Kiss of Fire

Rating

Director

Antonio Tibaldi

Screenplay

Heidi Hall, Antonio Tibaldi (Short Story: Heidi Hall)

Length

1h 31m

Starring

Christina Applegate, Stefano Dionisi, Matt Clark, Tony Torn, Gabriel Mann, Perry Anzilotti, Torrie Gold

MPAA Rating

R

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
When an attractive exotic dancer meets a handsome hitchhiking Italian, the result is a love affair with more ups and downs than a roller coaster.

Kiss of Fire stars Christina Applegate as Claudine Van Deusen, an exotic dancer who does laundry during the day at a mobile home park. One day Pelican (Matt Clark), the owner of the park, hires Italian hitchhiker Stefano Mauri (Stefano Dionisi) as maintenance man. When Stefano meets Claudine for the first time, his heart skips a beat and he begins a hollow pursuit.

After discovering her night job and taking her on a road trip, Stefano is more than happy to consummate their relationship, but things don’t go as they planned when Claudine decides to pursue other avenues of love and sex. The relationship yo-yos through this film, which feels a lot longer than it actually is.

Applegate proved with her standout performance in Married… with Children that she is a capable actress and she doesn’t disappoint here. But she can’t save this miserable failure. Only the last five minutes are interesting and even they are confusing.

Dionisi is out of his league in this, his first English-language film after a long career in the Italian cinema. The other cast members don’t have a lot to do and when they do have a few lines, they’re completely unnecessary.

Then there’s Kiss of Fire’s plot…oh, what plot? That’s a good question. What passes for a plot is little more than a premise for this chemistry-starved couple to share screen time sexually and argumentatively. As evidence of the script’s implausibility, the couple steals a cockatoo during their first excursion and never faces any consequences, despite the store owner’s clear view of their theft.

To make matters worse, the love affair is as tepid as hour-old bath water. The fire burns out far earlier that it should and we’re left with dying embers of a hopeless relationship, not to mention the ashes of a poorly directed movie.

Kiss of Fire has no redeeming values and even the most resolute film viewer will find little interesting about this movie. Applegate fans might enjoy watching her bare almost everything, but that won’t be enough for most audiences. Every film needs a good story to carry it through and this one simply doesn’t deliver.

Love has been equated to many things, fire being the most common. It provides a light in our emotional darkness and there’s something to be said about a film that can capture that emotion. Too bad this one can’t even light a match.

Review Written

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