Verdict
Summary
Dillon plays a great psychopath here, and Young is quite good as the damsels in distress. The tone is definitely in the ’90s yuppie fear thriller vein, but with some sensual sex scenes and nudity. The movie immediately lets you into the villain’s zone and it’s pretty remarkable to watch Dillon play charming and cunningly murderous from one moment to the next.
Plot:
A suave killer sets his sights on an empire, but first, he must seduce twin sisters …
Review:
Handsome young college graduate Jonathan Corliss (Matt Dillon) pushes his pregnant fiancé Dorothy Carlson (Sean Young) off a ledge to her death right atop the building where the marriage-licensing agency is at where they were to meet to apply for a marriage license. It’s a cold-blooded murder, and Corliss has planned everything: He’s already mailed her suicide note, and nobody has ever seen the two of them together. But why did he do this? We find out: Dorothy’s father is a millionaire copper magnate (Max Von Sydow), and Corliss wants into the family. He begins romancing Dorothy’s twin sister Ellen (also Young), and after a sexy, heated courtship, they get married. By then, Corliss has already murdered three more people – one, a drifter whose identity he takes as his own, another, a possible witness to his relationship with Dorothy, and another, Dorothy’s ex-boyfriend, whom he kills and frames for her death. It’s all so neat, so calculating, and Corliss’s blood is colder than a snake’s. He is on a one-track mission to overtake the copper empire his father-in-law is lording over, and he’s getting so close to claiming it that when Ellen begins questioning some things that could ruin his shot, he turns his deadly eyes onto her, and will stop at nothing to keep his secrets from ever being revealed.
From a book by Ira Levin (Sliver which, incidentally, also involves throwing a woman over a building to her death) and James Dearden, the screenwriter of Fatal Attraction, A Kiss Before Dying was previously adapted for the screen in 1956, but for this modern take the direction is much steamier and more graphically violent. Dillon plays a great psychopath here, and Young is quite good as the damsels in distress. The tone is definitely in the ’90s yuppie fear thriller vein, but with some sensual sex scenes and nudity. The movie immediately lets you into the villain’s zone and it’s pretty remarkable to watch Dillon play charming and cunningly murderous from one moment to the next. Howard Shore did the score.
Kino Lorber brings A Kiss Before Dying to Blu-ray, and the high definition transfer is more than adequate, and the disc comes with two audio commentaries by two sets of film historians, plus the trailer.
