Directed by Pen Densham
Starring Joanna Pacula, Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus, Mimi Kuzyk and Jan Rubes
Last week, I reviewed The Hidden, a 1987 epic of weirdness featuring a group of cops following a parasite-like entity that could control the actions of others. This week's movie, released a mere year after that one, is similar in a lot of ways but different in many others. The Kiss also has the basic plot device of some sort of supernatural...thingy that passes from person to person. Unlike that one, though, this one has a lot of hot women. So +2 cool points to the movie there. I'm actually legit surprised that there aren't more mainstream movies released like The Kiss these days. Sex sells. The early '90s in particular was absolutely rife with this stuff, as Joe Eszterhas' sex- and murder-laced epics graced the multiplexes and a few of them did monster business.
This flick has one of those true oxymorons of plotting - a simple setup with complicated execution. Stick with me. The action starts in 1963 deepest, darkest Africa (the Congo, to be precise), where a young girl named Felice has just been sent away with her Aunt on a train ride...to hell. It's implied, I swear. It doesn't take long for the movie to turn all kinds of weird as crazy Aunt attacks Felice, launching into a fierce makeout session (seriously) that passes the spirit from a cursed Talisman from the Aunt to the little girl. So that's what we got - an ancient totem that goes from person to person, with the added twist that it has to be someone of the same bloodline. Oh, one more thing - the kiss ritual was all kinds of bloody to the point that I had to actually turn away from the TV screen while watching it. I can watch buckets of fake blood in these movies, but something about this scene got me. Chalk it up to my one in 10,000,000 glandular condition.
From here, we flash forward 25 years to the present day world of 1988 Albany, New York. Felice's sister Hilary (Talya Rubin) lives in a bigass house with her husband Jack (Nicholas Kilbertus) and teenage daughter Amy (Meredith Salenger). Felice is busy living it up as a globe-trotting model of a truly unique nature. In the movie, we see her representing a vitamin company based out of South Africa. 'Cus when you think modeling, you think South African vitamin companies. But then again, Hardees trots out insanely hot chicks eating burgers and I don't complain, so maybe I'm just a moron. Soon enough, tragedy erupts as the pivotal character of Hilary is offed in a car accident.
Where we're headed from here should be fairly obvious to everyone. Felice shows up at the Halloran household with the intention of passing the talisman from herself to Amy. We get all of the usual things we expect to happen in the process, as Jack falls in love with Felice and invites her to stay at the house. 'Cus let me tell you something (brother), when you're deceased wife's sister looks like Joanna Pacula, this is totally something that you should be all about. It's all pretty predictable stuff, sprinkled in some glorious bits of nudity from Pacula that ups the rewatchability quotient on The Kiss by approximately 73%. Couple this in with the fact that the director seems to have this creepy-ish interest in slow-motion shots of Meredith Salenger swiming in a white bathing suit, and you've got the makings of a movie that could have gotten you through some lonely nights back in the day.
Wow, this review really did take a detour, didn't it? Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
In between the hot women, however, we've got a movie that manages to deliver despite its predictability. It's mostly due to the performances of the two female leads. Pacula and Salenger had excellent chemistry as the proverbial Wicked Aunt and Virtuous One characters. This was absolutely a MUST for this movie. If the relationship between Felice and Amy didn't work, nothing else in the movie did. Fortunately, it works fantastically. So much so that we're easily able to forget all of the scenes that Amy shares with her friends and dip boyfriend that repeatedly go nowhere. Folks, these teenage characters are your "cannon fodder" of the film that up our body count above the government-mandated minimum. They're here to do nothing more than die and/or be in peril, and nothing more. I AM, however, pleasantly surprised at how well the romance plot between Felice and father Jack came off. While Kilbertus wasn't quite up to par with his two female costars, he does manage to come off as a sympathetic widower who is just unfortunate to learn that his sister-in-law looks like Joanna Pacula. It's not that hard to forgive him.
Oh, and Felice also has otherworldly telekinetic powers and a killer demon cat that she uses to kill people. I just realized that I completely left that out of this review up until this point. So that's where our element of danger comes from in the script and nobody can say that I left it out. Everything builds up to a finale that is nothing else if not batshit insane in the good way. Much like The Hidden, it's some pretty damn cool stuff that gives us a satisfying conclusion.
To be fair, I don't think this flick was quite as good as The Hidden. It's just as out-there, but for whatever reason I didn't respond to this story emotionally quite as much as I did to the stuff between Michael Nouri and Kyle MacLachlan in that film. It's probably dudebro bias, so take that for what it's worth. Still, this is a horror flick that manages to be both emotional and occasionally pretty tense. The acting is good, the plot is well laid-out, and it's got two incredibly hot women to gawk at. For that alone, I gotta give my recommendation. *** out of ****.
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