This film is a good example of what's bad with Australian Cinema: Blatantly imitating American Cinema, without understanding the how or why. This is a run-of-the-mill ripoff of your American killers-on-the-run road movie. They've got the usual blood and guts and gory throat slashings; That's pretty predictable in a movie I'm guessing they hoped would appeal to the American Market.Where "Kiss or Kill" fails is the characters. The leads are miserable, boring wretches. If they'd died driving their car off a cliff in the first 30 minutes, it would have been a better movie for it. The cops chasing them are, well, cops chasing them. The story is lame; killers on the run. Will the cops catch them? Who knows? Who cares? There is nothing to hold the viewer to this story.This movie came out at the same time as the mediocre "Men in Black II." I recall the Producer of "Kiss or Kill" complaining that in the face of this Hollywood Blockbuster, no one would see a poor little quality Aussie film. Well, I saw this and it was a disappointment. I did watch it through to the end, but it was tedious going. The production qualities and acting aren't bad; It's the lame story and script and uninspired direction that kills it.It's supposed to be a suspense, but for that to work you have to care. If "Silence of the Lambs" was 2 hours of nothing but blood and guts it would have bombed too. But what made that movie come alive was the characters and the script. If it was a Student Film, that could have been forgiven. But as an "Art House wannabe Blockbuster" it fails miserably.If you do like this genre, there are much better movies. 1 Star out of 4.

This is a near amateur work,sometimes incoherent,sometimes self-conscious.But further acquaintance shows that you should not be taken in by appearances.This is a very strange story,with an actress Frances O'Connor ,who resembles Juliette Lewis (try to see "Kalifornia" and you'll know what I mean.)A couple (A poor man's Bonnie and Clyde) is on the lam with the cops hot on their heels.The girl has lured middle-aged man in order to strip him of what he has on him,with a little help from her lover.She has given him sleeping pills but unfortunately he has died.We will never really know whether they were guilty.Then begins a chase,including two cops,a pedophile former athlete,and a bunch of weirdoes whom we only see a few minutes and remember though.Strange is the keyword .The bizarre innkeeper,who knows scary things about the hole he lives in,the couple,who eats a fondue in the desert-a dish you usually eat in the French/Swiss mountains when it's very cold outside-,the cop who begins to talk about his handicapped child,the old couple in a former nuclear area, and their awful fate,everything exudes something drastically out of the ordinary(or too ordinary depending on whom you ask,anyway it's all the same).Frances O'Connors and her co-star are effective;their relationship is much more complex than we thought at the beginning of the movie.And the ending is even more disturbing,the last line of Nicole being very ambiguous .Once thing for sure is the love they share,it's really true love.We will never know why the boy ties her to the bed:it's not simply sexual,it seems that there's something more frightening .And when we begin to understand,the explanation becomes null and void.Filmed any old how,"kiss or kill" deserves your attention,and is a must for road movies buffs.

The director wants to show us a car skidding to a halt. So he films a car skidding to a halt, from a single camera angle; then he shows us the whole shot but with several consecutive frames simply missing. He does this continually, throughout the entire film, so that a character can't walk across the room for the most trivial of reasons without jerking from place to place like an electron.In an interview, Bill Bennett justified this practise by saying that we don't really need to see the missing footage in order to tell what's going on. An appalling argument. We don't need to see ANY of the footage in order to tell what's going on. We could probably reconstruct it from the dialogue track alone - even then, we'd probably have a fair idea of what's going on if every tenth word were removed. Why doesn't Bennett just mail us the script? This is yet more proof that artists shouldn't theorise about art. Bill Bennett clearly thinks he has the right to impose his failed experiments and half-baked theories on my aching eyes - and I resent it.It's more of a pity because the basic script is fine. (What there is of it. Some dialogue has been improvised - a touch that sometimes works well, sometimes doesn't.) There's a decent suspense story here and there's a nice touch using remote regions of Australia which I'd rather leave a surprise. The story is strong enough to transcend the childish editing and push "Kiss or Kill" into the "watchable" category. How good it would have been if edited in a sane manner is hard to tell. I simply can't evaluate such abstruse hypothetical questions. Nor should I have to.

The story is clever, the direction is fresh and original, the dialogue sparkles. A whodunnit of a different variety. I can't wait to see another movie by this director/writer.