Killing Zoe (1994)

Excellent but underrated film

Absolutely the worst movie.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

This film may have a really low budget, but it more than makes up for this in terms of manic energy. What we have here is essentially a heist movie in the DOG DAY AFTERNOON mould. Quentin Tarantino acts as executive producer and his influence obviously comes through in Roger Avary's style - it's a film packed with manic characters, lots of intense bits, graphic violence, and irrelevant dialogue.The film's overall impression is lowered by the boring first half, where nothing much really happens. There's a lot of character-building, too much in fact, and the lack of budget really shows here. In some ways it feels like an art-house movie and far too much time is spent on drug-induced nightmares like when Stoltz finds himself vomiting in a bathroom where two homosexuals go about their business nearby. It's very unpleasant and not very enjoyable to watch. In the film's sex scene, near the beginning, we see two lovers combined with clips from NOSFERATU playing on a nearby television - I'm not sure what message they were trying to put across here, but it's extremely surreal.Things really kick up a gear when our characters (eventually) arrive at the bank and almost immediately their plan starts to go awry and they start massacring the hostages and employees of the bank. Soon enough the police find out and retaliate with events culminating in a final, bloody shootout with bullets and bodies flying everywhere - this is where the film really comes into its own, a violent showdown done in a commendably old-fashioned style. The acting is fine, with Eric Stoltz cast against type as the softly-spoken leading man, a character whom we can emphasise with (his shooting of the blown-up guard is suitably powerful). Julie Delpy provides some glamour as his love interest who gets caught up in all the shooting, while Jean-Hugues Anglade is excellent as the psychopathic ringleader who loses it big time at the end. The final showdown between Stoltz and Anglade is excellent, seemingly lasting forever and totally riveting. Anglade's inevitable death really fits the bill of his crimes in this case, as he gets shot in slow-motion about a zillion times.KILLING ZOE may not be an original or particularly brilliant film, but fans of heist thrillers won't go wrong here and it has an independent, offbeat slant to it to make it commendable viewing.

This film has a lot of Tarintino influence in it, especially as he helped director Roger Avary make it. Like From Dusk Til Dawn, Killing Zoe spends the first half of the movie setting the scene and the rest of the movie with the action. Killing Zoe is a low budget film made in Los Angeles with a few Parisian shots. This is also Avary's first movie and I think he has some talent.Zed (Eric Stolz) has been invited to Paris by an old friend, Eric (Jean-Hughes Anglade) to crack a safe in a bank. Zed is a professional, and we see this as he sets to work opening a safe, yet he is a quiet humble man who prefers to make love than to kill. He is also a man who is easily manipulated and Eric does this quite regularly in the movie. We see Zed being forced into taking drugs and having women dragged away from him because Eric doesn't particularly like them. He is also taken of a tour through a very dark side of Paris where we see drugs, sleazy women, and men screwing like animal (I use such terminology because it is only for the selfish desire of pleasure). The next day, Bastille Day, he then must participate in a daring bank robbery. Daring because everybody is hung over, or still on drugs; it is a high security bank; and it seems very little planning has gone into it.Eric is not the typical Hollywood robber. He kills at a whim and has no preferences to who he will kill. He murders a woman and a man and lets another man go free. In fact Eric seems to have a thing against women as he brutally throws Zoe (Julie Delpy) out of the room when he first meets Zed and throws another whore across the room when she tries to seduce Zed (even though he cannot understand her). He kills people on a whim and represents the worst that humanity can offer.Zoe is another character who begins as a prostitute yet does not want to think of herself as one. She needs to money to get through school and just considers the job as a little thing on the side. Yet she knows what she is, and even though she considers herself beautiful and refined, everybody else treats her as a whore. The reality of what she does hits home when she listens to three men tell a joke about a whore.Killing Zoe is a reasonable movie and good for a low budget production. Much of the movie was spoken in French which is supposed to reflect the fact that it was in France, but this didn't irritate me as it did in Stargate when everybody spoke ancient Egyptian. Still it is a good movie and worth a watch if you can handle drugs and brutal violence.

On my view, I do admit I was a bit disappointed. Give it a few views, I was entertained intensely. First we have Paris, one of the most beautiful cities of the world, though we don't get to see much of it in this. Granted, this is no Pulp Fiction, some of it's dialogue with it's intellectual humor, leads us to question Quentin might of got his pen a little wet here. Like Reservoir Dogs, we have a heist gone wrong, amidst a little frank and shocking violence. (Eric) Jean Hughes Anglande has invited a childhood friend over, safe cracker Zed (Stoltz) he hasn't seen in some time. They're to do over a big bank on Bastille day, where the night before they get on the p**s and H, so obviously we're in the hand of some real experts. This too becomes a shock to Zed, who's only given a day's notice, not even having time to checked the bank out. In part, as seen to the amateur display of activities by our thieves, in these ugly masks, you could silently label this as an anti drug movie. Now here's the fun angle to the title. On the day of Zed's arrival, he's sent an escort, Zoe, (Julie Delpy) who just happens to work at the same bank, they do over, where Zed caught at a pivotal moment, towards it's end, is forced to make a choice, and I did too like the way it ended. Too, Eric's drunken admittance of aids, to Zed, made sense in the way he literally shoved Zoe out of his room, after the two's little interlude. Loved the cool opening plus it's title song, where were shown numerous streets of Paris, as if from a driver's POV. I loved the end song too, with Delpy saying "Let me show you the real Paris". Also Stoltz's whacked out POV, of visible music tunes, drifting out of friend, Anglande's trumpet. Not for all Tarantino fans.

You can completely skip the boring and utterly annoying first hour to go to the second half. The drama in it is really lame. They try to spice it up with controversial topics ( AIDS, hookers ) but in the end that is just to cover up the lack of good ideas to make an innovative action movie. From a bad executed drama it suddenly turns into a nice gangster comedy like Reservoir Dogs. Everything just leads up to the robbing of the bank and the dark humor that goes along with it. Okay, so it's all a bit clichéd, but who cares...? This is not world class cinema, but it is good enough for a boring Saturday eve. Just don't watch it with too many expectations. And don't think that something produced by Tarantino makes it into a new Pulp Fiction, it just doesn't.