I’ve seen some bad openings, but Cold Blooded Killers has one of the worst I’ve seen in quite a while. Between the overwrought dialogue, “I’ll hunt you to hell and back. I’ll rip out your heart and feed it to you.”, lacklustre action choreography and shitty CGI. The scene is a perfect storm of suckage.
A couple is sitting down to dinner when the doorbell rings. The husband goes to answer it. We hear gunshots and a woman, who we will learn is Rose (Felissa Rose, A Nun’s Curse, Knifecorp) walks in and gets into a firefight with the wife who has a small arsenal stashed under the sink. Unfortunately, she can’t hit anything as she goes from pistol to machine pistol to full-auto assault rifle. Rose kills her then haggles over the price with the guy who ordered the hit.
The couple’s daughter, who looks to be all of twelve then shows up and starts blazing away at Rose, with aim as good as her mother’s. Rose starts trying to justify what she did to the kid, then kills her anyway.
Honestly, if it wasn’t for the film’s cast I would have turned Cold Blooded Killers off at this point. I should have anyway because it doesn’t get any better. We quickly find ourselves in The Golden Monkey, a strip club full of lethargic dancers who have knife fights in the dressing room. The camera freeze frames on Misty (Nicole Cinaglia, Paranormal Attraction, Hunting Lands) her name pops up on the screen as a voiceover tells us who she is in case we’re blind. She soon ends up dead. Or maybe not. That matters because she was Rose’s sister. It also matters because we’ll get several more of these stupid intros as the film goes on.
One minute the cops are saying Misty was found dead. The next we hear she was kidnapped and still missing, while the club’s owner, Becky (Caroline Williams, Ten Minutes To Midnight, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), screams at the cops to find Tammi’s killer. This makes as much sense as Rose apparently having been on the run for the past five years but driving a shiny new Camaro with custom plates that read KILLER next to a red rose (Cold Blooded Killers was shot as Killer Rose). Not exactly what I’d do if I was trying to avoid being found.
It all has something to do with Hank (Dave Sheridan, The Resort, The Special) who’s developed an app for connecting hit men, drug dealers, pimps, etc. with customers. And who wants revenge on Rose for killing his brother. All of this involves annoying comic relief cops, double-crosses, badly staged action scenes and not one bit of sense.
Cold Blooded Killers is billed on IMDB as a horror film and released by TriCoast Entertainment’s horror label DarkCoast. It also has a cast full of horror veterans. Apart from Rose, Williams, and Sheridan, there’s Yan Birch (Terror Tales, The People Under the Stairs), Brinke Stevens (Rattlers 2, Slumber Party Massacre), Sheri Davis (Tales for the Campfire 3, The Devils Heist), and Ricky Dean Logan (Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and probably a few others I missed.
But Cold Blooded Killers is much more of an action film with assorted paid killers killing each other off. Some of them are psychopathic, but that hardly makes it a horror movie. Nor does a couple of not very gory chainsaw killings. The scariest thing in the film is Hank’s facial hair. Well, that and the fact it got released.
It might not be fair to lay all of the blame at the feet of writer/director Rickey Bird Jr. (Booze, Broads, and Blackjack, Left Alone in the Snow) though. I’ve heard from someone who worked on Cold Blooded Killers that there were problems on the set. Those problems included Bird being denied the edit he was promised and new scenes being shot by someone else. If that’s the case it would explain the continuity issues mentioned earlier. It might also explain how it went from a film pitched as, and cast like, a horror flick to the action film that was released.
Cold Blooded Killers is available to stream.
Hey Jim. I worked on this mess. I think you should know that Director Rickey Bird jr had zero to do with the opening scene. It was added after the fact along with other scenes NOT shot by him. You can see the scenes Rickey shot and the ones added after the fact. A Ton of broken promises on this Film. Their biggest fuck up was not allowing Rickey to edit the film. Would it have been a Classic? Nope. Would it have made more sense and be more enjoyable? I would bet on it. You capping on how bad the beginning scene is. Well true. It being shot by Rickey Bird jr? False. I get it. The movie is a total mess.. But saying Rickey did stuff he had no part of should be retracted…
Thanks for the heads up, I’ve made an update to the review.
Unfortunately, with small indie films like this there’s frequently no way of knowing about things like that unless you know somebody involved. I try to get some background on the films I review, but with Cold Blooded Killers, there’s nothing out there beyond a press release.
Hey Jim,
Thanks for reviewing the film. This was supposed to be a grindhouse action movie.
https://rickeybird.com/f/killer-rose-aka-cold-blooded-killers