KISSED (1996)

“I’ve always been fascinated by death.”

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.

ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN (1958)

A wealthy woman is still in love with her worthless husband despite the fact that he spends nearly all of his spare time shacked up with some nasty skank down at the local watering hole.  He doesn’t even try to hide that shit either!  One evening, the wife is driving home in a rage when she sees a spaceship in the road.  She jumps out of her whip and runs away.  The local police can’t find any proof of her story, so she continues home where she bickers with her husband and then falls asleep.  It’s exciting stuff.  Things go around and around like this with the local cops doing next to nothing, the husband cheating and the wife getting pissed off for 56 minutes of the film’s 66-minute runtime.  Finally, with the film nearly over, the spurned woman grows to 50 feet tall and goes in search of that silver-tongued ding-a-ling slinger she calls a husband.

Whatever genius came up with the expression “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” back 73,000 million hundred years ago was probably referring to ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN.  The poster (with artwork by Reynold Brown) has passed the test of time and become one of the most iconic posters of the 1950’s science fiction boom, but the movie itself is a stinker.  Short runtime, crap special effects, below average acting (the deputy was especially annoying), a person who "pulled a boner", boring script, abrupt ending, low budget, small cast and sets that consist of a house, a bar, some random fields and a small street. People bad mouth PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, but I think that film is way better than AOT50FW.

Worth watching for those who are curious, but most others will probably end up falling asleep and dream of something more exciting.

Remake - Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1993)