Don't listen to the negative reviews

As Good As It Gets

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The cool thing about this movie is that it was made in South Australia in my friend's hometown of Ceduna. Okay it was annoying him telling me where all of the scenes were and how they were shot out of sequence, but generally you wouldn't know unless you have lived there for a while. Kiss or Kill is a road movie and it is supposed to be shot as they travel across Australia to Perth yet it is shot almost entirely in and around Ceduna. It is interesting though how the filmmakers make it seem that you are journeying for quite a way even though in real life they do not.I liked Kiss or Kill. It was an art-house movie that made it onto the NewVision label and distributed across the United States. I think that is pretty good for a homegrown movie. Australia seems to be producing a lot of art-house movies now though Kiss or Kill is more light on the art house than other movies. What did annoy me was the number of cuts that they would use during the scenes. It is difficult to explain but they would jump a couple of seconds in the action which gave it a different quality but it did annoy me. There are a number of reasons why they did it this way but it could simply be a style that the director wanted.This movie is a movie about a couple of juvenile delinquents who lure married business men into hotel rooms and rob them. One day they kill the victim so decide to flee the city and go to Perth. Unfortunately they have a video in which a very famous football player is recorded basically being a pedophile. It is possible that the businessman was blackmailing him but now the video is in the hands of these kids and the footballer wants it back. Thus they have the police on their tail as well as the footballer. Then people start dying and it seems possible that one of the couple are killing them. We believe that Nick, the woman, is killing people in her sleep, and it comes to a point where she believes it.Kiss or Kill is a story with a good plot though thematically it is empty. It looks at the characters of the juveniles. Nick absolutely hates men after she watches her mother get torched when she was a kid. Thus as men were being killed she believed that it was a psychological aversion to men. We also explore the relationship between them as they struggle to come to terms with murder and they fact that they might be caught. This is where their ride comes to an end because even though they are not moralistic, the fact that they are to be incriminated for many murders they look like everything is at an end.Even though it is a good movie, it does not raise any deep themes nor does it leave you thinking. The end slipped into standard Hollywood rubbish but Kiss or Kill is a good movie to watch, especially to support the South Australian Film Industry.

This is probably one of my favorite movies.I first saw Kiss or Kill when it first came out in 1997.It is not your run of the mill road movie it is more complex.There is a sense of paranoia between the lead characters throughout which adds to the mystery of the whole movie.I highly recommend this movie and I hope it comes out on DVD soon.9 out of 10****

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.

Surprisingly, the genre hasn't been worn down to the nub, despite dozens upon dozens of examples pointing to the contrary.Annoying, overused, Scorsesean jump cuts aside, "Kiss or Kill" has enough good things going for it to make it the best Aussie import I've come across in a great long while.The director is Bill Bennett, whose other noteworthy effort was a Sandra Bullock picture that wasn't really worth bragging about (has anyone made a Sandra Bullock picture worth bragging about?) He's not too keen as a director, really, cross-cutting scenes that haven't got anything to do with each other, overdoing the jump cuts to force a free-and-easy atmosphere onto the proceedings, but as a scenarist he's excellent. The plot begins like any other ordinary "Bonnie and Clyde" xerox, but it flows free from there, as if Bennett just let the characters take over, rather than the plot conventions.The acting, uniformly, is pretty close to fantastic. There's Frances O'Conner as the fast-moving but slow-thinking Nikki, who as a child (opening sequence) sees something so horrible at her home that it's no wonder she chose a life of crime. Matt Day is equally skilled as her lover/partner, though we aren't given as much insight into his character as we are Nikki's. Chris Haywood and Andrew S. Albert are complete naturals as the cops on their trail. For those two detectives, they get a brilliant variation on the "Pulp Fiction" bacon discussion that is the film's highlight.If Bill Bennett fails directing the film into Tarantino-esque jazz rhythms, he succeeds ultimately by giving us an Australian outback that's so barren and unmistakably evil that one might think the "Mad Max" road barbarians were already bopping around, not patient enough to wait for the apocalypse. Characters talk of "unfathomable tunnels under the desert" or live in an abandoned nuclear testing facility, and all through the film there's subtle hints that the outback is one spooky, spooky place. Also, Bennett's decision to use no music (and I mean NO music) is a masterstroke, and he employs a champion cinematographer named Malcolm McCulloch to give the film an eerie, chilly atmosphere. Balance that atmosphere with the occasional joke and cheery scene, and "Kiss or Kill" keeps an audience on its toes.Films like this usually disappoint as they drift into convention at the climax and towards the summary. Creativity in the third act of most movies these days seems quite lacking, in fact, which made the last third of "Kiss or Kill" such a pleasure to watch. I'll just say that thankfully, the surprises and expected twists were, like the rest of the movie, driven by character and personality, instead of the requirements of the genre.