Demon Kiss (2010)
Reviewed by The Foywonder
Starring Elizabeth Di Prinzio, Sally Mullins, Jamie Macek, Sebastian Gonzales, Julie Simone
Written and directed by Dennis Devine
Usually I’m known for possessing uncanny recall about the most mundane happenings in b-movies, but I watched this flick three weeks ago and at the time was suffering from a very bad cold. I don’t remember all the plot details, but I do remember being mildly entertained during my late-night viewing of the no-budget, T&A, quasi-religious horror flick Demon Kiss. I’m sure being blitzed out of my mind on Nyquil and antibiotics helped.
This brings me back to the summer of ’04 when I was recovering from gallbladder surgery. When its 3AM, you’re half asleep and loaded with Percocet, Olympic handball is an amazing spectacle to behold. Are you familiar with this form of handball? It’s played on a basketball-like court with dudes running back and forth passing an oversized softball to each other that they want to throw into a lacrosse net. It’s like soccer mixed with rugby, and it seems to be a sport only popular in smaller European and Asian countries that you don’t typically hear Summer Olympics announcers praise for possessing “powerhouse teams”. Barely lucid and cranked on pain meds, it’s the greatest thing ever created by mankind.
Likewise, when you’re conscious but feeling glazed over from sickness and meds designed to help treat it, a movie about a demon body-jumping between cops and prostitutes in search of a young hooker who may be the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene, whom you may know from the Bible as the prostitute that became a follower of Jesus and, amongst Dan Brown conspiracy theorists, became Jesus’ wife and mother of his children.
The demon will spend the most of the movie in the body of a lecherous homicide detective working as lead investigator of the murders being committed most of the time by his possessed self. The demon, which passes between bodies with a kiss (hence the film’s title), will periodically inhabit the body of other hookers working for the same website as the Mary Magdalene descendant/reincarnation. Much of Demon Kiss consists of people possessed by the demon trying to find out this one girl’s real name and address, something you would think wouldn’t be too difficult for a possessed homicide detective to use his resources to find. But then if that possessed cop did just fall back on tracing IP addresses and subpoenaing file records to locate this girl, it wouldn’t allow for all the legwork the demon does that leads it to one naked hooker after another, and sometimes it isn’t just the legs that gets worked if you catch my drift.
It’s funny how some of the woman playing these hookers, and by playing a hooker I mean taking off their clothes while spouting dialogue meant to trick you into thinking some of these gals are actually characters with a point to their existence in this film aside from gettin’ nekkid on cue, look like they could be models and others look like they could have been method acting. There are some unappealing tattoos on display to go along with the flesh. Did my eyes deceive me or did one female actually have a swastika on her shoulder? One way or another, almost all of them will end up dead and covered in blood before it’s over.
Elizabeth Di Prinzio is the actress playing the prostitute everyone is seeking out. I have no problem describing her as an actress because she is one of the only three females in the entire film that does not get naked. She looks way too cute and clean-cut to be playing a low-rent call girl. Her dour character seems to know this too; the reason she spends most of the film seeking an exit from the world’s oldest profession, recording audio notes about her experiences as a hooker for a book you know she’ll never write, and frequenting a counselor who herself was a one-time prostitute now helping wayward hookers deal with the psychological baggage of their job while trying to get them to stop turning tricks.
As sleazy as this movie sounds, it really is more silly than sleazy, though there is no shortage of sleaze. There was also just a faint enough whiff of intriguing pseudo-religious ideas buried beneath the ever mounting pile of naked flesh covered in blood to keep me watching and wondering as to where it was all going. Like what exactly did this demon plan to do when it finally finds this girl unknowingly possessing the spirit of who it describes as “the mother of all whores” and how exactly will this adversely affect the world as we know it? Getting to the resolution proved to be a tremendous letdown, really just a lame exorcism sequence with more gore than William Peter Blatty could have ever envisioned.
Honestly, I should probably hate this movie. I should probably be ripping it to shreds. It has the look of a cheap cable access production, the acting with few exceptions is laughably bad, and the whole movie really is little more than an excuse to come up with different ways to film naked female bodies splattered with blood. I’m sure the combination of extremely low expectations and being whacked out of my gourd on Nyquil at the time I watched it probably helped.
Demon Kiss is the movie I could imagine Fred Olen Ray making if he got bonked really hard on the head and woke up convinced there was a market out there for a theological horror film designed to appeal to Christians not turned off by seeing women getting fully naked every five minutes or witnessing a naked woman laying on her stomach getting a broom handle shoved up her twat and popping out of her mouth.
2 1/2 out of 5
Discuss Demon Kiss in the comments section below!
Categorized:Reviews
