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VICIOUS KISS
Produced by Lynn King
Written and Directed by Donald Farmer
Director of Photography - Robbie AndersonJason - Danny Fendley
Angela - Monique Parent
Lisa - Margaux HeminwayOf all the movies by Donald Farmer that I've had the privilege to watch, none have come across as perversely warped as VICIOUS KISS.
I typed the above sentence almost 3 weeks ago and just let it sit there on the page all by itself. I couldn't follow it up because I couldn't figure out why VICIOUS KISS bothered me as much as it did. Finally, it came to me. It had been so simple and was right their in front of me the entire time, along with the above sentence. VICIOUS KISS owes its effectiveness to a simple role reversal.
VICIOUS KISS takes a cat-and-mouse stalker premise and reverses the roles. This time it is the woman tormenting the man. As I said before, simple, but effective. Traditionally, b-cinema has it formulized that men are the sources of power in action film, and women are the victims. It plays on the audience's viewer demographics. The predominately male target audience identifies with the male strength of character and lives out fantasies vicariously whether they be heroic or predatorial in nature.* Placing the male as the victim is like cutting off the penis of the audience, and no man wants that.
Jason is a struggling artist just trying to sell a painting. Angela is an art collector who murdered her adulterous husband and somehow escaped conviction. Jason looks a lot like Angela's dead hubby. She wants Jason for her sex toy, and to give her all the devotion Jason's doppleganger never did. She buys his life and tears it down piece by piece. Angela is the worst kind of nutjob out there, a psycho bitch from hell with lots of money who can buy and sell your ass on the slightest whim.
Danny Fendley, who plays Jason, has given more complex performances than he does here, but he's never hit the highs of aggravated desperation so convincingly. Fendley, as an actor, has little emotional range, something Farmer has been able to capitalize on in the past with such works as DANGEROUS RUN. In VICIOUS KISS he's required to run the emotional gambit and just doesn't hit all the notes. Farmer puts Fendley through the wringer and gets the back-breaking work out of Fendley where it's needed, emotional devastation.
Fendley's foil, the gorgeous Monique Parent, is frightfully creepy as the praying mantis-like Angela, and it's Parent's performance that makes the movie work. Calm and in control, she's able to manage a performance that comes across as simultaneously cunning and emotionally destroyed. In her mind, nothing she does to Jason is wrong, even rape and murder. When compared to one of the 1990's most high profile Praying Mantis movies, BASIC INSTINCT, Parent makes Sharon Stone look low-rent.
I haven't seen any other work by Parent, but I'm highly intrigued at the prospect of catching something else she's in. The woman comes across as a fearless actress who isn't only about flashing her skin. She has depth and talent, the good looks are just a plus.
With each new movie of Farmer's that I take in, I can't help but think about what is going on inside the guy's head. Each film is darker than the last, delving deeper into moral decay. His work relishes the underbelly of society's deviant outcasts pushing them to the farthest corner away from moral righteousness. It's as if the thought of putting a truly decent character on screen has never entered Farmer's head.
*No, I don't have anything to back me up on this one, so I wouldn't go quoting me in any term papers if I were you.