Kill Me Tomorrow

 

Picture: C     Sound: C+     Extras: D     Film: C-

 

 

Love triangles are not uncommon, but Kill Me Tomorrow (1999) tries to give it a supernatural twist.  The triangle, however, is not the normal one based on competition.  The odd Holly has pulled Russell away from more involvement with Tricia, who really wants him the most.  However, Holly is successfully offering aggressive, no-holds-barred sex in the nearby cemetery.  Maybe Russell was not the guy Tricia had him figured out for, but Holly has another surprise: she’s a witch!

 

This premise from co-writer/director Patrick McGuinn could either turn out very badly or possibly work.  It sounds like it could be a very bad cable version of Buffy- The Vampire Slayer  (which has problems of its own) or Sabrina – The Teenaged Witch (for an even younger audience).  This unrated film is only so because it did not get a wide release.  It could also be a surprise gem, which it is not.  What is a surprise is that it fails by not going all the way on the levels of sex and the supernatural key to making a film like this work.

 

Sure, Holly is a tough-talking gal with sex on her mind, but this never amounts to much, nor does her power ever get explained just enough to believe it is happening.  Too much would turn it into Science Fiction, but the poor visual effects come out of nowhere and are sometimes laughable.  The obvious inspiration for this is that cancer on recent cinema, The Blair Witch Project, a textbook example of how NOT to make a Horror film.  See its sequel for further proof.

 

The acting from its cast of unknowns also hampers the production, and the assistance of screenwriters Jonathan Ceniceroz and Peter Perrone shows that none of these gentlemen have the first clue about how the Horror genre works, or how to handle eroticism on film.  You’d root for the killer witch, if she were not as bland as the rest of the two-dimensional characters.

 

The 1.85 X 1 letterboxed image sometimes looks like the film was shot on videotape, and might well have been, though the credits note that film stock was used.  Thor Newcomb is credited as Director of Photography, but it is not that memorable, made worse by some often-weak editing choices by Todd Downing.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 might have been stereo somewhere, but is monophonic here, with clear dialogue but forgettable music.  Two extras, a trailer and behind-the-scenes piece, are here.  They do not further convince this critic these people knew what they were doing.

 

There was a time you could have a smart film about a teenage group that was not a satire (the played-out Scream films) or an outright waste of time.  Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty (1998) was the last such attempt at a serious enough such film, which succeeded on some levels, though there are limits to the comparisons.  It is hard to pull of a supernatural thriller, but Kill Me Tomorrow fails through sheer inexperience.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo