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There are a lot of good movies in the "crime-gone-wrong" sub-genre: Reservoir Dogs, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and of course the wonderful Dog Day Afternoon. William Friedkin, of The Exorcist fame, has teamed up with playwrite Tracy Letts to produce a darkest of dark comedies in the same vein: Killer Joe. It's dank, it's filthy, it's funny, and it's painfully brutal. It received an NC-17 rating. I know why. It is quite horribly, even clinically violent...one particular scene is of such a violently-degraded sexual nature that it is jaw-dropping. I've never seen a scene like it, and don't really want to. Yes, it's that harsh. Fried chicken takes on an ominous cast in the rearview, here. Matthew McConaughey is flat out brilliant as the title character (yes...you read that correctly). He's Joe, a Dallas police Detective who moonlights as a contract killer, at $25 000 a pop. He's one scary SOB...but this is no standard thriller, so he's no standard villain. A villain he is, sure, but so is everybody else. Chris, a small-time drug dealer, a dim bulb who is still probably the most intelligent person in his southern-fried, poverty-stricken and degraded liitle dysfunctional family, is going to be murdered by loan sharks. But he has discovered that his mother has a tidy life insurance policy. So he and his father, Ansel, decide to have her killed. The beneficiary is sexpot girl-child Dottie, the only person faintly resembling "sweet" in this dank, unpleasant movie. Except Dottie is more than meets the eye, too, as we eventually find out. Ansel is played by Thomas Hayden Church, and he is so good that only he can match McConaughey. Ansel is not very bright, he's perfectly aware of his shortcomings...and he is also quite a horrible person, moral weakness personified. Ansel's wife Sharla (his new wife, not his ex, the one to be murdered), played by Gina Gershon, is if anything the worst of the whole lot. So, these cornpone morons decide to kill the woman, and collect the money. But Killer Joe is more than they bargained for. Smooth, seductive, cold and all Business, he's a psychopathic entrepreneur, and quickly puts everybody under his thumb. Including young Dottie, whom he takes as sexual collateral until the money is paid. The thing is, as events unfold (and they unfold badly, of course), it seems that Killer Joe has also met more than he bargained for: the family is so dysfunctional, so monumentally stupid, that things don't go as smoothly as planned, all his care and masterful control notwithstanding. The last twenty minutes of this movie are so extreme that it's put some people off (and earned it the NC-17). It worked for me, but I get the criticisms, I really do. Obviously, the 77-year-old Friedkin has no qualms about shock and excess. Also, it's quite painfully depressing, and I think a sort of pessimistic parable of life at the beginning of the 21st century: perverse sex, lots of violence, casual murder, sheer greed, tv....crushing financial problems...and fried chicken. And did I mention that it's actually a comedy?