Schlock Corridor: Day Fourteen

DEVIL'S KISS (PRINT OF THE DEVIL)

"To avenge her husband's death, raven-haired psychic Claire joins forces with a telepathic professor, a chrome-domed zombie, and Satan himself."

A mysterious lady named Claire shows up at a party with her boyfriend, Ray Bradbury. She greets her host, some greasy Count who recognizes her straight away as the widow of that one guy who committed suicide for some reason maybe a while ago. Claire winks so hard she looks like she's having a stroke as she assures the Count that that guy's wife is so dead they had to bury her twice, and the Count just goes along with this subterfuge, because he's a nobleman and those types play a lot of strange, pointless games to pass their time.

The Count is holding a fashion show in his dingy castle, hosted by some lanky loser wearing a leather jumpsuit with an obscene amount of zippers adorning its surface, including two over his nipples, which I am thankful he kept closed. Leather Dude announces the arrival of the cadre of models, who just wander in and flail about for maybe thirty seconds in their polyester outfits (complete with capes) before leaving for good. I couldn't help but notice at this early point in the film that everybody on screen was wearing bellbottoms. Fucking everybody.

The Count quickly changes gears, begging Claire to hold a séance, hoping to contact his late brother Lauren, who fell of a horse and bumped his head some time ago. Meanwhile, Thrift Store Dracula is upstairs awkwardly trying to rape a random young woman, but she resists for three seconds and he gives up, calling her a slut and stalking into the darkness like an asshole. The lady screams, and the Count rushes upstairs, immediately jumping to the mad conclusion that the séance was a success and this poor woman was almost raped by the ghost of his brother, who was clearly upset because their parents gave him a woman's name and he just had to prove his manhood by forcing himself on any woman with his ghostly genitals.

The Count insists Claire and Ray Bradbury remain at his castle, because apparently they're both world-renowned paranormal investigators, or something, and he assumes they'll know how to communicate with dear brother Lauren. They quickly agree, because Claire is hatching a scheme to get revenge on the people who drove her late husband to suicide, and she's going to use Ray Bradbury's skills as a telepathic expert, as well as the cellular regeneration serum he has invented(?!). She's also going to make a pact with the Devil, because that makes sense.

The pair bide their time until somebody in town dies, and as luck would have it, Telly Savalas is in town, and he gets his head splattered by an errant carriage, so our heroes (?) set to work. The plan is for Claire to summon Satan, implore him to force a lesser demon to inhabit the corpse of Kojak, then use Ray Bradbury's serum to reanimate the corpse, at which point Bradbury can use his immense skills as a telepath to control the devil-zombie, forcing the undead fiend to kill their enemies and satisfy Claire's lust for vengeance.

Some would call this the perfect crime. Those people are called "fucking stupid", because that plan makes absolutely no sense in any universe. Making a pact with Satan to possess a corpse that has been brought back to life by some fringe scientist's miracle elixir, then using said fringe scientist's apparent psychic abilities to remote control the monster, all to kill one guy? Yes, I said one guy. The dynamic duo only unleash their monster to deliberately kill one fucking person. Kojack strangles the Count in his bed, and that's it.

It gets loose somehow a little later in the film and strangles a maid, then Claire and Ray Bradbury use the exact same method to resurrect her, just letting her go despite the fact that she's a bloodthirsty demon-zombie, because her death was a mistake and letting loose another demonically-possessed zombie in the castle certainly seemed like a perfectly fine idea at the time.

Naturally, she stabs a stable boy to death before Patrick Swayze (the Count's photographer nephew)shows up to overpower her, and the demon-zombie is carted off to the local funny farm, where she is killed by a round of electro-shock treatment. Apparently, Ray Bradbury was psychically linked to the maid, because the moment she dies in bedlam, he suffers a fatal heart attack and drops dead in the cellar. Then Kojack gets loose again and unceremoniously strangles Claire before turning his attention to Patrick Swayze's chain-smoking girlfriend.

Patrick Swayze teams up with Thrift Store Dracula (who just pops up again at the film's climax for no fucking reason) to stop Kojack, but the demon-zombie happens to make eye contact with a crucifix on his way to Strangle City and melts in front of Swayze's girlfriend, and I have no idea what I just watched.

What is Devil's Kiss? I don't know. This movie makes no sense. It feels like a series of randomly-selected scenes from some goofy old Italian soap opera stitched together with a bunch of newly-shot awkwardly framed sex scenes and redubbed by a cast of very confused voice actors trying (and failing) to make sense of the poorly translated script. What are any of these characters even doing in this movie? How is the Count responsible for the death of Claire's husband? How did Ray Bradbury invent a cellular regeneration serum? And he's also a telepath? How did Claire come across her rare book that contains spells to contact the Lord of the Flies? Why did she go through so much trouble to kill this one guy?

She could have just hired an assassin, or perhaps she could have killed him herself? It wouldn't have been that hard. He clearly trusted her enough to let her stay in his house for free, in perpetuity. She had a thousand opportunities to kill this son of a bitch. Hell, I'm sure Ray Bradbury would have been all too glad to do the deed for her.

Or maybe the escaped prisoner she found while horseback riding one day would have done it. All she had to do was take him home, feed him a chicken wing and flash him her boobs, and he signed up for Claire's "So You Want To Be A Henchman" course right away, helping her do all sorts of things, from grave robbing to clothes ironing. I'm sure if she asked nicely, he would have gladly murdered anybody for her. I don't know what happened to this guy, by the way. At some point, he just stopped being in the movie. Maybe I blinked, and I missed his graceful, dignified exit from the narrative, but I have no idea where he went.

But anyway, Claire's plan is nonsense. That's just a fact. Why even bring the Devil into it? That shit never works out. But it's not just Claire's plan for vengeance, it's the entire plot. None of it makes sense. Shit just happens, then before you can formulate a question regarding what you've just seen, more shit happens, seemingly at random, sending you into a state of utter bewilderment. It's almost like writer/director George Leg, or Jorge Gigó, or Georges Gigo, or whatever the fuck his real name is, doesn't have any talent as a storyteller whatsoever.

The whole movie honestly does feel like some insane fan's re-edit of a particularly stupid storyline from his second-favorite soap opera. From the constant, awkward extreme close-ups, to the overbearing performances, to the actress who plays Claire staring directly into the camera to share her nefarious plans, to the maddeningly loud and histrionic piano score that sounds like it was stolen directly from some early silent melodrama, it's all too much to take. There's no excuse for a movie this willfully stupid to exist.

And the print made available to Netflix is in terrible shape, which just makes the movie more difficult to watch. Image quality varied wildly, not between scenes but between shots, with nearly a third of the movie appearing blown-out and overexposed. There's also a constant hiss on the soundtrack, becoming louder and more distracting throughout the film. Just a terribly distracting, sub-par experience from top to bottom.

Devil's Kiss sucks. It sounded so cool, so bonkers, that  I just had to watch it. But of course nothing could live up to that description. What a disappointment.

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