A Kiss Before Dying (1991)

Touches You

Crappy film

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Blistering performances.

This is a remake of a 1956 movie and I can't imagine any remake has more closely resembled a reanimated corpse than this version of A Kiss Before Dying. This lifeless husk just sort of shambles along, letting out the occasional groan, before finally being put out of its misery.The film starts with Jonathan Corliss (Matt Dillon) throwing his girlfriend Dorothy Carlsson (Sean Young) off the roof of Philadelphia's city hall. The splat Dorothy make on the marble floor where she lands is one of only three good things in this movie. The police believe Dorothy's death is a suicide, something her super rich father (Max von Sydow) is happy to go along with. Her twin sister Ellen (Sean Young, duh!) doesn't buy it though and tries to investigate on her own. Months and months go buy and to cover his tracks, Jonathan eventually kills an old boyfriend of Dorothy and frames him for her murder. That's when we discover that Jonathan has actually become Ellen's new boyfriend as part of a scheme to get a job with Ellen and Dorothy's super rich daddy. If you're wondering if Ellen ever discovers Jonathan's scheme and realizes he killed her sister…you're probably just dim enough to like A Kiss Before Dying.The crucial and glaring problem with this movie is that none of the characters have any human depth to them at all. They're nothing but nails that get pounded down by the Almighty Plot Hammer. Jonathan Corliss has absolutely no internal life. He might as well be a ticking clock or some other mechanism. Dorothy/Ellen are almost as bad, though Sean Young going topless as Ellen does grant that character a smidgen of prurient appeal. And let me be clear. Young and Matt Dillon are not at fault here. It's not that they're giving flat, uninspired performances. These actors are just trapped inside roles that make them nothing more than props. There's never a moment when either Ellen or Jonathan are real people doing real things. They're only puppets being obviously manipulated in whatever way the plot needs them to go.That plot is a less glaring but still significant problem. Maybe the idea of a guy weaving a multi-year scheme where he kills several people so he can become a rich man's personal assistant made sense in 1956, but I don't think it passes muster in 1991 and it's even dumber today. I sat through this film waiting to find out what was Jonathan's goal. Why was he doing all of this? It wasn't until about a half hour after he got the job with Ellen's dad that I realized, that was his only goal. He wasn't going to kill Ellen, he wasn't going to kill her dad, he wasn't going to try and take over or destroy her dad's company. He just wanted a job above middle management. But considering how many years he spent sociopathically devoted to his scheme, Jonathan might have been able to accomplish the same thing if he had just applied for a job in the mailroom.Oh, and the whole reason he had to kill Dorothy and start his plan over with Ellen REALLY doesn't fly in 1991. When your story turns on something that might have been shocking in 1956 but is fairly blase in 1991, you've got to change that plot point in some way to match modern sensibilities. Writer/director James Dearden tries to skip over that incongruity with a single line of dialog at the end, but it doesn't work.I did say there were two other good things in this film. One is the aforementioned topless Sean Young. The other is the very Hitchcockian shot when Ellen finally realizes the truth about Jonathan. Unfortunately, two great camera shots and Sean Young's boobs, as nice as they are, can't carry an entire film by themselves.A Kiss Before Dying has something of a reputation for being infamously bad. It doesn't live down to that expectation. There's no gross storytelling or performing incompetence on display here. There just isn't a spark or glimmer of living, breathing humanity anywhere in this film.

If you're a Matt Dillon fan, or have a curiosity about the dark side of human nature, then you'll enjoy this movie. The biggest problem with this film is there are way too many coincidences. Also, some parts are downright unbelievable. Here are some of the holes: The first murder: it's hard to believe that if you murder someone on the rooftop of a high-rise building that someone from a nearby building wouldn't have seen anything and reported it to the police. Why wouldn't the cops check for prints on the victim's shoes or purse? Why wouldn't they take a DNA sample from the fetus in order to determine the father of the unborn child? The second murder: what did Jonathan do with Jay's body? Why wouldn't the cops check for prints on Jay's car? Why wouldn't millionaire Carlsson have investigated the background of "Jay Farraday" and discovered discrepancies with Jonathan's alter-ego? The third murder: how could the killer work in New York, but find the exact moment to follow his girlfriend to Philadephia? How was he able to see what kind of car the murder victim was driving, and then go back to his own car so that he could follow him to his apartment? The fourth murder: the detective traced the victim's call to the killer's phone and could have seen how many minutes they spoke, yet did not ask for the killer's alibi. Dorothy just happened to be listening when her old acquaintance's murder was announced on the radio. Wouldn't the killer have been smart enough to weigh down the suitcase with the sliced up body and wrap it up so that it wouldn't come open in the ocean? He had an incinerator in his building. Why wouldn't he use it? The worst coincidences: the killer could murder a sister, then go to her identical twin and have her fall in love with him and marry him. What are the odds in a city of 7 million people and thousands of restaurants of Jonathan/Jay running into a former co-worker from another city at the same time that he had Dorothy with him (a rarity in itself)?

The film starts off with a very depressing situation and you decide just what kind of a story are we going to view. A poor bride arrives too late to get her marriage license and then the poor bride disappears. Sean Young,(Ellen/Dorothy Carlsson),"A Killer Within",'04, is the sister to the missing bride and is from a very rich family who deal in Copper. Max Von Sydow,(Thor Carlsson),"Heidi",'05 is Ellen and Dorothy's father and he is very strict and over bearing, really wanted a son instead of two daughters. Matt Dillon, (Jonathan Corliss),"Loveboy",'05, plays a rather mixed up young man who started out very young watching railroad freight cars go by his bedroom window and decided he was going to be rich like the Carlsson Family. There are some romantic scenes in the shower and bed and quite a few murders. Pretty good entertaining film.

The casting in this picture was awful. The only person who could act was Max von Sidow. The rest of the cast it was painful to watch, painfully boring. The lead, Sean Young, was the worse. All the emotional range of a zombie and the intensity of drying paint. Neither she, nor anyone else, were really 'believable' as actors. It's not surprising that everyone who was in is this picture has faded off the radar. One must criticize the directing in that the director either 1) did not inspire the cast to greater effort 2) give them enough direction 3) or failed to see they were without talent. James Dearden did direct the classic 'Fatal Attraction', and co-wrote it, too. This seems to be his only real success. The major differences: he co-wrote 'Fatal Attraction', apparently writing on his own he is not very good. And, he had a much better cast.The script fails from a fairly predictable plot (predictability is not good in a murder mystery, duh) and unconvincing motivation for the killer (his daddy left him, so he kills, what, 3 people, maybe more…? How many would he have killed with bad potty training?) Matt Dillon's performance as the killer is as unconvincing as the script.