Any film that is prefaced with an extract from a Dylan Thomas poem deserves some praise and this film doesn't disappoint in most departments. This is essentially a film for students of film because it plays with so many cinematic conventions and mixes seemingly irreconcilable genres. Kiss or Kill is both film noir and a road movie, playing both genres against each other with the aid of Godardian jump-cuts to heighten the uneasiness and underlying menace the film evokes so well. In this sense, the film is visually audacious and technically brilliant and that's thanks to the direction which is on-target most of the time. My only gripe was the inclusion of some dubious story lines that detracted from the film's overall uneasy effect. Thankfully the acting of both leads compensates such flaws. Worth watching with a Film Theory book in one hand and popcorn in the other.

The cool thing about this movie is that it was made in South Australia in my friend's hometown of Ceduna. Okay it was annoying him telling me where all of the scenes were and how they were shot out of sequence, but generally you wouldn't know unless you have lived there for a while. Kiss or Kill is a road movie and it is supposed to be shot as they travel across Australia to Perth yet it is shot almost entirely in and around Ceduna. It is interesting though how the filmmakers make it seem that you are journeying for quite a way even though in real life they do not.

I liked Kiss or Kill. It was an art-house movie that made it onto the NewVision label and distributed across the United States. I think that is pretty good for a homegrown movie. Australia seems to be producing a lot of art-house movies now though Kiss or Kill is more light on the art house than other movies. What did annoy me was the number of cuts that they would use during the scenes. It is difficult to explain but they would jump a couple of seconds in the action which gave it a different quality but it did annoy me. There are a number of reasons why they did it this way but it could simply be a style that the director wanted.

This movie is a movie about a couple of juvenile delinquents who lure married business men into hotel rooms and rob them. One day they kill the victim so decide to flee the city and go to Perth. Unfortunately they have a video in which a very famous football player is recorded basically being a pedophile. It is possible that the businessman was blackmailing him but now the video is in the hands of these kids and the footballer wants it back. Thus they have the police on their tail as well as the footballer. Then people start dying and it seems possible that one of the couple are killing them. We believe that Nick, the woman, is killing people in her sleep, and it comes to a point where she believes it.

Kiss or Kill is a story with a good plot though thematically it is empty. It looks at the characters of the juveniles. Nick absolutely hates men after she watches her mother get torched when she was a kid. Thus as men were being killed she believed that it was a psychological aversion to men. We also explore the relationship between them as they struggle to come to terms with murder and they fact that they might be caught. This is where their ride comes to an end because even though they are not moralistic, the fact that they are to be incriminated for many murders they look like everything is at an end.

Even though it is a good movie, it does not raise any deep themes nor does it leave you thinking. The end slipped into standard Hollywood rubbish but Kiss or Kill is a good movie to watch, especially to support the South Australian Film Industry.

"Kiss of Kill" tells of an Aussie "Bonnie & Clyde" couple on the run through the boonies of South Australia. This austere flick is a mediocre watch at best with the only interesting facet being we don't really know which of the couple is doing all the killing. Unfortunately, we're not given a reason to care about anyone in the film save our natural desire to see the cops catch the bad guys. Hence, we remain casual and detached observers trying to wring whatever interest there is to be found from the meager substance of the story which echoes of many films of the past.

Footnote: IFC preshow factoids claimed it took Bennett 10 years to write the screenplay and the script was zero pages long. Whatever.