Kiss Daddy Goodbye (1981)

I really feel sorry for these poor people.

And not because of the turmoil their characters go through; not even because they're in a lousy movie. I feel sorry for them because I was there.

Maybe not on the set of this particular movie, but in the same predicament as they. Remember Death 4 Told? Kiss Daddy Goodbye is cut from the same mold...and I do mean mold.

This is a cheap-jack effort, produced cheap-jackly and made all the cheap-jackier by its casting. Yes, its casting. And even if this thing had top-notch effects ad cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, its casting would still drag it under the quicksand.

Gloop. Blub-blub-blub.

Now, to the plot: newly-transplanted coastal town deputy Blanchard (Fabian Forte) has some minor problems with his duties. Not just murderous bikers who skinny dip on private property and kill a local professor (Marvin Miller) who home schools his motherless twin children, and spirited social worker Nora Dennis (Marilyn Burns) who provides some professional as well as some romantic tension, but also the psychic powers of aforementioned twins Beth and Michael, who cause havoc as they raise their father from the dead to kill bad people, seek revenge for his murder, get his nails painted black, the usual stuff.

Really? That's the plot you want to stick with? It's like a "Twilight Zone" episode, provided Rod Serling didn't give a damn and hired out the writing duties to Mrs. Slocombe's third grade class.

The kids, as essayed by Nell Regan and Patrick Regan III, real-life twins (both of 'em), play it like they just wandered off of a cereal commercial and were looking for their stage mother. As far as their acting goes, it's made up of a lot of staring. At things. At people. At each other. But when they talk in their nasally California mumble, you'll wish for more staring.

And while we're on the subject of staring in dumbfounded silence....

Fabian? Fabian plays the local law enforcement? Singing Fabian? Fabian Forte? Who plays the biker gang - The Dave Clark Five?? I'd much rather have had Tony Bennett as the deputy - now THAT would have been a singing deputy.

However bad an idea it was to cast Fabian, though, it was a worse idea to toss in, as the social worker, Marilyn Burns. And if her name sounds familiar to you, it's not because you've heard it follow "Nero fiddles while...". It's because Marilyn was the final girl in that seminal hardware classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - and judging from the vacant stare and empty smile she employs most of the time, she was much more involved and involving when being pursued by LeatherFace, et al.

And when it comes to chemistry, Marilyn and Fabian go together like peanut butter and vinegar. LARPing and respectability. Heavy metal and Pat Boone. In short, watching these two interact either in dialogue or romantic terms is like watching Charles Grodin make goo-goo eyes at Miss Piggy; it doesn't work.

On to our director: Patrick Regan, who's also directed...um.... Well, he's also written...um...ah! The Farmer! Heard of it? No? Oh. Um....To be honest, Patrick's had a far more illustrious career as a second-unit and assistant director, having been behind the lens for such well-respected works as the 1986 film adaptation of the Marsha Norman play 'night, Mother, the Sir Richard Attenborough biopic on Charlie Chaplin named (ironically) Chaplin, and Jon Lovitz' best film Mom and Dad Save the World. Yay, Patrick.

Does Regan's name sound familiar? That's also for a good reason - remember our twin terrors? Ah; there ya go! The director cast his own mop-headed tykes as our protagonist mentalists! Directorial conceit, I say! I also noticed that these kiddos have had about the same film career as I have. See; they were so bad even their DAD wouldn't cast them anymore.

This is the only sentence I'm going to write about the script; neither Regan pere nor one-shot co-writers Ronald Abrams and Mary Stewart could script their way out of the proverbial wet paper sack.

Let us now speak of the special effects. And when I say "special effects", I mean "the LACK of special effects". Oh, there's reverse-camera effects, moving-stuff-around-just-off-camera effects, people-moving-as-if-being-mentally-guided effects and squint-so-you-don't-notice-the-wires effects, but none of these visuals would make Roger Corman look twice. I mean, even Corman would rig up some pretty amazing stuff on a nickel-and-dime budget like this one doubtless had. Not here: I kept waiting for some great ESP moments until by the end, I would have settled for some great ESPN moments.

You know what the biggest offense committed by Kiss Daddy Goodbye is? Besides the porn-sounding title? It's the fact that they just didn't try. Stuff happened, they filmed it, called it a movie, but that was it. At no time did the cast nor crew infuse this thing with any interest, any excitement, any life. This has to be absolute dullest, most uninvolved movie ever since Woody Allen made Interiors. But at least Woody had clinical depression on his side.

While I'm thinking of it, what kind of a movie is this, exactly?

Psychic horror? It's nowhere near The Fury (for better or worse).

A zombie movie? Yeah, with one zombie dad made up for Burning Man; right.

A love story? Not with *Singing Deputy and Chainsaw Girl at the fore.

Biker movie? I'd put this several rungs below Easy Rider (and 1/2 rung above Werewolves on Wheels, but still).

Maybe this is a self-referential quasi-comedy spoof of horror movies with a Dadaist twist?

What? It has a Psycho reference halfway through and several dramatic highlights that'll leave you laughing if your heart is as black and jaded as mine. Still, I think such an effort is out of director Regan and company's stunted reach.

I guess the safest bet is to go with a classification coined by one of my fellow bloggers:

Everyone's heard of sci-fi. Well, Kiss Daddy Goodbye is low-fi.

A movie with few to no effects, poor direction, bad acting and nil technical merit.

Low-fi.

It's like a film-maker's workshop where the class was given $50 and told to make a movie.

It's something that SyFy Channel wouldn't even show at 3:00 AM.

Ouch. Yeah. Low-fi.

And still, with all of that, it got a DVD release.

Which just goes to prove that old adage: someone musta known somebody.

I suppose if you have a masochistic streak you can seek out Kiss Daddy Goodbye; it's not like it's going to do anything to your brain except lull it into a narcoleptic stupor. And if you could use the rest, then I suppose Kiss Daddy Goodbye is the movie for you, bad movie insomniac.

* = incidentally, I think "Singing Deputy and Chainsaw Girl" would be an awesome movie title.