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Kiss Daddy Goodnight


It's quite possible that I may have found it.

I'm not going to stick out my neck and claim that this is the worst film ever made, because with a rough estimate of a few million films made worldwide, the odds are staggeringly against such an assertion having any real truth value. I will, however, say that it is doubtlessly the worst film I've ever seen, and I've seen Feeders 2.

What is it that makes this film so horrendous that I should venture to make such a comparison? To put it simply, Feeders 2 is so godawful that it's somewhat funny, at least in parts. Kiss Daddy Goodnight isn't in that league of "so bad, it's good." It just stays in the realm of flat-out bad. It's the most somnolent, sickeningly tedious trudge towards absolute nothing that I've ever witnessed in cinema. We all know, or at least those of us above the age of seven or so know, that movies cannot hear us. However much we might try, shouting warnings at the screen, for example, will never avert an on-screen stabbing or monster attack. Perhaps in the future, films will be made in Reciprovision, and will actually change if we yell at them often enough, but for now, we're stuck with what was originally shot. Despite this, I found myself veritably begging this film, out loud, "for god's sake, can something, anything please just...happen? Anything?" And as expected, the film brutally ignored me and just kept sitting there like a complete asshole, doing nothing.

So what is the film about? I shall make a valiant attempt to be generous and pretend that the film is about anything at all. Uma Thurman stars as Laura, a young woman who hangs around in bars so she can pick up men, go home with them, then roofie them and make off with their shit. Full stop. Before you even think about wasting your time with this film, just hit the fucking brakes. So perhaps you like Uma Thurman. Perhaps you remember that in the early part of her career (and this was her very first production) she could hardly make it through a film without getting at least partly naked. Forget it. It doesn't happen. There's nothing even remotely steamy here, nothing even of a purient interest. Yes, at the age of seventeen, she was indeed quite cute-there's a picture there, so you can see for yourself without watching so much as two consecutive frames of this movie. It doesn't help, and it doesn't matter. She was just as young and cute in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, plus she was naked, and oh yeah, the film didn't suck. Where was I? Oh yeah: getting so bored just remembering this film that I keep doing anything to avoid talking about it further. So yeah. One day Laura meets her downstairs neighbor, this old guy who's lost his own daughter, you see, and it's, you know, something. Presumably going for awkward and uncomfortable, but it's so dull you can't muster up the necessary emotion to start giving a shit. And this is the more interesting part of the film. Oh, yes. It does get worse.

See, there's a friend of Laura's named Sid, played by Matt Dillon's little-known brother Paul, who fills about half the screen time of this ninety-minute turkey by wandering around town looking for his old pal Johnny. Johnny was a guitarist, and Sid has decided he wants to re-form their old band. His half of the alleged narrative consists of repeated iterations of "Hey, have you seen Johnny?" "No, not here. Maybe he's somewhere else." "Thanks. I'll slowly wander off and look somewhere else." I've never hit fast-forward during a movie, ever, but my GOD, did I ever want to every single time Sid showed back up and took the overall speed of plot progression down from a rubber-smokin' 1 to negative twelve. At the nonexistent risk of ruining things for you, I'll just say right now that eventually he finds Johnny (played by Steve Buscemi, who was already a decent actor and the only bright spot in this dismal mess), who's moved on and spawned, and doesn't want to play in a band anymore. So there you have it. After forcing you to sit through the most brain-dulling series of scenes in film history, the film then has the audacity to just admit that it's been wasting your time all along, and this entirely useless plotline, shoved in for the apparent reason of padding the thing out to feature length, gives up the ghost without anything at all having come of it. Just having to remember this unparalleled torpidity makes me wish someone would come by and pour half a bag of cocaine up my nose before I slip into a coma and die.

Oh, I forgot: Someone begins stalking Laura. Since there's about three people in this film and one of them is stumbling around town searching for a reason to vindicate his presence in the story, it's not too hard to guess who it is.

It's that old guy, in case the intervening paragraph about Sid caused your brain to pour out of your ears in despair. At one point, Laura stabs him in the dark, albeit non-fatally, so in order to make sure that his normal, non-stalkery relationship with Laura continues unabated, he gets all sneaky and stabs Sid in the same spot, also regrettably without any death resulting, in an attempt to shift suspicion. This leads to possibly the only (unintentional) laugh in the film, when Laura happens upon Sid in the bathroom, washing the blood out of his shirt. Yes, that's all you have to do to deal with a stab wound to the abdomen: simply wash off the blood, and everything will be just fine. Maybe Sid couldn't afford an ambulance. Maybe the production couldn't afford an ambulance. They didn't seem to be able to afford light bulbs, after all, but there's not much we're desperately keen to see, anyway. I also wouldn't attempt to do all my audio recording by using an ancient pair of headphones that the dog has chewed up in place of a microphone, but I'm just not a true artist, I guess. For all I know, director Peter Ily Huemer really wanted to capture the experience of wandering aimlessly around town with one's head wrapped three feet deep in sheets of dryer lint. If so, my hat's off to him; he has succeeded with flying colors.

Just...just don't. It's not worth it. There is absolutely nothing here to see. Even if they'd bought light bulbs, it would still be true.


-review by Matt Murray


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