- Title: Instinct to Kill
- IMDb: link
2001’s Instinct to Kill is a bad, cheap movie that may or may not have been made for the change someone found in their couch. Mark Dacascos stars as a former cop turned protection expert JT Dillion whose latest client (Missy Crider) is the emotionally-frazzled and abused wife of a serial killer (Tim Abell) who has just escaped from the local mental hospital. Out for revenge against the wife and cop (Kadeem Hardison) who helped put him away, our killer will eventually catch back up with Tess to harass her once more while carving a new line of bodies to her door.
Shoddily filmed with minimal effort made to any aspect of the movie from the script to its action scenes, calling Instinct to Kill a B-movie seems like an insult to the genre. I’ve seen fan films with higher production values than this “finished” product.
Featuring locations which look to have been chosen for free access and hastily put-together low-impact stunt sequences, the film is laughably bad (and that’s not even mentioning the dialogue, the low-rent disguises of our killer, or the obvious stunt doubles seen in multiple action scenes). Crider works fine as the wife scared out of her mind but never really transforms into vengeful heroine necessary to sell the film’s final act. Because of that, too much of the film has to be thrust upon the shoulders of Dacascos as her protector (undercutting her own journey) and the her killer husband.
There’s a kernel of a story here involving the wife of an abusive husband, and that husband being a talented killer and mastermind (which is often referred to but rarely showcased), but the execution leaves much to be desired. For reasons passing understanding, the movie is being rereleased on Blu-ray.
