Kissed (1996)

Drama (Canada)
Running time: 88 minutes, color
Directed by Lynne Stopkewich; starring Molly Parker (The Wicker Man, HBO's Deadwood), Peter Outerbridge (Nikita, Happytown)

Movie tag line: A young woman whose fixation on death leads her toward feelings of necrophilia.

My tag line: Freak girl meets cadaver, freak girl falls in love with cadaver, freak girl humps cadaver's face.

Necrophilia: The sexual attraction to corpses in which individuals desire to possess an unresisting and unrejecting partner. (Hey - how 'bout just get married?)

I watched Kissed for the first time in my life on my PC with those fucking hurtful earbuds stuck in my ear canals, so I really got every detail of this movie - didn't miss a thing. And there is plenty of content to catch in this movie and it is really well done from decent cinematography to script. The story follows Sandra Larson (Molly Parker) from childhood to young adulthood and allows us to examine her life as she deals with and fully immerses herself in necrophilia.

"I hump dead dudes."

In the opening scene, Sarah narrates about her feelings as she runs her fingers through the hair of some dead guy and kisses him. The scene fades out and cuts to paramedics loading a body into an ambulance as Sarah looks longingly at the ambulance driving away.

The story briefly hits the high points of her childhood through flashback. As a young girl (she looked to be in her early teens) Sarah is seen stroking the body of a dead bird before placing it in a cardboard box. As children we all encountered dead animals, some of them pets and some wild. This is how we first learned to deal with death, right? Not this chick. Later that night she takes the cardboard box from under her bed where she stashed it and begins preparing the bird for a burial ceremony - still kinda cute and thoughtful.

Wrapping the body in tissue paper she chanted: "I shroud the body, shroud the body, shroud the little sparrow with the broken wing," places the bird back in the cardboard , "I lower the body lower the body, lower the body," and opens the her bedroom window. "I go into the night, into the night, into the night," and climbs out. One of the problems I had with this was there was no explanation for this chanting except maybe to heighten the creepiness of the subject matter.

Cut to Sarah walking through the dark woods. Upon arriving at the burial site she lights a lantern and does a little whirly-dance. A little weird, but harmless and still kinda cute. The music in this scene really sets the tone, being eerily reminiscent of the ambient sounds in The Machinist. Finishing her dance, she stares at the box containing the dead bird, an owl hoots and she strips down to her undies. That's right. Apparently on planet Zolthar where she's from the sound of a hooting owl triggers a Pavlovian get-naked-in-the-woods-for-a-dead-animal reaction. At this point my weird-shit-o-meter is creeping past the halfway mark as she takes the body out of the box, unshrouds it (inefficient double work, if you ask me, dumbass kid), smells it and whispers, "The anointment."

Little freak Sarah then rubs the dead bird all over her body, her facial expressions being those of a woman being sensuously kissed on the neck. The scene fades out into a blinding white light and the story jumps forward to her spending time with a childhood friend, Carol. (Jessie Winter Mudie).The script was really well written, somewhat deep and able to hold the viewer's attention: "Carol was my first real friend. She said she could see in the dark and talk to spirits and ghosts." My meter jumped to Circus Sideshow, approaching the red.

Sarah and Carol get into this bizarre behavior together with the exception of rubbing the corpse on themselves. However, "All summer long we find dead animals, shroud their bodies, chant and bury them all by daylight. After dark, I'd go back and give them a proper burial."

"I'm gonna do you so hard . . . "

Carol severs ties with Sarah after a ceremony in which she rubs a dead chipmunk all over her body so fiercely that partially congealed blood oozes out in the process, unbeknown-st to Sarah. She realizes what's happened when she notices Carol staring at her like, "What the FUCK are you DOING!?"

"I never played with Carol again, and for the first time I saw myself the way others might." No shit you freak.

The story then goes into Sandra's young adulthood. She graduates up through her obsession to things like tasting the remains of a dead mouse in high school,

"Cutting into the bodies seemed dangerous and destructive, but I had to get inside, see the order and understand the perfection,"

to strip-teasing for corpses in a funeral parlor and rubbing her gash (yes, that's right) on its face and achieving orgasm on said corpse's face during her college years.
At one point later in the movie, while observing a body in a casket, Jan - pronounced "Yon" - the janitor (James Timmons) confides in Sandra in regards to the funeral home director Mr. Wallis (Jay Brazeau).

Jan: "Don't let him fool you," he says to Sandra, "He's weak like everyone else. All I hear are his dirty jokes. He has no respect. Mr. Wallis is a troubled man."
Sandra: "What do you mean?"
Jan: "He likes the boys. I caught him once and asked him why. He said what does it matter? It's all dead flesh anyway they can't feel anything.."

At which point my weird-shit-o-meter slammed to the right and broke off the peg.

Sandra goes on to get involved with a young man in college, confesses her desires and obsessions to him and he is very accepting toward her freaky-neaky ways. There is a pretty decent twist at the end of the movie, which I won't divulge here. It's not a neck-breaker of a twist, but it's definitely worth a watch.

Despite all my ribbing, the movie is, for lack of a better phrase "tastefully done". I got the feeling, though, that the author wanted the viewers to sympathize and perhaps even identify with Sandra Larson. Well it ain't happenin', sister. During my first viewing of this movie I occasionally looked over my shoulder like a child who knows he's doing something he shouldn't be doing and I'm far from being a child, but that's the effect this movie had on me.

If you like indie movies, watch Kissed. It will make you uncomfortable but it's different and well done. It is the scene of an accident that you pass by and look at despite your inner voice telling you you shouldn't.