The Kiss (2008)

 Okay, image problems. For some reason, none of the discs in The Horror Collection will play on Windows Media Player, so my reviews for all six films will unfortunately be image free.

Oh boy, it took four movies for The Horror Collection to dissapoint greatly and with The Kiss, dissapoint greatly it has.

The Kiss centres on teenager Jeremy (Lendon LeMelle), an annoying prick who discovers the half-dead body of vampire queen Santa Maria (Lourdes Colon). After reviving her, they fall in love with each other...apparently. Maria helps him get enough self-confidence to make friends and be more popular, but Santa Maria has other, darker things on her mind...

The film starts off promisingly with a cool-sounding opening text, describing several vampire clans for different animals, i.e. the panther clan, the snake, the scarab etc., but the feeling that this might be a good movie falls on its face the moment the opening credits end.

Jeremy has a tough time with his life-shaky relations with his step-mother and hassling at school. All this changes when he hears a mysterious voice, which he follows to an abandoned mansion. In this mansion, he finds his way into HELL...which is just a black-and-white sepia toned sandpit where nothing happens. After Jeremy digs holes for a while, he eventually comes across the (terribly buried under less than an inch of dirt) coffin containing the skeletal remains of Santa Maria.

Horror Film Survival Lesson No. 8791487410000009: Ok, Jeremy, if you ever come across a body in a coffin in a mysterious wasteland inside a house, and it has a stake shoved into it's heart, DON'T pull the damn stake out! How well did that work out in movies like Zoltan: Hound of Dracula? (Uh...yeah, that was seriously the only movie with that situation that I could think of off the top of my head.)

Having no idea what's going on, Jeremy comes to the natural conclusion of taking the rotting, talking corpse out of the coffin and taking it with him to the outside world. He keeps Santa Maria's body in the abandoned house, where she tells him to help her rejuvanate. Jeremy is only too eager to help, as he's fallen head over heels in love with Santa Maria (for no reason).

While Santa Matia rejuvunates, Jeremy's life starts to improve. He patches things up with his step-mom, he loses his bullies, and becomes a full-on pimp with a trio of girls following him around everywhere. Eventually he decides to have a party at Santa Maria's house and invite all of his new friends, which proves to be the mistake of his life...

The Kiss is, simply put, terrible. The acting is mostly okay and decent with Lourdes Colon (who deserves to be in much better stuff than this), and surprisingly, Jack 'Spider Baby' Hill has a small role in the movie (he's fun in this, despite not getting to do much). The pacing however is terrible. Other than a kill in the film's opening prologue (which is totally superflous with the rest of the film) there is not a single death in this VAMPIRE movie until the hour mark! And what happens in that first hour is a mix of boring events and terrible characters.

When I said up there that Jeremy has a tough time with his 'teenage hell', I was just describing what the film thinks the character has. In actuality, the character of Jeremy is an unlikable prick who only has himself to blame for why he's bullied and has no friends. He's sour to people who try to apologise to him, he's annoyingly angsty and he acts like he's the worst off person in the world, when he's just a rude, arrogant dickhead. (And the film doesn't actually feel the need to tell us that his step-mother is just that until halfway through the film-until then, we can just freely assume that Jeremy is disrespectful eneough to call his own mother by her first name.)

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't yet gone into length on how Santa Maria is rejuvanated-I'll do that now. Jeremy has, for no reason, fallen in love with this corpse, so to help her, he needs to get her blood. He does this by, at first, killing a rat, which he decapitates and bleeds out in a wine glass, scored to zany music. That's mean but it's nothing to what he does next. We see a montage-scored to happy music-of this prick casually murdering cats and dogs to feed their blood to Santa Maria. If you took away the music, this would be a good scene...if it was showing us the degredation of this character once he's smitten with a vampire, but it isn't. Dog Killer is meant to be the film's hero throughout!


Did I mention that this film is also meant to be a comedy? Well The Kiss is a "horror"/"comedy" that manages to fail on both levels of entertainment. It's not scary and it's really not funny at all, it's boring. And to top everything else off, it has a crap ending as well.

But what about the vampire makeup? The crux of most-if not all-vampire flicks? It's ridiculously bad! The Santa Maria skeleton prop looks ok, but its mouth never moves when she talks, so that loses it a point. But what loses the film's special effects team the rest of the points is the terrible vamping-out effects, which only look funny rather than scary or convincing.

The film has several other problems, ranging from the character of Carrie (Angela Rachelle), who's the usual love-interest type in these kinds of movies, yet this character has a boyfriend and is never in love with Cat Murderer-she is a completely pointless character who does nothing but talk to Animal Bleeder a couple of times, yet the film features her like she's an uber-important character; a lot of the kills in the film's final act are done with an eye-hurtingly annoying strobe-light effect; the fact that actress Lourdes Colon towers about three feet over Kitten Mangler, making the whole love aspect seem that much more ridiculous; and the characterisation-the character of Santa Maria is obviously evil, and actually admits this to Puppy Basher at the end after killing his friends along with another revelation (which I won't spoil), but Bunny Boiler's character doesn't seem to care, and is pissed off at Santa Maria for about thirty whole seconds before swooning over her again.

Also, at the end of the end credits, there's a joke disclaimer, "No teenagers were harmed during the making of this film". Ha ha ha, that's so not funny, and having a weak joke like that right after the audience has suffered through 80 minutes of boredom will serve only to piss them off-it did with me. Also, there was a moment in the movie where there was a glitch, so I just thought that my TV's digital signal was playing up, like it does sometimes, and then I remembered that this was a movie, not something on TV!

In closing, The Kiss is not funny, not scary and not recommended!