Cindy Sherman is an artist known for her photographic self portraits. A bio on the Museum of Modern Art websight calls her “among the most significant artists of the Picture Generation, who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with both humor and criticism.” Madonna sponsored (whatever that means) MoMA’s 1997 exhibition of Sherman’s most famous series, Untitled Film Stills. It’s comprised of 69 black and white photos shot between 1977 and 1980, in which she’s posed playing various characters in fictional movies from the ‘50s and ’60s. That same year she also made her one actual movie, OFFICE KILLER.

This time Sherman pointed her camera at someone else: Carol Kane (THE PALLBEARER) as Dorine Douglas, sort of the Milton-from-OFFICE-SPACE of the Constant Consumer Magazine staff. Her late father (briefly seen as Eric Bogosian in flashbacks – a huge get since he’d already done UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY and BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD DO AMERICA) was one of the founders, but she’s kind of an under-appreciated misfit in the office, tucked away in a cluttered corner doing her copy editing.

Associate editor Mr. Landau (Mike Hodge, STRIKING DISTANCE) has known Dorine since childhood and respects her, but he’s about the only no-nonsense professional around. Most of the movie is more focused on Norah Reed (Jeanne Tripplehorn, WATERWORLD), the Princeton graduate office assistant overseeing technology upgrades; her boyfriend Daniel (Michael Imperioli, LAST MAN STANDING), contracted to set up the new computers; and bitchy Kim Poole (Molly Ringwald, SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE), who hates Dorine and calls her a “mouse.”

Norah is a sympathetic figure, forced by her chainsmoking, leather-wearing editor Virginia Wingate (Barbara Sukowa, ZENTROPA, JOHNNY MNEMONIC) to pass out the letters everyone thinks will be their restructuring pink slips. I’m unclear what the letters actually say – nobody is fired, but Dorine has to sometimes work from home.

Home is worse than work, because she’s caretaker for her mother Carlotta (Alice Drummond, WALKING AND TALKING), disabled since the car accident that killed Dorine’s father. It’s a sad life, she doesn’t really have anything for herself. But don’t worry, she picks up a new hobby!

She’s working late when the office’s biggest sleaze Gary Michaels (David Thornton, THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO) gets electrocuted trying to fix the wiring of his computer, and she decides to take his corpse home and sit it on her basement couch. Then she starts murdering other people and posing them, her own little MANIAC or TOURIST TRAP.

There’s not alot to it, it’s a relatively easy series of murders, mostly not gory, and without having to do much cover up beyond some fake emails. On the other hand it does subvert some of your expectations, because Dorine is a straight up psycho, she hasn’t really been wronged enough for this to be a wish fulfillment revenge story. In fact she (spoiler) kills Norah, who really goes out on a limb to help her, and also two innocent girl scouts, surely a violation of her code as a former scout herself. Kane has fun being a little bug-eyed weirdo with crooked, painted-on eyebrows, but because she’s Carol Kane I can’t really hate her. Ah, that’s just Carol Kane. She’s harmless, for an office killer.

I think the most interesting part is that judgmental mean girl Kim is the one who figures out Dorine is crazy and tries to stop her, with no help because no one believes her. It’s not a chase movie, but she fits some of the criteria of a final girl, including being the last survivor. She plays it sincerely and (unsurprisingly) has the compelling presence needed for me to invest in her survival.

I thought the early scenes setting up the workings of the office were promising, but it ends up feeling underbaked. I’m not clear what most people do in this office, or what is going on with the restructuring (why would she have to work from home, why does she also have to work late?), and there’s alot of set up about Gary giving everyone the same cold with, unless I missed something, no pay off.

There’s something a little interesting about Dorine recoiling at Gary’s harassing shoulder touch and Daniel’s more innocent hand touch, followed by the revelation that she (spoiler) caused her dad’s fatal car crash after he touched her knee. I like that they don’t really spell it out, but on the other hand there doesn’t seem to be a consistent theme (other women in the movie seem to like Gary’s advances, Carlotta doesn’t seem to remember that Dorine killed her husband).

Overall the movie doesn’t seem very thought out, which fits with Sherman’s description of the production in her interview alongside Ringwald on the Vinegar Syndrome special edition. She says the movie came about at her Christmas party the year before. Producer Christine Vachon (POISON, KIDS, I SHOT ANDY WARHOL) noted that other artists they knew like Julian Schnabel (BASQUIAT), David Salle (SEARCH AND DESTROY) and Robert Longo (JOHNNY MNEMONIC) had recently made movies, and she thought a woman should follow the same path.

She says they were looking to do “cheap, arthouse horror movies.” They chose four treatments written by Elise MacAdam, a student of James Schamus (CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON), had her combine them and write the first draft, later worked on by Tom Kalin (SWOON) and Vachon’s pal Todd Haynes (who gets an “additional dialogue” credit), but they hadn’t figured out the ending while filming. She says “I went into it thinking that even if it’s bad, most horror films are bad, that’s kind of how they’re supposed to be,” and later, “I like watching horror movies and laughing at them, the scarier or bloodier or gorier, you know, it’s just kind of hysterical to me. Maybe not all of them, but usually, the more over-the-top, and this one isn’t even that over-the-top. I just hope people find it entertaining.”

I imagine some horror fans would find that condescending, but I think it’s a refreshingly unpretentious aspiration for a first time director from the art world. It’s not I could make something better than that bullshit, it’s I want to make some of that bullshit. Of course, those modest ambitions gave us modest results, but I think it’s kind of great to hear her describing the way we watched horror movies as teenagers in the ‘80s instead of trying to justify her interest by assigning deeper meaning to it.

Especially since a personal meaning seems to be right there! You could say it’s another one of her self portraits. Her series Sex Pictures involved posing mannequins and prosthetic limbs, and here she has her killer alone posing corpses and imagining them alive. At the end (spoiler) Dorine is in disguise, creating a whole new character to play, like she’s making an Untitled Film Still.

Stephen Holden’s (very negative) review in the New York Times says that the editor character “suggests a nasty caricature of Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington,” which I thought was weird since she hadn’t yet founded The Huffington Post, and was known as the not-so-bad Republican pundit on Politically Incorrect and teamed with Al Franken on Comedy Central. But maybe she was someone gossiped about in fine art and movie producer Christmas party circles in New York. Holden knew who she was, at least.

Three years later Mary Harron made AMERICAN PSYCHO, a way better movie that strikes me as a little bit related in subject matter. Of course, she had a much bigger budget and more filmmaking experience.

The (also very negative) review of OFFICE KILLER in Variety mentions “Movie is one in a planned series of low-budget ($300,000) horror movies masterminded by vet indie producer Christine Vachon.” The other ones don’t seem to have happened, which is kinda too bad. Kinda. The idea here seems to have been “wouldn’t it be kinda interesting to see what kind of horror movie Cindy Sherman would make?” And then the value of it is “Isn’t it kinda interesting that this is the horror movie Cindy Sherman made?” Not much more, not much less.