The Killing Zone DVD (1999) (1 Disc) (UK)

The Killing Zone is an unauthorised James Bond novel by Jim Hatfield. It was privately published in paperback in 1985 under the guise that it was officially sanctioned by Glidrose Publications. At the time, the official author of the Bond series was John Gardner who wrote from 1981 to 1996. It was first published in the United Kingdom by Charter Books but is no longer in print. The text is available on the Internet, however. CommanderBond .net - The Mystery of The Killing Zone. Online text version of The Killing Zone.

Low budget thriller claiming to be in the vain of Get Carter & the Ipcress File, the trouble is it plays more like a rip off than an homage. Matthew Palmer is a hit man or a computer sales man so his girlfriends thinks, & we follow him as he performs three jobs in his chosen profession.

The cast is formed of many faces youll know from British TV but none that you could name, of which the stand out performance clearly belongs to Padraig Casey, who is consistently watchable as the cold hit man Palmer.

The problems with this film do not lie in the performances but in the dialog the actors have to speak. How seriously can you really take a hit man who says in earnest Michael Cain is the bees knees Or his comic relief best friend who spiels out a long, long monolog about how if popular music is played in a supermarket it is instantly a classic? you will be pleased to know that this philosophy is quickly shot down & shown to be the bull s**t it really is. I continually got the feeling that the script writer has been trying to emulate the pop culture jargon of Quentin Tarantino, but with out his success.

This film is also prey to major miscasting in some of the rolls, The Blond Lady who plays the female killer is not threatening & only funny in terms of her inept take on her supporting roll. Also Who would believe that the scruffy, long haired, Hawaiian shirt wearing lay about like Lance could even write his name in the ground with a stick let alone write a factual novel about a professional killer such as Palmer.

The Three act suture of the movie works really well, but its in the individual stories where the problems lie. Plot twists play very heavily in the first two stories, but twists can be hard things to execute, as proved here as the twists either rely on two many variables that the possibilities of which are tiny or they simply defy human logic.

Over all this is just another British Gangster film without the break out capability that films like Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels or Gangster No 1 possess. The Dialog fails to pack the punch of the movies it is trying to copy, but then again when you find a movie in a bright orange case sitting gathering dust in the bargain bin of a newsagents, how good should you really expect it to be?