Blood Kisses – review

Director: Robert Kornhiser

Release date: 2012

Contains spoilers

There are certain images that set up an expectation. When a vampire film begins with imagery of spiked metal railing you just know someone’s going to end up on them, impaled. It’s a guarantee, a sacred contract with the viewer…

Blood kisses begins with just such railings. Now if you think I am going to say that the film let us down and no one ended up on the railings… well, you’d be wrong. It was, perhaps worse. By the time the character ended up on them I couldn’t care less. I was just glad it was over.

Nancy Malleo as Abigail

The film starts, complete with fuzzy photography that suggests the film is older than it is, though it does have a specific New York undertone. A drunk sailor (Hector Rodriguez Jr.) (or at least he wore a sailor hat) stumbles down the street. He is approached by a woman, Abigail Quintard (Nancy Malleo), in a corset. After the sailor is dispatched a nearby witness is killed too.

the funeral

Quince (Victor Joel Ortiz) gets a call from a doctor – his mother has died. We see the things going through his mind and see him as a child finding his mother (Charlotte Balibar) dead in the bath having committed suicide. The mother who has just died is his adopted mother. On the TV the news talks about the murders. We then see Quince, his girlfriend Danni (Sarah Yu) and friend Bobby (Johnny Pik) at the funeral. After the funeral Danni is called back to the store where she designs lingerie and does window dressing.

a victim

The police are investigating the murders of good looking men. All of them have been drained of blood. With the latest victim they notice a bite mark, maybe from an animal, on the man’s chest above the heart. Then it turns out that the medical examiner has missed similar marks on the previous victims. Quince is a teacher and it is his birthday coming up. He becomes targeted by Abigail but it appears she wants to turn him, rather than simply eat him.

Elizabeth Bove as Radice

Danni notices Quince exhibiting strange behaviour but the character seems so self-absorbed we wonder how she manages to? At one point she actually suggests she doesn’t want to appear possessive and says it possessively! The main cop, Detective Lowry (Angelo Angrisani), drafts in a (at first reluctant) professor Radice (Elizabeth Bove) to help and they discover that it all has something to do with a mental institute (and Abigail being held in a cellar that is part of Quine’s building). To be honest I’d lost the will by then.

displaying odd behaviour

The lore is confused, indeed it is barely described. I found the little bite at the breast interesting but mostly the film just meandered pointlessly along with unsympathetic characters, poor dialogue, non-existent narrative, uninspired photography and poor to bland acting. Honestly there isn’t much more to say – except the promise of railings didn’t let me down (even if the rest of the film did). 1.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.