The best part of the backstory on this bad boy is that it was re-titled Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! for international release. Who knows if it were good or bad but this “overkill” if you’ll excuse the pun probably didn’t make the critics go any easier on it. The reviews I saw were dire, and why not? Does everything James Mason appeared in have to be good? Was he allowed stinkers? I know I’ve seen a few. Seems to me he took pretty much any role that came his way. A man has to get paid, ya know? Why not? Why not a shitty mafia/drug cartel movie? Doesn’t seem they spared expense. They dragged film crews to Spain, Tunisia and Afghanistan so the locations at least must’ve been interesting. I’d probably check it out if only for the extra Kills and exclamation points. And the soundtrack is fierce.

Does it stand alone as a cool album? Yes. Would smoking a block of hashish enhance the experience? Probably. Especially when it gets to the last track which is a reprise of the opening track, but with a fucking fabulously bad vocal performance… it’s truly bad. Just bad. So bad it’s actually good. Entertaining anyway. But really, except for that last one, it’s solid album all around. It’s the grooviest of the groovy. The last line of the song is literally:

Kill them! Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!

I guess that’s where the extra kills came from.

The movie, by the way, co-stars Jean Seberg, and released in 1971 it was probably filmed at the height of whatever her involvement with the Black Panthers actually was. Interesting politics there, and a not atypical FBI vendetta that may have forced her to an early death. That’s another story for another time though.