The video game-inspired chaotic action of Boy Kills World will be coming to physical media in 4K UHD glory from Lionsgate.
Boy Kills World is one of many box office victims from this year. However, after its April release, Lionsgate is preparing to bring the mayhem home in crisp clarity on July 9 as the Bill Skarsgård actioner has been announced to have a 4K UltraHD Blu-ray release, courtesy of Blu-ray.com. The film had a pretty warm, but mediocre reception, getting a 59% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with a 72% audience score. But our own Chris Bumbray was grinning ear-to-ear with it, saying in his review, “The movie itself is a pretty wild, dystopian action epic with heavy doses of black comedy and outrageousness mixed in. […] Overall, I had a total blast with this demented actioner. Director Moritz Mohr makes an impressive debut, and the film includes enough world-building that it could easily spawn a franchise.”
The description reads,
“Skarsgård stars as ‘Boy’ who avows revenge after his family is murdered by Hilda Van Der Koy (Janssen), the deranged matriarch of a corrupt post-apocalyptic dynasty that left the boy orphaned, deaf and voiceless. Driven by his inner voice, one which he co-opted from his favorite childhood video game, Boy trains with a mysterious shaman (Ruhian) to become an instrument of death and is set loose on the eve of the annual culling of dissidents. Bedlam ensues as Boy commits bloody martial arts mayhem, inciting a wrath of carnage and blood-letting. As he tries to get his bearings in this delirious realm, Boy soon falls in with a desperate resistance group, all the while bickering with the apparent ghost of his rebellious little sister.”
The details and specs for the film have yet to be released. However, the film notoriously sports two different cuts that involve the narration aspect of the film. It could be possible that the Blu-ray releases had alternate tracks where you can switch from both.
The plot depicts Skarsgård’s Boy character as being a deaf-mute, but he still has an inner monologue. In the TIFF version, Skarsgård would naturally provide the voiceover. According to Chris Bumbray’s multiple viewings of the different cuts, in the final version, “Skarsgard himself doesn’t provide the voice-over, which H. Jon Benjamin of Archer fame does. The conceit is that the narration is the last voice Boy heard before going deaf, being the voice of an over-the-top 80s-style arcade game. In the version that I saw originally, this idea was dropped, with Skarsgard narrating the whole film himself in an unaffected voice. I believe there’s yet another cut out there where Skarsgard himself does the video game voice, which was teased in a promo trailer that leaked months before the movie played TIFF.”
If you saw Boy Kills World, what were your impressions? Would you be interested in hearing the alternate narrations?
