Back in 2008, one of The Big Bang Theory’s biggest actors starred in a superb slasher horror that almost everyone missed out on thanks to the unfortunate timing of its release. Much like the cast of Friends, the lead actors of The Big Bang Theory parlayed their success in the sitcom to become major stars after its 2019 series finale. However, not all of them were plucked from obscurity to star in the series. While Jim Parsons was a relative unknown before the show began, Johnny Galecki had starred in everything from Blossom to Roseanne throughout his childhood and teens.
Similarly, although Kunal Nayyar and Simon Helberg were hardly household names, Kaley Cuoco was already a sitcom veteran thanks to her roles in 2001’s Ladies Man and 2002’s 8 Simple Rules. While The Big Bang Theory launched her career into the stratosphere, Cuoco had also already appeared in numerous movies before the series began. Most of her earlier efforts were children’s films and comedies, but April 2008 saw the release of her lone horror effort to date, the indie slasher Killer Movie. A clever self-aware horror in the vein of the Scream movies, Killer Movie remains criminally underrated 18 years later.
Kaley Cuoco’s Killer Movie Is A Criminally Underrated Indie Slasher
Directed by reality TV veteran Jeff Fisher, Killer Movie satirizes the director’s old stomping ground in its witty story. The movie follows the opportunistic director Jack Tanner, who travels along with his production team to a small town to make a series about their promising hockey team. To his chagrin, Tanner is told that celebrity wild child Bianca Champion will be part of the show or the producers will pull the plug on his funding.
Soon, however, the director and his spoiled star have bigger problems to handle than their clashing egos. Someone starts killing off the locals and, eventually, members of the production team, and the masked murderer is clearly making their way to Tanner and Champion. As familiar as these story elements may sound, Killer Movie’s whodunit plot is genuinely tense and unpredictable, and its kills are nastier than viewers might expect from a late ‘00s indie slasher.
Killer Movie Arrived At The Wrong Time For Kaley Cuoco’s Career
Cuoco is a hoot as Bianca, while The Vampire Diaries star Paul Wesley gives a superb central performance as the slippery, cynical, but ultimately well-meaning antihero. With a supporting role for pre-Gossip Girl Leighton Meester as an ill-fated local, Killer Movie has an impressively stacked cast, and Fisher’s obvious familiarity with the internal workings of the reality TV industry lends the movie’s satirical script real bite. Sadly, its timing was all wrong for a dark, R-rated slasher comedy.
Killer Movie arrived in early 2008, right before The Big Bang Theory blew up and became truly huge. A year later, the movie might have been a massive hit thanks to the presence of Cuoco, Wesley, and Meester after their combined career boosts. Instead, although the next two decades would treat viewers to a slew of critically acclaimed self-aware slasher comedies like Cabin in the Woods, the Happy Death Day movies, the Ready or Not series and Scream reboot movies, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Totally Killer, Heart Eyes, and Clown in a Cornfield, Killer Movie came a few years too early to cash in on this trend.