Kill Squad (1982)
★★½ — Kill Squad (1982)
There's a scene in Kill Squad where a perfectly ordinary conversation, the kind that might be about shift rosters or who owes who a tenner, escalates without warning into an all-out, multi-man brawl. Nobody bats an eyelid. Nobody stops to ask why. And honestly, by that point in the film, neither do you. That's just how things work around here.
Ah, grindhouse. Where would my life be without it.
Kill Squad is exactly what it looks like on the tin, a low-budget, early eighties action romp that makes no apologies for what it is and asks very little of you in return. The acting is hammy. The script is functional at best, gloriously daft at worst. The fight choreography has all the polish of a school play rehearsal that ran out of time. And yet, I sat through the whole thing with a grin on my face, which has to count for something.
There's a specific pleasure in settling down with a film that has absolutely zero pretension. Nobody involved in Kill Squad was gunning for prestige. They were making something fast, cheap and entertaining, and on those last two counts at least, they largely pulled it off. The fights come thick and fast, even if they look like they were worked out about ten minutes before the camera rolled. The whole film has this gloriously tatty energy that I find genuinely hard to dislike.
Compare it to something like The Raid 2, where the action choreography is so precise and brutal it makes your jaw drop, and Kill Squad looks like a different planet. But that's not really a fair fight, is it. Kill Squad isn't trying to be that. It's trying to be a rollicking Friday night at the grindhouse, with a bucket of popcorn and no great expectations, and in that spirit it absolutely delivers.
I've got a soft spot for films like this, in the same way I enjoy Nightmare City: films that are, by any objective critical measure, a bit rubbish, but which carry enough manic energy and genuine enthusiasm to paper over the cracks. The people making these things weren't cynical. They wanted to entertain you, and there's warmth in that even when the results are rough around the edges.
The charm of grindhouse is that you go in knowing exactly what you're getting. The contract is clear from the opening frames. Nobody's going to hand you a slow-burn character study or a meditation on the human condition. They're going to hand you blokes hitting other blokes, a threadbare plot to hang it all on, and roughly ninety minutes of your time accounted for. Kill Squad honours that contract faithfully, even if it doesn't always honour basic things like continuity or convincing performances.
Is it good? Not really, no. Is it entertaining? Genuinely, yes. That's the grindhouse paradox, and Kill Squad sits right in the sweet spot of it. I wouldn't put it on for someone who'd never seen this kind of film before, but for anyone who already knows they enjoy this particular flavour of low-budget mayhem, it's a perfectly solid way to spend an evening.
Two and a half stars. Essentially daft, occasionally brilliant, never boring.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1982 | Watched: 2025-05-19
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Watch in the UK
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
