I recently read an interview with Jeff Carroll, the writer and producer of this independent film ‘Gold Digger Killer’ who is a very impressive young man and reading his words has raised my appreciation for him, his film, and what he was attempting to accomplish with this movie of his. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to go light on the brother when examining ‘Gold Digger Killer’, just that I respect and appreciate the message that he was trying to put across, less so the way it actually came across.

Any film that opens with some woman sitting on a toilet, distraught because she’s pregnant and holding bent clothes hanger should be a clear indication that we’re not gearing up for a light breezy Sunday ride in the park. This scene is merely conversation fodder for three women who are sitting in an abortion clinic. Shante is in for her fifth, count ‘em, fifth abortion while getting support from her girls Shaniqua and Imani who happens to have the car. Now I have no idea how much condoms and / or birth control pills cost but it’s gotta be a more economical birth control solution than abortions. Anyway, the ladies are giving Imani a hard time because her whip is jacked, her clothes are suspect and she’s always broke. Her girls consider Imani’s plight self-inflicted since she could be rolling with a baller which would fix all of her financial troubles, but instead she sticks with her law school attending, job no-having, wacky device inventing boyfriend and seems to be more than happy with him.

Oh well. With hoochies in one ear and a broke down ride hollering in her other ear, Imani gets completely fed up with her broke ass boyfriend and his pointless (for the moment) magical remote door unlocking invention and goes out baller hunting. On this fateful evening Imani meets the high rolling Flip at a club and agrees to go out with him hopefully ending her financial woes. Bad move because once girlfriend gets to the hotel for the ‘date’ she gets all GHB’d up and gang raped for her trouble. Unfortunately for these suckaz, they picked the wrong one. At first it started out as simple revenge, but

with Imani becoming increasingly cracked mentally, a dude simply asking for directions is liable to get an armor piercing bullet through the brain. Obviously shooting people in the head is against the law in most states and goofy policeman Kareem is being sent undercover to flush out the ‘Gold Digger Killer’. Thing is that Kareem is the anti-player with a jacked up ride and negative game, and there is a side story to this flick describing how he would like to be a player because he feels this is the only way he can get a woman’s attention. With the body count getting really high and Kareem’s superiors applying mad pressure to close the case, these two are on a collision course. Gold Digger’s and playa’s alike had better WATCH OUT!

Actually in this movie Imani is really killing the Gold as opposed to the diggers but ‘Gold Killaz’ just doesn’t have any kind of ring to it. There’s so much more to ‘Gold Digger Killer’ than Imani walking around straight blasting fools as the film largely deals with the modern urban concepts of love and dating. We are a witness to various groups talking about the down sides of playa’s and Gold Diggers, talk shows talking about the subject, poets espousing on the subject at hand and comedians cracking jokes about Gold Diggers. Most of these are separate entities from the film itself and this takes away from what the film does best which is watching Imani play Ms. 45 as she descends deeper and deeper into a crazed insanity.

Technically speaking ‘Gold Digger Killer’ suffers from a lot of the things we see in low bud indi films with spotty sound in some scenes, some inconsistent lighting and shaky editing. The biggest problem though, as cute as she may be, is that Shatara Curry as Imani isn’t much of an actress. Hers was a character that was supposed traverse a gamut of emotions from loyal girlfriend, to fed up girlfriend, to distraught rape victim, to crazed murderous lunatic but the only emotion Ms. Curry could offer up was varying degrees of benign indifference. Actually she was way more pissed off that her boyfriend didn’t have a job than she was at being drugged and gang raped. Still I was able to adjust to her performance, partly because she is really good looking and because you just accepted this is nature of the character she was portraying. However it seemed at the outset that there was going to be more of a relationship between Imani and Kareem, but this never materialized and despite the flaws of the film, I was still really starting to get into it, but it almost just ended without warning. It just felt like there was something more that was supposed to happen. I’m never one to champion that any movie be longer than it need be, but it felt like another 10 minutes or so would have done ‘Gold Digger Killer’ some good.

‘Gold Digger Killer’ was an interesting film with some important things to say but it felt like it departed from the core of the film to often to lay some forced morality on us when it would have been better if it could have integrated this more into the story itself. This would have made the narrative flow much more smoothly and left more room to develop the principle characters. Still an interesting watch though it probably could have been better constructed.