'Killer Joe' is hyper-brutal yet intriguing

Matthew McConaughey steals the show as the titular 'Killer Joe.' (Credit: By Skip Bolen, LD Entertainment)

During a key scene in Killer Joe (** out of four; rated NC-17; opens Friday in select cities), Lee Hazlewood's version of These Boots Are Made for Walking plays in the background.

This movie is clearly made for Matthew McConaughey. The Texan actor subverts his slick charm in the service of an uncommonly diabolical character. His soft-spoken sadist in a black cowboy hat darkly amuses just as it sends a huge shiver down the spine. The bone-crunchingly violent film has luridly entertaining moments. But by its resolution, this sleazy Southern Gothic nightmare has simply gone off the rails.

This is a nasty black comedy filled with seedy, stupid and deeply unlikable types, and as such it's a truly unpleasant experience. But, in the hands of veteran director William Friedkin and screenwriter Tracy Letts, it is occasionally intriguing, even in its wicked dysfunction. (Friedkin, the 76-year-old director of The Exorcist and The French Connection, has defiantly not mellowed with the years.)

Chris (Emile Hirsch), a 22-year-old ne'er-do-well in debt to a local drug lord, hatches a plan to kill his mother for her insurance money. He goes to Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), his dimwit dad, who insists on a percentage, and another for Ansel's harridan wife, Sharla (Gina Gershon).

They hire a contract killer named Joe (McConaughey) but run into a snag when Joe demands payment first, and neither Chris nor Ansel has the thousands he requires. But Joe has taken a shine to Chris's fragile 20-year-old sister Dottie (Juno Temple) and takes her as his "retainer."

The dead-eyed Joe, with his veneer of politeness barely masking the madman that lurks within, becomes their twisted family patriarch. Even the chained pit bull outside their trailer home seems to bow and scrape with respect.

The actors dig in with relish, but never quite come together as an ensemble. McConaughey and Hirsch are unnervingly convincing, Haden Church is drolly comic, but Temple's damaged innocent is too vacantly theatrical to blend in. Gershon isn't giving a performance so much as a slatternly caricature.

Making matters worse, the lot of them are so heinous in their base motivations that they are more akin to a freak show than a loosely connected family.

The dialogue can be acidly funny, the kind that induces a wince along with a laugh. When Sharla is dousing herself with perfume, Ansel makes a request of her "when you're done fumigating the gates of hell."

Chris' assessment of Texas is wryly pithy: "It's just a bunch of hicks and rednecks with too much space to walk around in."

The web of betrayals is involving, if not complicated. This is the kind of film where the audience feels a twist coming. What unfolds is mildly surprising, but the accompanying carnage is thoroughly off-putting.

If spending a couple of hours with the nastiest bunch of trailer park trash imaginable sounds like fun, then carve some time out for Killer Joe. Otherwise, give this hyper-brutal, trashy thriller a wide berth.

Movie Trailer: