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Killers Kiss

A review by Mike Shea   Movie Rating: ( * * · · · )    DVD Rating: ( * · · · · )

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One of Stanley Kubricks earliest films, Killers Kiss weighs in at a super-fly weight of 67 minutes. The film is a hard edged story of a down and out boxer who gets knocked out by the blonde that lives across the way. The film has some great shots in it and the characters are deep and manage to portray an awful lot in just a look. My biggest gripe is that we are given hardly any time at all to watch the characters develop over the film. It does a good job of introducing the characters and giving them some background and feeling, but then we are treated to 30 minutes of running around on roofs and fighting with the butts of manakins. While we know and like the characters, how they react to what has happened to them is dealt with in about two lines of dialog. I could have used a lot less roof running ("Oh, my leg! I cant go on") and a lot more of getting the characters to interact with eachother without the use of plastic legs. The DVD is a normal 4:3 to 1 ratio, but the film was native at 1.33 to 1 so I couldnt expect much more. The sound was mono and there was only a trailer for an extra. While it showed a few great shots and a good bit of building dark and seedy characters, the latter half of the film was just too much of a let down.