tdrish The Killing Of America documents real life footage of the random acts of violence that wreak havoc upon the country. There are no actors here. It's all real. The first 30 minutes of the movie examines the assassinations of some major icons, such as JFK and Martin Luther King. The middle of the film will focus more on random acts of local violence, such as school shootings and snipers. The last half of the film will focus on serial killers, such as Ted Bundy. Put them altogether, and you have one of the most disturbing classic documentaries of all time. Be warned, everything you see in the film is real, and and in extremely graphic detail. ( It cannot be denied the worst scene is seeing John F. Kennedys head ripped open by bullets. Again, this is REAL footage!) Myself, I do not enjoy seeing anybody getting hurt, much less watching children getting slain and families mourning over the deaths of many loved ones. However, this documentary is simply showing us history, up until the time of its release (1981) in the making. Fast forward to 2018, and its still very disturbing, especially when we see that things have not progressed much toward peace. I did not like the fact that most of the first half of the movie focused more on the problem with guns, and gun control. Guns are not the problem, its the person operating the gun that's the problem. We choose to hurt people. We choose to murder people. Why do so many people choose to do so? It's one of the unanswered questions to the documentary. Why are we so angry? What fuels a person with so much hate, that they perform these terrorist acts of violence? We may never know what powers such crimes, all we can do is be aware of our surroundings at all times, and NEVER take anything for granted. ( At the time of this review, Chicago has a growing number of crime and homicides, dominating record high numbers, putting Chicago at more murders a day then Los Angeles and New York combined! We are not evolving, we are dissolving here.) It's up to you weather you want to watch this or not, for sensitive viewers, it may give you nightmares. For those who wish to proceed, just understand one thing, and I will leave you with this: This is all uncensored history. You don't have to like it. You don't have to love it. You don't have to hate it, either. Just embrace it. Embrace the fact that this all happened. We don't know why. All we can do is embrace ourselves, and each other.

Richard Chatten At first the 80's graphics and synthesized music led me to expect a sleazy exploitation movie, but the eloquent and forcefully delivered commentary - the statistics are often scarier than the images - reassured me as the film progressed that it seemed seriously intended. Much of the footage I'd never seen before - such as JFK arriving at Love Field and being driven through Dallas in colour - although other film used frequently seemed to veer away from whatever central argument the film was actually advancing. At one point the film wistfully speaks of a more innocent era a quarter of a century earlier; but the increasing proliferation of atrocity footage such as we see here probably owes as much to the fact that cameras - and now mobile phones - are now ever-present to record such incidents. If the film is about America's morbid love affair with the gun, the mass poisoning of his followers ordered by the Reverend Jim Jones doesn't really belong here; while like the summary execution of Viet Cong commander Nguyen Van Lem in Saigon on 1 February 1968, which is also included, it took place thousands of miles from the United States itself. Other material - like several photographs of suicide victims - seem to have been included because the film's makers didn't want them to go to waste rather than because they were particularly relevant. Likewise serial killers like the creepy Ted Bundy and the remarkably articulate Ed Kemper don't really seem to belong in this particular documentary since they didn't shoot their victims.Another startling clip that I'd never seen before was of Lyndon Johnson himself in black & white after the University of Texas shooting in 1966 - over FIFTY YEARS ago!! - pledging new measures to prevent guns falling into the wrong hands. Before 1966 was out, America had already seen its first copycat shooting by an idiot called Robert Smith who committed a particularly cruel and cowardly mass shooting in a beauty salon in Arizona on 12 November 1966, after which he explained that "I wanted to get known - to get myself a name". He's still in jail now, and I'd ironically never heard of him before; so much for making a name for himself. Some of the 'reasons' we hear in the film are almost comically banal, while Sirhan Sirhan, as usual, seemed genuinely not to have a clue why he'd murdered Robert Kennedy.Like the clip of LBJ, the scariest thing about this film is that it was made 37 years ago and so little has changed in the intervening years. The latest mass shooting in America happened in - guess where? - Texas less than two weeks ago, and by the time you read this there'll doubtless have been others.

daniel-mannouch Though crass in some parts, The Killing of America is an accomplished, paranoia inducing travelogue through the big dog's fraught relationship with violence, made even more shattering due to the fact that whilst there might not be mania inducing levels of lead in their atmosphere anymore (For Now), the underlying problems that triggered most of this chaos still plague America today.We go from Ghetto Shootouts to Political Assassinations to Serial Killers to one of the greatest twist endings, if you can call it that, in cinema, let alone exploitation, which like I said this Mondoco does go into. It's a disturbing catalogue of tragedy, idiocy and despair at the great social experiment blowing up in people's faces. A genuine sense of panic is felt whilst watching and as this is evidently a political film about bringing to attention a nation's state of emergency, well, Mission Accomplished.The Killing of America is, whilst not for repeat viewings, a must watch if you're even half interested in Mondo.

osborneadam This documentary is about violence in America up to 1981. It was intended for a Japanese audience. There's lots of violent footage, some not readily seen anywhere else. If that's what you're looking for this is a good movie for you. But it doesn't really make a statement other than America might be more violet in 1981 than ever before. I say might because we're not sure why or by how much. There are some messed up people out there. That's what this shows you, example after example...over and over and over again. Newspaper coverage used to be as graphic as this movie. In the 1950's newspapers often included gruesome pictures of mangled injuries from auto accidents. Generally, 90% of the population are well-meaning. The other 10% are ill-intentioned or desperate enough to commit horrible things. This movie is about those 10%.