Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) takes a job as a housekeeper at a mysterious high-rise apartment block in search of her younger sister. Unfortunately for her, the wealthy community that make up the building is part of a devil-worshipping cult in search of their next sacrifice. 

They Will Kill You is both ridiculously derivative and insanely fun. Running at just ninety-four minutes, it also never outstays its welcome. 

So where do we start? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to watch a film where the creative team decided to mash together a whole host of movies in an effort to create a fast-paced action movie and actually pull it off? Take the apartment block cult of Rosemary’s Baby, the level-by-level progress through a building of Dredd and The Raid, the corridor fight from Oldboy, the spaghetti western influences of Sergio Leone, and a huge heap of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, specifically the House of a Thousand Leaves sequence, and you essentially have They Will Kill You. 

In fact, it rather bizarrely shares almost the exact same plot of Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come, which was released just a few weeks prior to it. 

What matters here, though, is that regardless of how liberally this film has borrowed and paid tribute to those other films, it has done so with a panache and verve that makes it entirely entertaining. 

Zazie Beetz is great as the ass-kicking pain sponge who will stop at nothing to save her sister. Even a devil cult does not faze her. Armed with a shotgun (Evil Dead vibes?), a samurai sword, and any other tool or object she can find, she spills blood like there is no tomorrow. 

Director Kirill Sokolov certainly uses her to his full extent with dynamic camera whips, slow motion, and big declarations of intent. Leone and Tarantino seem to feature very highly on those influences. 

Action sequences include corridor fights, flaming axes, and scrabbling around desperately through crawl spaces. With limbs severed, heads exploded, and blood spraying everywhere. There are even some decent special effects later when dark rituals start to get serious. 

There are even a number of fun, small supporting roles in the interesting array of villains, all of whom seem to be having a lot of fun. Patricia Arquette, Tom Felton, and Heather Graham certainly provide an interesting breadth of devil-worshippers! 

Derivative does not have to be dull. They Will Kill You is lots of fun in a way that lets it live as a future cult classic homage to many greater films.