I imagine most people had the same reaction I did after watching the first half hour of Natural Born Killers. I imagine the same 6 words came out of many people's mouths. What. The. Fuck. Am. I. Watching.

This zany bloodbath of a movie was penned by none other than Quentin Tarantino and directed by Oliver Stone. The film is like a shotgun blast of weird visuals, triply editing, and over the top violence. The gimmick is fun at first. It's like being taken through a Charles Manson funhouse ride. But it frankly starts to grow thinner and thinner as the films goes on. I found that the fractured and crazy storytelling method actually became a distraction more than anything.…

"Shit, man, I'm a natural born killer"

You know what'd be great? If I gave myself a break from watching films that just want to melt my brain.

Well, let's start off with the positives, shall we? Every single performance is this film is absolute gold. There's Woody Harrelson's swaggering psychopathic Mickey, Juliette Lewis' even more psychopathic Mallory, Robert Downey Jr's arrogant, slimy Australian reporter, Tom Sizemore's sleazy detective and Tommy Lee Jones' completely mental prison warden who actually shows emotion. Yup, you read that right. Tommy Lee Jones actually loses his temper. Multiple times. And it is glorious. Then there's that script which, despite apparently a lot of changes, you can tell was originally written by Tarantino. Which also…

"You know somethin'? Bad-asses don't die, Mal." - Mickey Knox

Exactly how much LSD was Oliver Stone on when he made this movie?

Anyway, Natural Born Killers is quite simply one of the most bonkers films ever made. Seriously, it's utterly insane. It's like the contents of Patrick Bateman's mind just splashed onto 35mm prints. Most of this insanity comes from the constant use of archive footage to a bit (see: A LOT) of sensory discombobulation. Natural Born Killers is an assault of black-and-white, mixed-up soundtracks, hallucinatory colour and dream/nightmare-like imagery, and there's nothing else quite like it.

On top of Brian Berdan and Hank Corwin's over-zealous yet amazingly effective editing, there's the performances. A melodrama at heart, there are…

The first time I had seen this was also the last time until now. It must have been around 1998. I was just 15 and discovered a whole new world of filmmaking by watching Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" (1994). Since there was no internet around back then you had to trust in your local VHS-renting place and the ability of the personel to recommend you good films. For me this was my first venture into "pretentious filmmaking" and I absolutely hated it with a passion.

After watching it again today I have to admit that it actually wasn't that bad. But it's been another 15 years and I have seen a slew of pretentious crap by now. Oliver Stone tries to…

[A-]

I rewatched most of this in bits and pieces while writing a paper about the different formats Stone and Richardson used to film it. One of the more interesting discoveries I made is just how much of the film's phantasmagoric aesthetic was the product of Richardson and editor Hank Corwin (who would later work on The New World and The Tree of Life) being afforded incredible artistic license by Stone. Here's a particularly revealing quote I discovered in a recent interview with Richardson:

"It was quite a remarkable experience, I've never had anything like it. We would sit there on the set and I'd go Super 8, [Oliver] would go no 35MM, and flip a coin. And you know,…

Very much a film of its time, and as hypocritical as any satire can end up being, the gruesome 'NBK' is full of bad people doing bad things. At the heart of this dated but artfully shot film is killer couple Mickey and Mallory, played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, respectively. They are both dangerously believable in their roles as married mass murderers, tainted by generations of violence in the media. One man who is out to spoil future generations of folks is one Wayne Gale, played by a young Robert Downey Jr., who hosts an 'Americas Most Wanted' kind of show that exploits the exploits of society's dregs. The soundtrack is as trippy as the visuals, patched together…