User Reviews

This is a truly terrible film, that frankly doesn't need to exist. The basic premise was reasonably interesting, being set in Britain and about a normal guy, after some sort of nuclear war. Unfortuneatly the entire thing devolves into a putrid mess of cliché, and a teddy bear that acts everyone else in this pile of drek off the screen. Teds performance is a tour de force compared to all the human actors. I don't want my money back, so much as I would rather pay more money to ensure no one involved in this project ever worked in film again. Quite frankly, insulting. If I had my way, Every copy of this film would be melted down and the plastic used to do something useful, though the aura of fail surrounding the film would doubtless taint whatever product was made with it, possibly compelling all within a hundred feet to use stilted dialogue and be utterly unconvincing-I was very aware I was watching a film at all times, and an awful film at that. I can only hope my words can express even a fraction of the horror that is watching this. Though you may get a giggle out of Ted.

Unlike many of the shot on videos featured on the site the last few days, The Killing Edge was directed by someone who had made several films, Lindsay Shonteff. One of his first films was 1964's Devil Doll, but he may be best-known for a series of James Bond remix remake ripoff movies that started with Licensed to Kill and continued to include Spy Story, No. 1 of the Secret Service, Licensed to Love and Kill and Number One Gun. He also made The Million Eyes of Sumuru, Permissive, Night After Night After Night and as budgets lowered in the mid 80s, he started shooting on video. Beyond this movie, he also made the video giallo Lipstick and Blood.

Working from a script by Robert Bauer (who also wrote Shonteff's Vietnam movie How Sleep the Brave), this is the story of a man - Bill French (Steve Johnson) - wandering the post-apocalyptic wastelands with only a stuffed teddy bear as he searches for his family, who he finds just in time for them to be killed by robotic Terminators, which is why this was released in West Germany as Killing Edge - Super Gau Terminator.

They are not robots. This is not exciting. In fact, it seems like it was made up while it was being made, just like many shot on video projects. The difference is, again, Shonteff who at one point was someone who made actual films.

I first watched The Killing Edge back in the mid 1990's when I found it on the bargain-price rental shelf at our local video shop. As I had never heard of the film before, and taking into consideration that this was a British, (And therefore shot on a shoestring budget!), post-apocalypse film, I had an idea that it was going to be a pretty poor excuse for a film. The storyline is pretty weak and full of holes, there has been a nuclear war that has wiped out most of civilisation, those survivors left alive are being rounded up by the remnants of the army and either shot out hand or forced to work the land, watched over by "The Terminators". The killing Edge follows one survivor, an ex-soldier who survived the holocaust thanks to being in a motorway tunnel when the attack happened, make his way through the contaminated wastelands in search of the wife and child he left at home on the morning of the war. The film is amazingly bad, for the most part the costumes appear to have come from really bad 1980's army surplus and charity shops, the acting is wooden and totally unconvincing. The sets range from a random field, an old gravel pit/landfill site, and supermarket car park on a Sunday morning and a foul 80's show home. This film really must have had a budget of about 10p. However, this is a good film if you can manage to open your mind and revel in its utter crapulence, so many plot holes, such little acting talent, bad costumes, bad props, bad sets, bad sound, you will wonder exactly how it was possible for someone to make such a rubbish film?! Furthermore, every time I have watched the killing edge I am left feeling utterly depressed, there are no high points to the film whatsoever. I must say that the theme music is genuinely excellent, a moody 80's synth tune that sounds like some old boy came up with it one afternoon whilst sitting at his new Casio keyboard on an easter bank holiday in 1985. Anyway, if you see this film at a bootfair or second hand shop part with your 50p, take it home and watch it.