Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 Returns with an Affectionate Look at John Dahl's 1989 Debut Kill Me Again, a Terrific Neo-Noir Starring Val Kilmer and Michael Madsen
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices
I want to start by apologizing for not posting more frequently on the site. It has been an exceptionally challenging year, both personally and professionally.
Less than a month ago, my father died at 77, a half hour before Father’s Day. He’d been in hospice, so it was not surprising, but it was devastating. My mother abandoned me when I was a baby, so my dad was all I had.
It’s been hard to concentrate on anything for the past few months. I tell myself that I should not feel ashamed of taking time off to process grief. I’m not sure I believe it.
There is an angry voice inside my head that tells me that until I’m able to make everything right by paying off my massive credit card debt, finishing the books that I am in various stages of completing, refund everyone who contributed to the Saturday Night Live project, launch a podcast about movies about movies and transform Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas and Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place into commercial successes I don’t have the luxury of not working every goddamn minute that I have free.
The problem is that there is a very good chance that I will NEVER accomplish all of those worthy goals. They’re ambitious, and I have an incredible capacity for screwing up.
I feel like I’m so far behind that I’ll never catch up. I’ve considered turning Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place into a blog as a way to make my workload more manageable, but I’m not quite ready to take that step yet.
It’s been eight long years since I started Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place after My World of Flops was cancelled by The Onion. I’m proud of what I’ve created, both in terms of the wonderful community this has fostered. However, experience has forced me to be very cynical and pessimistic about the site’s future.
I’m perpetually struggling financially and professionally, in no small part because I regularly write about struggling financially and professionally, and not something more commercial or appealing.
Thankfully, the work is its own reward. I love what I do. I have creative freedom. I can write about whatever the hell I want.
I’m lucky in that I can write about movies like 1989’s Kill Me Again, John Dahl’s inexplicably obscure 1989 directorial debut.
I’m covering the nifty sleeper because of the recent deaths of two of its three leads. Val Kilmer died on April Fool's Day this year. I hope that did not cause confusion among friends and family who received the sad call and had to ponder, for at least a moment, whether or not it was a prank. Of course, Kilmer had been sick for a very long time, with a terrible illness that robbed him of his voice, but dying on April Fool’s Day is like someone’s dad dying on Father’s Day: a little on the nose.
Madsen died on July 3rd, incidentally, my son’s seventh birthday. This invites the question: Who is killing the cast of Kill Me Again? And how long do castmembers Joanne Whalley and Jonathan Gries have on this miserable blue marble of a planet before the lunatic who killed Madsen and Kilmer takes their lives as well?
I saw Kill Me Again on video when it first came out. I was a thirteen-year-old cinephile and compulsive masturbator who loved neo-noir because it was deservedly cynical about human nature, darkly comic, and sex-saturated.
Also, neo-noirs frequently had naked boobs, which was my primary interest in life during my adolescence.
Kill Me Again prominently features the cleavage of Kilmer’s ex-wife as femme fatale Fay Forrester. She’s a sick twist with a dark past and a one-track mind fixated on stealing enough dough to live comfortably on.
She begins the film as the girlfriend of vicious thug Vince Miller (Michael Madsen), a career criminal and all-around brute who kicks off the action by robbing mob flunkies of 850,000 dollars.
Vince has no illusions about his girlfriend. He knows that she’ll probably rob and kill him if and when she has a chance. That does not seem to be a dealbreaker for him. A man as murderous and brooding as Vince does not have the luxury of a non-villainous girlfriend. He wouldn’t know what to do with her anyway.
Madsen was the toughest of tough-guy character actors. He didn’t have to act tough because he was tough. A man with his face had no choice but to become a thespian who specialized in playing dudes who’d kill their own mother for pocket change and a ride out of town.
Kill Me Again turned me into an instant Michael Madsen super-fan. I was already quite enamored of his sister, Virginia.
Madsen’s sociopathic villain is not surprised when Fay knocks him out with a big rock and makes off with a suitcase full of stolen loot.
In desperation, Fay seeks out Jack Andrews (Val Kilmer), a small-time shamus with a gambling problem, a dead wife, and a failing business.
We’re introduced to Jack enduring a visit from henchmen eager to collect a sizable debt. They let him live and keep all of his appendages, but make their discomfort known by randomly smashing things.
In the kind of novelistic detail that sets Kill Me Again apart from lesser noirs, Jack picks up a smashed photograph of him with his late wife and carefully, lovingly removes the shards so that he can see her clearly.
It’s a small moment that speaks volumes about Jack and his grief. She even looks like Fay, which helps explain why she has such an easy time manipulating him.
He’s a fundamentally decent human being with morals. In noirs, there’s a name for people like that: suckers.
In a bid to evade Vince and his fury, Fay pays Jack ten thousand dollars to fake her death so that she can start a new life with a new name and a new hair color.
In true femme fatale form, Fay is ruthless. Every relationship is transactional. Men are just a way to get money. Jack is just another fool she can use and discard.
Fay seals the deal with sex. She’s a tease who understands just how easy, fun, and lucrative exploiting dopes can be.
Out of desperation and lust, Jack accepts the assignment despite knowing, on some level, that Fay is no damn good at all.
Jack knows he shouldn’t trust her, but he doesn’t exactly have better options. The devilish diva discards Jack the moment she no longer has any use for him, but Vince isn’t about to let his ex get away with robbing and assaulting him.
The genius of Madsen was that he didn’t have to act tough: he was tough. He didn’t need to do anything to cut a terrifying figure.
A few years before Resevoir Dogs, Kill Me Again had Michael Madsen terrorize a man tied to a chair, in this case Jack’s best, and perhaps only, friend, a piano salesman played by Jonathan Gries.
I vaguely recalled Madsen torturing Gries to a peppy pop tune, possibly something by Stealers Wheel, but I remembered wrong.
Kill Me Again takes its title from Fay’s request that Jack “kill” her a second time to get her off the radar of law enforcement and her killer ex.
Kilmer exuded prickly intelligence as an actor. One of the reasons Kill Me Again didn’t receive a wide release is that Kilmer and MGM were lukewarm about it. Kilmer insisted that his character spend much of the film impersonating Mark Twain to evade Vince, but Dahl turned him down flatly, leading to tension.
That’s right: Val Kilmer starred in a movie where he was described as difficult and reportedly did not get along with his director. That may be hard to believe, but it’s true.
Despite being gorgeous, gifted, and smart, Kilmer makes for a surprisingly convincing patsy.
Kill Me Again isn’t anywhere near as well-known as Dahl’s follow-ups, Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, but is every bit as accomplished a neo-noir.
Neo-noirs age better than seemingly any other genre or sub-genre because they’re rooted in the style and sensibility of movies from the 1940s and 50s rather than the present.
Kill Me Again feels like it was made in 1949 as much as it looks like the product of the late 1980s. In his masterful debut outing, Dahl possessed a unique understanding of the visual language and themes of Neo-noir.
He made a movie rooted in the gloomy fatalism of classic noir, devoid of posturing and posing. Dahl’s debut is effortless and authentic, a dark tale of greed, lust, and brutality.
It’s just what I needed to return to writing about films here. Watching the stellar work of two actors who died within months of each other helped distract me from thinking about my own father’s death.
It turns out that I LOVE movies. And I love my work. And I love y’all.
Welcome back, me! Stay a while, won’t you?
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