With its gripping story telling, deep-meaningful characters that are easy to relate to, and high-end production values. How could they not continue on with the series? All joking aside, it seems as if they have finally dropped the ruse of selling these movies as being horror and gialli-ish type films, even though, they clearly are anything but. With part four though, they did drop a lot of the horror and thriller elements and dumped in a bunch more sex and nudity instead. I really didn't know it was possible, but apparently it was. There is still a story in "Fantom Kiler 4", it's just as bad the previous three entries, but Nowicki managed to pull it off a bit better this time around. Actually what helped to make the story a better than the other three movies comes from the twist at the end. I won't spoil it, incase there is the one person out there who, for whatever reason, actually cares about that. For most of the movie though, it stays similar to the other "Fantom Kiler" movies by having a detective trying to track down the madman. Only this time it's a female detective, Sylvia Kovak, and instead of random victims the Fantom goes after those who are close to Sylvia. Only her female friends of course. As usual the women are sexually violated before Sylvia can do anything to stop it, all the while the Fantom plays games with her to help release her sexual frustration. So it seems more or less that there is less of a plot to make room for more sex, but it isn't until the end that you actually understand the reasoning behind everything and actually gives the characters some reasonable motivation. Then again, maybe I so desperately wanted there to be reason, as a way to make it feel like watching these movies isn't such a complete waste, that I'm reading more into the movie than there actually is. Even though there is more nudity and sex this time around, it actually feels that it has gone in a much darker direction in this installment. There was always this bit of misogynist feeling to the other "Fantom Kiler" titles, but really not much worse than other softcore titles that overly sexualizes women. With part four though, the sex seems to have become much more demeaning and aggressive. With scenes of the Fantom coming into Sylvia's room at night then penetrates and masturbates her with the barrel of a pistol, some very rough groping and fingering to some of the victims, and some of the women being forced to strip then being humiliated. Of course these scenes are still meant to be erotic and stimulating, since that's always been the purpose behind these movies. It's just that in comparison to the other three, where the women were occasionally humiliated or treated roughly but were still done in a manner that was meant to be erotic. Where as in this installment, it seems that they were going for more of the demeaning aspect while being arousing. "Fantom Kiler 4" is definitely the best installment in the series in terms of quality, and definitely kicked things up a notch by becoming more hardcore with its sex scenes. It is still laughably bad though with the male characters wearing cheap old-man masks, all the actors speaking very rough English, and pretty much everything else from the past movies that were bad. In the end though, "Fantom Kiler 4" is what it is, and is created to fill in that certain niche of perverted horror movies. Though this time around it doesn't try as hard to pretend to be anything more than that.
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