The Kiss (2008) - Horror Vampire

The Kiss (2008) - When I received this film for Christmas I was disappointed that it was not the great and awesome "The Kiss (1988)" Where a women keeps her eternal youth by stealing it from young women she gets close to with the help of an African god idol. But alas instead we have this strange film that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. Is it comedy, horror, or just horrid. The opening with its explanation of the different clans of vampire and the burial of the snake clan queen left me worried that this would be a movie full of its own importance. The horrid acting in that first scene shaded my hopes for the film.
Jeremy Williams (Lendon LeMelle) is the picked on kid in the apparently one room schoolhouse, a loner with a disconnected Mom he goes through his days listening to his head phones and trying to not get noticed. One day when hiding in an abandon house to avoid some bullies, he hears the cries of our buried vampire queen. After opening the tomb and carrying the dried corpse home he goes about, and I guess this is the comedy part, collecting small animals for blood for her. Her psychic connection to him grows as she gets more blood and reforms into the beautiful Santa Maria (Lourdes Colon). Upon becoming fully formed again she fucks him to seal the deal. Note: If you are going to bring a latina vampire queen back from rotting hell make sure you get to bang her as part of the deal. No longer a virgin Jeremy now has a new confidence and some amazing powers, well they are her powers to keep him safe from the bullies. Jeremy has a start to a normal relationship with the startlingly blue eyed Carrie (Angela Rachelle) that never quite goes anywhere but was getting us thinking Jeremy is semi normal. Then of course he starts acting like a dick, he has a group of girls hanging on his jock, he is confident even cocky with the former bully Javier (Michael Galvez) and in general is not an appealing guy.
Santa maria wants more than dogs blood so she has Jeremy invite the groups from the high school to her place for a "Party", she really is the only one who gets to party at this event though. When they arrive Jeremy is all uppity under the spell of Santa Maria and the kids seem to not notice that non of the guest at the party spend much time interacting with them. They are ghost summoned to fill out the room and have little interest in the living. Santa Maria now goes about looking to feed on the kids, two end up in a bedroom for a romp, Fonso (Vincent Rivera) and Sandra(The ever so sexy assed Noel Signagio) and while she is in the bathroom putting in her birth control, Santa Maria comes in a hot little nighty and bites the shit out of him. Then snacks on Sandra when she comes out. Here though we get to see the real flaw in this film. The makeup! Santa Maria has this big latex mouthpiece of fangs that looks like a Halloween, five and dime store bought costume. It spoils what so far has been a fairly decent low budget vampire flick. Up until this point writer/director Scott Madden had done a nice job hiding the bad makeup with quick cuts and deceptive angles but here it is on full display.
She goes about killing off the other kids and when finally we come to pretty Carrie we get surprised that she is killed too. Jeremy was shocked and so was I. My thought was there would be a choice for Jeremy between the two women but really his choice is to either die with them or join Santa Maria as a vampire. Finally the last bit of bad fake mouth is shown in full light and looks stupid and the film comes to a close but what about that explanation about the vampire clans? How will this come into play? Well it won't, you will get a couple throw away lines and realized that whole idea could have been edited out and it would not have impacted the film at all. Now I want to recommend this but boy it is really close, this really is not a good film but I still enjoyed it. Maybe because I watched it after Katiebird so anything would seem better than it is.
Rating (5.0 barely) 5.0 and up are recommended, in the Zombiegrrlz system only rent it!

Notes on the year: Back in January the Finalgirl Blog launched a plan to watch 100 movies in the year and I was trying to match that effort on this blog. I did not break the films up into categories, like she did but figured that with all the films I missed as a youth I could get 100 in in the calendar year. Well this is my 100th review this year. Cheers for me!!!!!!