaginative decisions continue apace. In this sequence, Star has her intended victim tied up and seems seconds away from killing him when she is stopped by a pleading performance so devoid of energy it might as well be asking for gum. That sort of thing took me out of the movie again and again.
After the pleading sequence, Star sings a song that goes: “We’re the Millers. You turned us into killers.” That song feels like it belongs in another movie unfortunately, the film includes it multiple times, and every time feels just as wrong as the last.
Also problematic is how needlessly convoluted the film makes what should be a straightfoward narrative. Star teams up with a man named Zion (Brian Anthony Wilson), who has similar ties to the family that hurt Karma; making Zion part of this revenge spree just complicates things unnecessarily it would have worked better if the setup were simply Star avenging Karma’s death. But that’s not all. In addition to Zion, we also see everything through the eyes of police detectives who are trying to solve what happened; these decisions widen the scope too much when it doesn’t need to be widened if this were a whodunnit, I could understand bringing in more characters, but we know who did it.
Adding to my frustration is how much past information Zion recaps for his father just so those details can get out there for us viewers the whole scene reads as nothing more than an exposition dump; it doesn’t feel natural or conversational at all; It feels like we watched him take a ride share to go tell his story at an asylum where his dad already knows most of what he’s saying.
That being said, I do appreciate writer/director Thomas Walton’s restrained approach towards sexual assault on display here he doesn’t try and sell us that IPV is traumatic by making us sit through a graphic depiction to do so; he knows you don’t have to teach somebody that water is wet.
All in all, I do believe Walton’s heart was in the right place and for that I commend him, but the execution was lacking. If you’re interested in checking out the movie, it’s available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital now.
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