Monday, February 24, 2020

Vampiress Review: "The Kiss"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1221356/


The Gist:  An awkward kid who gets bullied in school and ignored by girls has a change in luck when he recovers the body of a vampire who he nurses back to health. Little does he know she has a major jealous streak.

Female Vampire FactorLourdes Reynolds plays Santa Maria.
Santa Maria is a centuries old vampire cursed to be entombed alive until her dried and withered body was found by a young man named Jeremy.
She commands Jeremy to help her recover using telepathy until her body recovers and she once again looks human.
thru the entire process Santa Maria and Jeremy develop a relationship in which the older Santa Maria is both a girlfriend and in a way a protective mother to him. 
 Wherever he goes he is protected by her which not only prevents the bullies who bothered him at school from picking on him but even makes the girls who used to ignore him now pay attention to him.



We then find out all of this was part of a greater plan.  Santa Maria tells Jeremy to invite all his new friends to a party at her home (the stereotypical creepy old mansion in the neighborhood no one thought was occupied).   As the party goes on Santa Maria is one by one killing and feeding on the party guests. 
When faced with what's happening Jeremy feels that he was being used.  Santa Maria ensures him this was not the case and her feelings for him are real and she was doing that partly for him as those kids were not nice to him.  She ends up turning him and the movie ends with her going over the rules of vampirism with him.


Side note:  Santa Maria vamps out in three phases which seem to change the more she feeds.  Stage one is normal fangs.


Stage two I would describe as sabre teeth or tusks (which we later find out are snake fangs as her kind come from the serpent and not bats).
And the final state which we see at the end of the film is straight up demon mouth (very cheap rubber that doesn't move much demon mouth at that).


Final Opinion:  One of my favorite films when I was younger was "Prom Night 3: The Last Kiss."  This film seems to take heavy influence from that one with the "evil spirit of a dead woman seducing a naive kid who seems to not have any issues with the situation because hot ghost woman is better than the no women he was getting before even though everyone around him is getting murdered" plot.   If I have any complaints its that similar to films like From Dusk Till Dawn it's a film that slowly works it's way to one giant vampire finally instead of the whole movie being about the vampires.  I give it a Vampire Beauty Rating of 4 out of 5.  I would love to see a prequel that revolved around the character of Santa Maria. More screen time for her would boost the enjoyment factor much more as she reminds me a lot of the character Violet from True Blood in that she is as sexy as she is aggressively blood thirsty which makes her a text book throw back to 1980's level horror movie vampiresses as opposed to the sympathetic ones of modern day.

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