Just released on digital Staten Cousins Roe’s A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life, is an ink black horror comedy that rips the very soul out of the personal development industry. Katie Brayben in Lou a downtrodden 30 something who still lives with her mum and works in an ice cream parlour in a boring seaside town. Katie finds solace and hope in the words of life coach Chuck Knoah and its at a personal development seminar that she meets Val (Poppy Roe, the wife of the director, who also produced and edited the movie)
Val is perfectly made up, super confident and has the kind of cheekbones you could slice meat on. Lou falls under her spell and joins her on a road trip to seek the path towards spiritual self enlightenment through a series of personal development therapy groups. Only thing is Val is a serial murderer.

I really loved A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life. It’s an extremely dark funny film, with a superlative performance from Poppy Roe, who is all perfect red lipstick and ice cold attitude as Val. It’s been compared to Thelma and Louise crossed with Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers and I think that’s not a bad comparison, since Val and Lou bond on the road while essentially murdering most of the folk around them. Meanwhile the life coaches and management gurus are ruthlessly parodied for the lunatics, charlatans and fraudsters that so many of them genuinely are.
If you are someone who has been working for a big corporation where you have been routinely subjected to mind-numbingly dreadful courses run by self confident fraudsters who have sold their services to a gullible management, afraid to call out the emperor for not wearing any clothes this is definately the film for you.
Darkly funny decadent fun we give A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life a big 666/666
A Serial Killers Guide to Life is out now on iTunes and Digital HD
Leave a Reply