Natural Born Killers: 20th Anniversary Edition

“In the media circus of life they were the main attraction!” So ran the tagline for Oliver Stone’s incendiary satire, a typically bullish implementation in tabloid-baiting distress-making that can justly be accused of wallowing in the same excesses it slams. Twenty years on, does it still pack a punch? Or has it been upstaged and out-gored in the interim – not least by Quentin Tarantino, whose Kill Bill films put more carnage on screen than Stone could possibly have gotten away with?

Tarantino, of course, was where Killers started; it was his screenplay that Stone adapted in the teeth of his fellow director’s objections. (“It’s not my shit,” he would later kvetch. “If you take my script and you fuck it up, I am not cool with that.”)

Yet there is nary a mention of the Reservoir Dogs man in this 20th anniversary reissue, which rather misleadingly implies this report of trailer trash nut-jobs on a killing spree sprang fully formed from Stone’s own psyche. (In the Method In The Madness featurette, editor Hank Corwin even suggests the movie was “made from the subconscious”.)

Such a position no doubt makes sense from a legal standpoint. But it does mean that a crucial piece of the puzzle is missing here, along with the shotgun blast-hole in Robert Downey Jr.’s hand and the decapitated Tommy Lee Jones head Stone reinstated in his director’s cut. Additional additions from that version – among them Ashley Judd being despatched with a pencil on the witness stand – are saved for a deleted scenes section that comes with an optional Stone intro.

There is also the alternative ending in which Woody Harrelson’s Mickey and Juliette Lewis’ Mallory get their comeuppance – a scene that, if included in the over-the-top version, might well have silencedmuch of the evaluation it received on initial release. Sure, the violence still shocks. Yet it’s not half as visceral as Stone’s stylistic overkill with its barrage of clashing stocks, disconcerting rear projections and relentless, staccato editing.

Not for nothing does co-producer Jane Hamsher – author of 1997’s Killer Instinct, often considered the definitive NBK chronicle – call it “the largest experimental film ever made”. Indeed, it is honest to say that few movies since have equalled Stone’s sensory assault on the viewer – an effect Jones cannily compares to Picasso’s Guernica painting in 2001 documentary Chaos Rising: The Storm Around Natural Born Killers.

Looking back, said storm now looks like something of the teacup variety. The world has went on since 1994 – and in truth, it’s left Natural Born Killers behind. Case in point? Don Murphy, one of its producers, now makes the Transformers films. Maybe NBK does have something to answer for after all…