B-movies work if they know how to use their over-the-top premise or badly acted progression into a slurry of unforgettable zingers. You need to have a special kind of talent to make the so-bad-that-its-good work, and Richard Douglas Jensen’s “The Kiss of a Vampire,” with its self-serious erotic tonality and zero sense of filmmaking bite, strays so far away from it. It is the kind of confounding micro-budget debacle that is so unaware of what it wants to be that it never truly achieves it.
Based on a combination of things – director Jensen would like you to believe that his senseless meandering is inspired by both a book and a movie that no one except Vampire connoisseurs would have heard of. It irks me not because he fails to pay homage to the 1932 film “Vampyr,” or even be remotely as enticing, but because it spends 1h 36 Min on Carol (Saporah Bonnette) – the film’s lead – just stuttering around in a sheer dress, looking completely lost.
For the sake of a plot, the film follows aimless Carol’s adventure after she rushes into a marriage with a super-weird doctor named Dr. Wessex (Philip Hulford), who takes her away to a remote cabin with super-shady small town vibes. Carol, who is schizophrenic and bipolar, later comes to discover that her sexy, horny husband, who is often missing throughout a good chunk of the day is, in fact, a 1400-year-old vampire (the kind that loves the darkness but is not hurt by light?).
There is some subtext here about eternal love and damnation, and what choice would Carol make when she has to choose between boinking her vampire husband every single day, or accept her lonesome fate because killing is bad? The film plays with her perception of who Wessex is, what the town is up to, in addition to some catholic repression in hindsight. But the execution is so genuinely juvenile that none of it ever becomes anything.
Midway through the film, some equally unengaging new characters also appear, but they do little to nothing that make sense of why the film is just moving forward with a collection of slow-mo shots of nude people. The acting is incredibly horrendous even for a B-movie that should work in a campy sort of way, leaving zero redeeming quality in its totality whatsoever.
![Christine [1983]: Absolutely Worthy of Its Cult Status](https://79468c92.delivery.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Christine-3-768x320.png)
