MOVIE REVIEW : ‘A Kiss Before Dying’: Worst-Case Thriller

Aficionados of terrible movies will walk out at the end of “A Kiss Before Dying” (citywide) with big smiles on their faces. Even in this quality-depleted movie era, classic bad movies are almost as rare as classic good ones.

But for those of us who don’t fancy ourselves connoisseurs of badness, “A Kiss Before Dying” is less than delectable. It’s a real botch-a-thon, and it gets worse as it goes along.

James Dearden, who adapted Ira Levin’s 1953 novel and directed, is best known as the screenwriter of “Fatal Attraction.” Whatever that film started out to be, it ended up a screaming-meemie thriller featuring a worst-possible-case woman who boiled pet rabbits and rose from the dead--or at least from the bathtub.

In what looks to be an act of equal time, Dearden has now fashioned a movie about a worst-possible-case man (Matt Dillon) who flips his girlfriend over a 10-story railing to her death and then insinuates himself into the bed of her unsuspecting twin sister (Sean Young, in a double role).

That “unsuspecting” part is the key to what’s wrong with the movie (rated R for language, violence and sexual situations). Since we know from the start what a murderous cur Dillon’s Jonathan is, the suspense has no tension.

Instead, we sit around for what seems like an eternity while our heroine strains her noggin putting together clues that any Sesame Streeter could have figured out in the first reel. Young’s Ellen, the only surviving heiress to a copper fortune, doesn’t seem to have a trace of smarts. She’s socially conscious, though, working at a Manhattan homeless shelter despite the fact that she traipses about for most of the movie in designer outfits.

Jonathan isn’t very smart, either, although clearly we’re meant to believe otherwise; the only reason he pulls off his schemes is because everyone else in the movie is so infernally dumb. Like, for instance, Ellen’s magnate father, played by Max von Sydow. We’re supposed to believe that someone who has double-dealed his whole life in the business world would harbor nary a suspicion about his surviving daughter’s avid suitor.

In “A Kiss Before Dying,” being rich means being dim, while being working class means you’re primed to fleece the rich. Parts of this movie play like a cross between “An American Tragedy” and “Sleeping With the Enemy”--the wrong parts.

A poor kid who finagles his way into the copper empire, Jonathan is apparently intended as the spirit of the anything-for-a-buck ‘80s. That’s the way Dearden tries to update this ‘50s material. But the movie itself is a symptom of anything-for-a-buck-ism. Anything goes; nothing works.

It shouldn’t have been all that difficult to transpose an Ira Levin thriller to the screen--the same book, in fact, was filmed far more successfully once before, in 1956. Dearden is currently writing the script for Adrian Lyne’s movie version of “Lolita.” If Levin poses this much of a problem, heaven help Vladimir Nabokov.

‘A Kiss Before Dying’

Matt Dillon: Jonathan Corliss

Sean Young: Ellen/Dory Carlsson

Max von Sydow: Thor Carlsson

A Universal Pictures release of an Initial Film/Robert Lawrence production. Director James Dearden. Producer Robert Lawrence. Executive producer Eric Fellner. Screenplay by James Dearden based on the novel by Ira Levin. Cinematographer Mike Southon. Editor Michael Bradsell. Costumes Marit Allen. Music Howard Shore. Production design Jim Clay. Art director Rod McClean. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (strong language, violence, sexual situations).