In a 7.9 review titled “Slaughtering Intelligence,” Marshall Fine calls Killing Season (Millenium, 7.12), the Robert DeNiro-vs.-John Travolta paycheck movie, “sadistically violent, over-the-top…laughably bad.”

Fine saw it last week at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, “[and] if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this review,” he notes, “because the only press screening in the U.S. is Wednesday night (7.10) and reviews are embargoed online until 6PM Thursday, 7.11.

Travolta introduced the Karlovy Vary screening “and warned the crowd that the film was violent ‘but not gratuitously so,'” Fine write. “That apparently included the scene where Travolta himself gets shot through both cheeks with an arrow, which embeds in a door, leaving him hanging as unhappily as a butterfly pinned to a specimen tray. That’s just before De Niro waterboards him with a mixture of lemon juice and salt.

“I’d call Killing Season a cat-and-mouse game. But that would insult felines and rodents, both of which are much smarter than this movie.”