The Killing of America (1982)

At first the 80's graphics and synthesized music led me to expect a sleazy exploitation movie, but the eloquent and forcefully delivered commentary - the statistics are often scarier than the images - reassured me as the film progressed that it seemed seriously intended. Much of the footage I'd never seen before - such as JFK arriving at Love Field and being driven through Dallas in colour - although other film used frequently seemed to veer away from whatever central argument the film was actually advancing. At one point the film wistfully speaks of a more innocent era a quarter of a century earlier; but the increasing proliferation of atrocity footage such as we see here probably owes as much to the fact that cameras - and now mobile phones - are now ever-present to record such incidents. If the film is about America's morbid love affair with the gun, the mass poisoning of his followers ordered by the Reverend Jim Jones doesn't really belong here; while like the summary execution of Viet Cong commander Nguyen Van Lem in Saigon on 1 February 1968, which is also included, it took place thousands of miles from the United States itself. Other material - like several photographs of suicide victims - seem to have been included because the film's makers didn't want them to go to waste rather than because they were particularly relevant. Likewise serial killers like the creepy Ted Bundy and the remarkably articulate Ed Kemper don't really seem to belong in this particular documentary since they didn't shoot their victims.Another startling clip that I'd never seen before was of Lyndon Johnson himself in black & white after the University of Texas shooting in 1966 - over FIFTY YEARS ago!! - pledging new measures to prevent guns falling into the wrong hands. Before 1966 was out, America had already seen its first copycat shooting by an idiot called Robert Smith who committed a particularly cruel and cowardly mass shooting in a beauty salon in Arizona on 12 November 1966, after which he explained that "I wanted to get known - to get myself a name". He's still in jail now, and I'd ironically never heard of him before; so much for making a name for himself. Some of the 'reasons' we hear in the film are almost comically banal, while Sirhan Sirhan, as usual, seemed genuinely not to have a clue why he'd murdered Robert Kennedy.Like the clip of LBJ, the scariest thing about this film is that it was made 37 years ago and so little has changed in the intervening years. The latest mass shooting in America happened in - guess where? - Texas less than two weeks ago, and by the time you read this there'll doubtless have been others.

Violence is the theme of "The Killing Of America", a visually graphic compendium of murder in the U.S.A. "Guns and more guns" intones the narrator, as shots are fired, victims fall, chaos ensues, and the killer's face appears on screen ... over and over and over, one crime after another. Watching this film you'd think that there's a killer hiding behind every bush.Beginning with the JFK assassination and progressing to the early eighties, the film compresses some twenty years of violence into ninety minutes, giving a somewhat distorted cultural impression. How does the murder rate during those twenty years compare to prior decades? The film doesn't tell us. How does that period compare to more recent times? The film can't tell us. So that one problem with "The Killing Of America" is that it is time-bound, stuck in a particular era, without reference to the past or future.One might also ask ... how does American gun violence compare to other countries? The film compares the U.S. to Japan and England, which have ultra-low murder rates. Beyond that, the film doesn't say. Recent statistics show that in comparison to other industrialized nations, the U.S. has a higher murder rate than any country except Russia. But when compared to non-industrial countries, like Honduras, Venezuela, and the Ivory Coast, violence in America is quite low. So a second problem with the film's message is lack of adequate geographic perspective.There's also a problem with the film's structure. Although there's a general chronological progression of events, I cannot justify the film's sequential positioning of different types of gun violence, for example, a political assassination followed by some local neighborhood murder, followed by an expose on a highly publicized serial killer. Such sequencing is haphazard and arbitrary. Apart from the obvious violence, what is the unifying theme in this jumble of cases?The visuals in the copy I watched are poor with lots of out-of-focus scenes, though that can partly be explained by impromptu photography. Overall images trend a little too dark. Sound quality also is poor in spots. Most background music is a bit too frenzied and too loud. John Lennon's song "Imagine" provides a welcome reprieve at the end.There is no question that the level of violence in the U.S. was then, and still is, too high. "The Killing Of America" does indeed provide factual information, with very good video footage of local murders and highly publicized national cases. But the political bias toward gun control is blatant. And the overall production suffers from morbid exploitative visuals at the expense of calm, rational analysis.

I have the Japanese video. The narration was all in Japanese while all the footage was subtitled. Good thing because I heard the English narrator drove people crazy with his long pauses.America from 1960-1980. Showing everything from police standoffs to assassinations to serial killer trials. Nothing is left out. You suddenly realize a lot more was filmed than they would let you see on the news.The street scenes of L.A. were interesting but the morgue & autopsy scenes were a bit much.Personal favorite scenes? James Hoskins in Cinncinati and Anthony Kiritsis in Indiannapolis. Kiritsis definitely has a commanding presence.

I saw The Killing Of America quite a few years ago now, & it was very cold to the bone chilling viewing. The last time i watched it, i thought, never again could i watch this. The scene i used to turn away from was the scene where the 2 accomplices took several neighborhood boys to their home, raped & murdered them. The killer Wayne, who shot his accomplice, was sitting in the police car, there was a picture taken of the left side of his face inside the car, while his right side of his face was staring right at the camera. That picture spooked the living hell out of me for so long, before i finally had the courage to view it. Now i feel i have faced one of my fears. To summarize, very creepy viewing, very sad, that so many people who could've turned out successful in life, turned to a life of crime and horrible murders. About anyone wanting a copy of this to watch, if you want to see this, Australia has just released The Killing Of America (Uncut) on DVD. (go to www.ezydvd.com.au to purchase it, it is $19.95 Aust. R.R.P.)