BEYOND THE DARKNESS: Cult, Horror, and Extreme Cinema by Russell Phil

Author:Russell, Phil [Russell, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bad News Press
Published: 2012-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

KISSED (1996)

Dir: Lynne Stopkewich /Canada

This is not a Nekromantik. In fact, director Lynne Stopkewich goes so far in trying to portray the subject of necrophilia in a non-sensationalist manner that she ends up making it seem somehow tasteful. And boring. There's no explicit mortuary scenes here, or corpse-fucking in the old Jorg Buttgereit mode. Stopkewich instead aims for an exploration of the spiritual possibilities in the attraction of death.

Based on Barbara Gowdy's short tale, We So Seldom Look On Love, Kissed centres on Sandra (Molly Parker), a morbid young woman whose fascination with death leads to a job in a mortuary. She meets a handsome young man in Matt (Peter Outerbridge), and eventually reveals to him her dark secret. Sandra's disinterest in the living sees her becoming increasingly attracted to the dead, where she seems to have ecstatic spiritual experiences with corpses... Meanwhile, Matt becomes increasingly obsessed with Sandra, and in a leaf taken from Romeo and Juliet, decides to get pretty drastic in his attempts to win her heart...

The worst thing a movie can be is boring. And Kissed is almost sleep-inducing. Rather than cutting the film down into a short, Stopkewich seemed determined to stretch out the incredibly dull proceedings for a full 80 minutes. There's also very little in the way of psychology to help us understand Sandra's motivations, and what we're left with is a cute and rather naive portrait of a corpse-fucker; all very sweet and quirky! Her disgusting perversion is treated in the same way as a woman with a terminal disease in some daytime TV movie; just another well-adjusted leading lady who just so happens to be a bit different - in this case a penchant for sleeping with dead bodies. I know the film focuses more on the spiritual dimensions of such vile subject-matter, but still I didn't believe a second of this garbage. Some have interpreted the film as Sandra's fantasy, and that would perhaps explain why all the corpses just happen to be handsome young men. All in all though, it's a simplistic and lifeless failure.

Despite nearing retirement, chief censor at the BBFC, James Ferman, had some reservations about the film, but new censor, Andreas Whittam Smith, recognised the film as an exploration, not exploitation, and passed Kissed uncut for home viewing.

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