Prologue: I'm watching this movie at the behest of my best friend, who was involved in the production. The only other movie that he's ever asked me to watch was an experience so jarring, so life altering, so horrid, that I still have flashbacks of terror when I think about it. It was the single shittiest thing I've ever watched. Even things I've downloaded from sites that had names like druggedandforced.ru had more artistic merit. This DVD was given to me over 4 months ago, and it's sat on my end table the entire time. Every time I passed by it I would get a chill down my spine. But alas, the time has come. I can't go my entire life making excuses as to why I've yet to watch it, though I've thought about just killing myself to get out of it. You may take that as a joke, but you haven't seen the things I've seen.
But for real, if I've learned anything in the past few years it's that I can get through the shittiest of shittiest movies and come out a better person, not the broken soul my previous excursion into his recommended film left me. So on I trudge, popping in the DVD that has been sold to me on the merits of a Lloyd Kaufman appearance. For those unfamiliar, Lloyd Kaufman runs Troma films. How the producer of a company whose apex came almost 30 years ago, appearing as an actor, is supposed to sell me on a film is beyond me, but I'm game. So here we go.
It's not awful. It's not good either, but it's not awful. It's so very very very muddled in excess story and unnecessary visuals but the script has more than a few bright spots.
Set in the future where the world is about to end, not that that has any impact on the story or really matters in any way. There are three main parts to story, a serial killer, a couple of lesbian killers, and a cop haunted by his dead wife, chasing them both.
The tone of the film is wildly all over the place. The serial killer is played very well, but it's the sort of goofy, fast talking character that while amusing, has almost no depth.
The lesbians, well I just don't know what the point of them are. Neither of the actresses are very good at all. One plays a mute, then suddenly she's Russian, then suddenly she's not, and it's never really explained at all what the fuck is happening. She's supposed to have a lot of angst I think, but who the fuck knows. Their characters are all over the map. They murder, they engage in horse play in a montage that looks more at home in a silly Cinemax movie out of 1996, they have deep philosophical discussions about love and loss, none of it very engaging or good. The one chick does get her tits out a fair bit but it's not erotic at all.
The there's the cop, who maybe in the hands of a better actor would have come across better, the story with his wife is actually interesting, and the tete a tete between he and the serial killer has substance on a surface level but it just gets lost in the mess of this story that has about 10 too many layers.
I guess my main problem with the movie is that there's no need for any of the futuristic stuff, all it serves to do is distract from the main plot, and given the obviously low budget the movie had, I couldn't but feel like whatever money they did have could have been spent elsewhere.
The acting ranges from bad to mostly competent to a few good performances.
The script has glimmers of solid comedy and drama, but it gets insanely verbose at times. There's a ton of dialog about the futuristic setting that just feels like script masturbation and never really explains where, what and why is going on in the world. They do mention that we're in The East End about 100 times though. But as I said, none of that shit matters to the story so it doesn't really matter. Then the final showdown between the cop and the serial killer is just filled with so much talking and an elongated attempt to build drama that it reaches it's apex and then swiftly goes downhill as you're begging for someone to shoot someone else so the talking will stop.
The budget is clearly very low, almost every outdoor scene takes place in the same area, all the indoor scenes use a lot of smoke and mirrors but it doesn't make it look any less claustrophobic.
Apocalypse Kiss has its positives, but a wild lack of direction and focus only does a disservice to the stuff that does work.
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