Kiss me until my lips fall off. Kiss me until I start to rot. Sandra (Molly Parker) likes dead things. As a youth she enjoyed stripping down in the woods and dancing around with whatever she could get her creepy mitts on. A dead bird, a dead chipmunk, an illegally aborted wookalar fetus, whatever. But as The Good Book instructs us in 1 Corinthians 13:11-12: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”, so did Sandra when she became an adult…she stopped messing around with dead critters and started facefucking dead men. “It’s a man, baby!” (Yes, I typed that out in an Austin Powers' voice.)
KISSED is a fun look back to the innocence of 1990’s Arthouse Cinema. I remember watching the film back in ye olde 1996 and kinda being blown away by it. (Remember: this was in the dark days before HBO’s Six Feet Under.) Revisiting it now for this review, KISSED is still a good film, but it is way more simplistic than I remembered it being. Still, simplistic or not, there isn’t a ton of tastefully filmed movies about the romance of necrophilia so you know you’re gonna watch it!
Quick pace, small cast of interesting characters that I wish had been fleshed out more (especially the dude who runs the funeral home), a surprisingly small amount of nudity, a predictable and unsatisfactory ending that left more questions than it answered (example: did the police read Matt’s notebook?), above average acting, interesting musical choices, ethereal lighting at times, cool vintage clothes, unique story that would have benefited from a longer runtime, only like two or three cars shown in the entire film...including a hearse during an extremely long car wash, not as much corpse sex as you would expect.
KISSED is an interesting film that is well worth watching. I just wish the budget had been higher and the script tighter. Kiss me until kingdom come. Forever, forever.
