plea for manslaughter. A note explains that Karla's parole was denied, as the psychologist found her artificial, manipulative, and without remorse. Cast Production The film was originally titled Deadly but was renamed Karla before its release. The script is based on court transcriptions, interviews and video shot by Homolka and Bernardo. Release The film caused significant controversy in Canada, where the families of victims Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy initially said that the film exploited the memory of their daughters. Politicians in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, including Attorney General Michael Bryant, called for a boycott of the film, and one Canadian theatre chain, Cineplex Odeon, stated that it would show the film only in its major urban markets in Toronto, Ontario, Montreal, Quebec and Ottawa, Ontario. The film was booked to debut at the 2005 Montreal World Film Festival, until a protest by Air Canada, a corporate sponsor of the festival, shelved the idea. Lawyer Tim Danson, who represented the French and Mahaffy families, watched a private screening of the film in September with the families in attendance. The following month, he announced that the families would not oppose the film's Canadian release. Actor Misha Collins, who played Bernardo, regretted being involved with the film after meeting a victim who escaped and has routinely told fans not to see the film or bring DVD copies to be signed. Reception Karla was deemed "a creepy but botched work" by Robert Koehler of Variety, who felt that the film was marred by its "choppy" direction, its sub-par production values, and its "confused" and "morally precarious" depiction of Homolka, which Koehler felt undermined her complicity in Bernardo's actions, writing, "There's a certain darkly suffocating quality to the chamber drama played out by these two sick souls, but the fact that the film is more willing to explicitly show Paul's constant beatings of Karla than the worst aspects of the killings underlines who is to be seen as the victim here." The Globe and Mail's Rick Groen was similarly critical of the film emphasizing Homolka's suffering over that of her and Bernardo's victims, and further opined that the picture was both "inexcusably mundane" and lacking in substance before awarding it a final score of one-and-a-half out of a possible four. Ken Eisner of The Georgia Straight condemned the film, deriding it as nothing more than a dull, clichéd, and "slapdash portrait of serial