Office Killer (Cindy Sherman - 1997)

[trep]

IMDb - 4.3/10 (470 votes)

[quote]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 clichés 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 ][/quote]

[quote]

Office Killer (Cindy Sherman - 1997) DVDRip.avi, 700Mb
video: 672x368 01:23:11 23.97fps XviD 1Mbps
audio: 48KHz 01:23:11 Stereo 128Kbps mp3[/quote]


Most people hated it, but hey it's Cindy Sherman directing a movie
Me, I've yet to see it so don't ask.
Thanks to Gottersturm for passing this one to me and to the one who ripped it in the first place.

THE LINK:
Office Killer (Cindy Sherman - 1997) DVDRip.avi

[lapsus]

Trepidante elink!

Mss. Cindy Sherman clickada.

thankyou!

[trep]

Pieces of trivia:

Todd Haynes .......................... additional dialogue

Given the incredible opportunity not only to direct a film, but to come up with the storyline, meant that I had to decide on the "kind" of horror plot I wanted. At first this seemed daunting, not only because of the variety within the genre, but given my resistance to classical narrative. Ultimately, I opted for a more subtle, more introverted horror, not unlike the main character, who I also saw as a stand-in for myself...What I was after was to show the macabre delight at how someone could make playful use of some dead body parts lying around. That was my starting point. Many other elements were woven into the final result. True to my other work, Office Killer is also ambiguous and confusing. Likewise, I was content to let some of the artifice be apparent...

The new Wes Craven slasher flick, "Scream 3," is playing all over, and I arrange to see it with Sherman. She slides down in her seat like a teen ager, knees pulled up, and giggles at the gory parts and the in jokes, like the casting of Roger Corman in a bit part, and afterward she says it isn't anywhere near as scary as Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street," which is one of her all time favorites, along with "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." She loves the adrenaline rush that she gets from even the worst of these films, and she also believes that they help fortify you for the horrible events that can invade your life at any moment. When the independent producer Christine Vachon came to a Sherman Christmas party in 1994 and said she would love to produce a low budget horror film directed by Sherman, Sherman was immediately interested. The result, three years later, was "Office Killer," which had a brief run at a few art houses in 1997. (It is currently available on video.) Miramax bought the rights, but sold them to another firm, which never got it into general release.

[...]

"I've never worked on a movie where I felt the director and I were both creating the character, and that she was as much a part of the character as I was," Kane told me. "She even did my eyebrows every day." As a director, Kane went on to say, Sherman was open to suggestions from everybody on the set. "She was definitely in control, but never needed to show her control. There was a lot of laughing involved, too. The gorier things got, the happier she was." The film received bad reviews, and must be judged Sherman's only non success to date, but some people loved it. "I could not stop laughing," Ingrid Sischy said. "It was my favorite movie of the year. It should have won an Academy Award."

Who?

Cindy Sherman

What?

The maverick photographer Sherman has made a horror flick called Office Killer, in which dormouse Dorine (Carol Kane) dispassionately eliminates former colleagues at Constant Consumer, the magazine that downsized her.

Why?

It's the work of a visual artist who knows all about maintaining an independent voice - and a timely antidote to Scream 2.

Where?

Forum (from December 3) and elsewhere.

GRAHAM FULLER: Producer Christine Vachon came to you with the idea of doing a horror film because she saw a B-movie aesthetic in your photos. Does Office Killer stay true to that aesthetic?

CINDY SHERMAN; I didn't even think of making the film look like my photographs. When you're worrying about things like getting a cat to perform, you don't always have the opportunity to make things look the way you want. I didn't have a visual concept, but I liked the limitation of a small budget because the idea of making a film that looked fake and cheap appealed more than making one that looked perfect and believable. I wanted to capture the intensity of the images [director] Dario Argento got in films like Suspiria [1977] and Trauma [1993].

GF: Your film presents an array of female types: the bitchy boss [played by Barbara Sukowa]; the nice boss who's cheating the company [Jeanne Tripplehorn]; the flirty coworker [Molly Ringwald]; and the murderous computer geek, Dorine [Carol Kane]. Are they connected to the female images in your Untitled Film Stills?

CS: I didn't relate them to those stills, which were really about film noir; it would have been too nostalgic. The photos are glamorous compared to the characters in the film, but yes, I think there may be a connection.

GF: Did it bother you having to tell a story?

CS: I wasn't thinking of some broader ideal, like making a narrativeless film, but I tried to use the story as a skeleton to hang images on. There were times I didn't care about the story, but there was pressure from various people involved in the film to make it as least confusing as possible. Everybody always seems confused about one of the dead bodies in Dorine's basement, but if I'd had my choice, there would have been more corpses there. Why not?

GF: Why did the horror genre appeal to you?

CS: Horror is considered to be this trashy thing that should be bad, so I felt I couldn't go wrong if my film sucked. I came across a book called Men, Women, and Chainsaws, by Carol Clover. She talks about the "final girl" theory, which applied to many horror films in the '70s where the audience was primarily young males, the killer was male, and the hero a goody-goody girl who doesn't have sex, kills the killer, and survives. I decided to make the killer a middle-aged woman because it was something I could identify with and because there aren't many films in any genre about women my age. I also identified with her setting up the bodies in the basement, because it's how I see myself playing in my studio with mannequins.

GF: So will audiences be screaming?

CS: It's more of a comedy than a horror film, but not a laugh-out-loud one. You can snicker along with what's going on - until Dorine flips out; then it gets scary. But it shouldn't be taken too seriously.

[faustroll]

I've just got the DVD a few days ago. It seems an interesting film. I don't think it looks like her photographs but at least it's worth to see.. Also there was a documentary about her in spanish that I downloaded a few weeks ago. If you're interested:




CINDY SHERMAN (documental).avi

[bizitza]

Gracias trep, pincho y pauso (a pesar de la "triplehorno")

Thanx faustroll

[trep]

Engsubs courtesy of Javaopera:

http://javaopera.ivyro.net/bbs/view.php ... =1&no=1873